Six Views on the Creation/Evolution Debate

From http://www.answersingenesis.org/home/area/feedback/2006/1229.asp

Note the complete lack of explanation, and the hope for a future theory. One may as well say, “we think pink unicorns did the sorting, but just because we don’t have proof for that theory yet does not mean that pink unicorns didn’t do it”. Furthermore, while the fossil issues he lists might be a problem for a gradualist evolutionary theory, such as Darwinism, they are not an issue with respect to the age of the earth.

The claim that the flood must have caused the sorting of the animals and plants simply because it occurs prior in time to the formation of the fossils is an example of the fallacy of Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc, (Latin, means “After this, therefore because of this”), False Cause, Questionable Cause, or Confusing Coincidental Relationships With Causes. A Post Hoc is a fallacy with the following form:

A occurs before B.
Therefore A is the cause of B.

This fallacy is committed when it is concluded that one event causes another simply because the proposed cause occurred before the proposed effect. More formally, the fallacy involves concluding that A causes or caused B because A occurs before B and there is not sufficient evidence to actually warrant such a claim.

It is evident in many cases that the mere fact that A occurs before B in no way indicates a causal relationship. For example, suppose Jill sneezes just before an earthquake starts. It would clearly be irrational to believe that her sneeze caused the earthquake.

Of course, YECists are forced into this fallacy because they have no other event that can explain the sedimentary layers with embedded fossils.

Annie @ 1065

Sorry, missed this one when you first posted it. I’ve skimmed the site, and they appear to ban anyone who cites from the published scientific literature. Interesting approach. ‘Nuff said.

Dave @ 1066 (and all that) 🙂

If adult similarities between reptiles and birds are interesting to you, the developmental biology / embryology would amaze you. Retiles and birds are tetrapods – and during development, their limbs start off with the standard tetrapod pattern. Thus basic pattern is later modified during development – for example, digits in the avian forelimb (wing) fuse to form the form familiar to anyone who has ever eaten chicken wings.

There are even more extreme modifications: cetaceans (whales, dolphins, etc) start off as four-limbed embryos, but the hindlimb buds regress during development. There are rare examples of 4-flippered dolphins known (the hypothesis is that a mutation knocks out the genetic program that shuts down hindlimb development).

As for your question, why no feathered reptiles? The simple answer is they’re all over the place (check your birdfeeder). 🙂

The longer answer is that it is likely that feathered reptiles were outcompeted by birds. If you picture common ancestry as a branching tree with nodes (where branches connect), transitional forms are near a node. These forms are thus close in form and manner of life to other species – and in competition with them. There is selective pressure for species to partition themselves into disparate environments to minimize that competition. That pressure selects for forms that radiate further away from the node.

A similar story can be seen in mammals – there are only a tiny number of egg-laying mammals left alive, although once this mode of life was the new thing, the bee’s knees, as it were. What happened? Well, marsupials took over, and then placentals after that. Only Australia was spared the placental rampage, because it was separated from other continents by then (it used to be connected to South America via Antarctica). In case you’re wondering, marsupial fossil species were discovered in Antarctica as a direct prediction of the distribution and age of fossils in Australia and South America, plus the knowledge from plate tectonics that these three landmasses were in contact at that time.

It just seems funny that birds would out-compete an “improved” reptile, but not an unimproved one. A lizard with feathers or a warm-booded lizard (especially) should out-compete the old version. Yet the old version still exists, and the improved one, which again, had to survive for an extended period of time in order to evolve into a bird, somehow didn’t make it.

The other thing i wonder is why evolution cannot be put to a more proper scientific test – observation. It would seem that, if we used a simple creature with a short generational time span, we could manipulate it’s environment and produce evolution. I mean, how many generations of amoeba are there is a year? 10 years? Would that not in some way be comparable to compressing millions of years of standard history? Plus we could monkey with the environment. Could we not then demonstrate evolution by producing a new species – a two celled amoeba?

Seems like I did hear of someone producing a 4 winged fruit fly, but it was sterile or had some other major problem.

Hi Dave,

Speciation has been observed, and even YECs accept this. They just call it “microevolution.” For example, YECs hold that all felids (cats) are descended from one pair on the ark – lions, tigers, jaguars, leopards, lynx, your household tabby, the works. From one pair. In less than 4500 years. And they call folks like me rabid evolutionists!

Same deal for all bears, canines, etc etc – just not chimps and humans! (this despite the fact that there is more diversity within felids than between humans and chimps).

There are many observations out there for speciation in progress or recently completed:

Speciation experiments in flies have been done in the lab – showing how selection of the same starting stock in differing environments leads to reproductive segregation (the start of speciation).

Even old Darwin’s finches – YECs hold that these all arose from a single ancestral pair of birds. The genetics evidence for same is too strong to contest – recently diverged species make the 98% homology value for humans and chimps look small by comparison.

Have you watched those biology lectures posted back up in post #715? There is a brief discussion of “ring species.” Google it – the wikipedia article is informative. Basically this is speciation in action.

BTW, the reptiles we have today aren’t the “old version.” They’re not the same as the non-feathered reptiles present at the time of the avian divergence. They are the descendants of same.

You’re also equating “feathered” with “improved.” Maybe so originally, but “feathered and flightless” didn’t seem to be a long-term successful approach – much like “lay eggs and feed the hatchlings milk.” Times change, environments and competitors change – and extinction is common.

Gabe

As a working Christian biologist, how would you evaluate the views of most of your Christian colleagues in fields relevant to evolution? How many accept it and how many deny it, how do those who deny it do so on scientific grounds and are they open to debating the issues?

In ‘An Evangelical Dialogue on Evolution’ – http://www.scribd.com/doc/14157160/An-Evangelical-Dialogue-on-Evolution – biologist Richard Colling says, “I believe that it is a matter of when, not if, the evolutionary paradigm WILL be integrated into the evangelical Christian theology. If not, the Christian faith will be relegated to cultural obsolescence. With the genetic data derived from the human genome project and other sources, the evolutionary connectedness of life on earth can no longer be denied. Therefore to build the foundation of the Christian faith on opposition to evolution is not only silly, it is suicide for the long-term viability and credibility of the faith.”

Is this something that you would agree with?

Unless someone can show me a speciation that results from genetic variation arising from mutation of DNA, I’m not convinced that speciation counts as evolution. Perhaps the evidence is out there; I’m just not aware of it.

Gabe, in what way would you differentiate theistic evolution from Darwinian evolution, which I generally see defined as a gradual blind, undirected process of natural selection acting on random variations in genes. Kenneth Miller is all for this definition (and he seems to be giving up on orthodox Christianity) and his theism seems limited to a deistic style of start the ball rolling with Jesus jumping in at a later date (so it’s not completely deistic), while Stephen Barr and Francis Collins try to distinguish their theory with a less deistic style start and plan. Is theistic evolution for you some sort of unfolding of originally implanted charateristics or information? Is there some sort of anthropic principle similar to that discussed in fine tuning cosmology?

Something is clearly going on in the fossil record, but I’m not convinced that Darwinian evolution is the theory that best explains what is going on.

I suppose one of my main problems with evolution is that for variation to occur by gene mutation, the changes are inevitable small, and do not seem to be large enough to give a statistically significant increase in survival. Take a giraffe, for instance, even if a giraffe baby is born with a neck a foot longer, how much of a food advantage is that? None much unless food is not abundant, and other giraffes are dying of starvation. But giraffes a herd animal, and the health of the entire herd affects the survival even of those with longer necks. Moreover, there are a zillion ways to die out there on the savanna: predators, fire, broken legs, disease, etc. A longer neck does not help survival for any of those situations.

Another major problem is that organisms are set up to eliminate mutations–both “good” and bad–and to maintain the stability of the gene. So it is in fact quite difficulat and rare to obtain gene mutations that stabilize in a population, too rare to be of effective use for gradualist evolution.

For example, take Lenski’s work with e. coli bacteria. He grew them for 20 years in his lab, going through about 40,000 generations. I believe in a paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Lenski claimed that after 30,000 generations one of his lines of cells has developed the ability to utilize citrate as a food source in the presence of oxygen–something that naturally occurring e. coli don’t do. Lenski found that it actually took two mutations for the cells to develop the ability to transport citrate into the cell where it could be used. 30,000 generations is the equivalent of +-600 000 years of evolution in a species with an average generation of 20 years (like primates). [cont.]

[continued from my post 1105]

Moreover, the conditions underwhich the cells developed and retained this mutation were extremely abnormal: they were bathed in a solution very high in citrate and very low in glucose (their usual food).

30,000 generations to develop a measely mutation that only stabilized in a population under extreme conditions that would not occur in nature? How does gradualist undirected Darwinian evolution ever develop anything even remotely complex given the limited timeframes available? Think of all the specialized adaptations in a whale–no rear legs, oil bladders, blowhole, baleen, flippers, tail, etc., etc. The mean age at sexual maturity for male and female Southern Fin Whales (Balaenoptera Physalus) is currently about 6 years, though in the 1930s maturity was apparently 10 or 11 years.

30,000 generations of a fin whale is 180,000 years. Let’s assume, to be conservative, that a useful mutation can occur and stabilize in the typical whale environment (unlike the unusual e. coli environment in Lenski’s experiments).

Wikipedia states that “The traditional theory of cetacean evolution was that whales were related to the mesonychids, an extinct order of carnivorous ungulates (hoofed animals), which looked rather like wolves with hooves and were a sister group of artiodactyls. These animals possessed unusual triangular teeth that are similar to those of whales. . . . The recent discovery of Pakicetus, the earliest proto-whale (see below) supports the molecular data. The skeletons of Pakicetus demonstrate that whales did not derive directly from mesonychids. Instead, they are a form of artiodactyl (another type of ungulate) that began to take to the water after the artiodactyl family split from the mesonychids.”

And what are pakicetids and when did they live? “The pakicetids are hoofed-mammals that are sometimes classified as the earliest whales.[2][3] They lived in the early Eocene, around 53 million years ago. They looked rather like dogs with hoofed feet and long, thick tails. They have been linked to whales by their ears: the structure of the auditory bulla is formed from the ectotympanic bone only.” The University of Bristol website has pakicetids living in Pakistan 48 – 50 million years ago, but let’s give evolution the benefit of more years (53M).

When did modern whales arise? Dorudontids are an extinct family of cetaceans (whales, for those who know not Latin) and are thought to have given rise the extent (current) whale families of mysticeti and odontoceti. They had a greatly elongated body shape, had proportions resembling that of modern cetaceans, their pelvis no longer attached to the vertebral column and their hind limbs tiny, and a distinct ball-shaped vertebra in their tail indicates that they possessed a tail fluke.

So, we have [cont.]

“feathered and flightless” didn’t seem to be a long-term successful approach”

Um, tell that to the penguins, ostriches, emus, reas and even my backyard chickens. They’d be highly offended!

And, hey… the Pittsburgh Penguins out-survived all of their competition this year. So there! ;^)

Dorudontids are found in 35-38 million year old fully marine deposits all over the world, indicating both a wide distribution and complete independece from freshwater. 53 – 38 = 15 million years, at one useful mutation per 180,000 years is 83 mutations. Since the Lenski experiment actually had two mutations to the citrate digestion result, let’s double that: 166 mutations. Hardly enough to get from pakicetids to dorudontids. And let’s not forget that Darwinian evolution is blind, and that many mutations are dead ends. And let’s not forget that some useful mutations get killed off by other factors (e.g., mutation helps animal eat more, but animal gets eaten by sharks or get’s disease, etc.). And let’s not forget the importance of breeding population size (time alone is not enough, one needs lots of breeding): Lenski was dealing with millions of e. coli. Cetacean populations never ever approached that number. So we’re dealing with a smaller population and thus less likelihood statistically of obtaining a mutation within a given period of time.

So, for me, whatever is going on in the layers of fossils of different species, it ain’t Darwinian. cheers, John.

BTW, Kurt Wise, in the paper discussed by Richard and Gabe (see posts 1094 – 1100), admits that the YEC flood cannot account for the layering and distribution of whale fossils. My reading has now basically convinced me that the flood was local, not global, which is not a big deal for me because there are valid and reasonable interpretations of the Bible that allow for either.

Regards,
#John

feathered and flightless” didn’t seem to be a long-term successful approach”

Um, tell that to the penguins, ostriches, emus, reas and even my backyard chickens. They’d be highly offended! 
And, hey… the Pittsburgh Penguins out-survived all of their competition this year. So there! ;^)

Dave, well said and point well taken. The only trouble is all modern flightless birds are descended from flying ancestors – none of the extant species are descended directly from feathered reptiles.

So, I should have qualified my statement with the following: feathered and flightless” didn’t seem to be a long-term successful approach at the time of the avian separation.

Unless someone can show me a speciation that results from genetic variation arising from mutation of DNA, I’m not convinced that speciation counts as evolution. Perhaps the evidence is out there; I’m just not aware of it.


The evidence is out there, John. Speciation at rock bottom is genetic divergence over time. Nothing else raises barriers to breeding, and barriers to breeding is needed for speciation.

Gabe, in what way would you differentiate theistic evolution from Darwinian evolution, which I generally see defined as a gradual blind, undirected process of natural selection acting on random variations in genes?

Theistic evolution is merely the investing of evolution as a “natural” mechanism with its appropriate God-given control and purpose. See my comments at post 868. I assume you’re a theistic meteorologist too? 🙂

Something is clearly going on in the fossil record, but I’m not convinced that Darwinian evolution is the theory that best explains what is going on.

Fair enough, but the skepticism of a non-specialist hardly counts as evidence. I’m not trying to be harsh, mind you, but you are denying something you don’t really understand. I’m not sure I have the time in the next few days to teach you population genetics either…

Question for you: do you think God just happened to create unrelated species sequentially in a pattern that “appears” to be arranged in a sequence of descent? Are you holding out for separate creation of all species? I’m curious what your view is.

{cont}

I suppose one of my main problems with evolution is that for variation to occur by gene mutation, the changes are inevitable small, and do not seem to be large enough to give a statistically significant increase in survival … Another major problem is that organisms are set up to eliminate mutations–both “good” and bad–and to maintain the stability of the gene. So it is in fact quite difficult and rare to obtain gene mutations that stabilize in a population, too rare to be of effective use for gradualist evolution.


John, once again you are arguing beyond your knowledge base. A few comments:

Small changes at the DNA level can have large consequences on phenotype (form).

Even small advantages in survival / reproduction can drive allele changes very rapidly in populations, especially smaller ones.
Your discussion of Lenski’s work is off also, for the following reasons:
Lenski is studying a model that is closer to what is called sympatric speciation (speciation within a constant environment), whereas you are attempting to extrapolate to allopatric speciation (speciation that involves radiation into different environments).

The environment used for Lenski’s work isn’t “extreme” – it’s a standard E coli growth medium with limited glucose. It’s actually a very rich environment. If anything, Lenski’s work is more interesting because there is limited selection pressure on the population.
Lenski’s work is in an (basically) asexual organism. Sex recombines new mutations into many different possible combinations over time, allowing populations to sample many different possible genotypes.
You are correct in saying that the ability to import citrate appears to have required two mutations. Hence, your calculations apply to “double mutation” situations – which are MUCH more rare than single mutation events. You can’t make a straight application from one to the other.

You seem to think that this change was the only one found over the course of the experiment. Not so- many, many, many other changes in these populations have been found as the original strain adapted to the environment. You can see the whole list of publications from this series of experiments here. Pretty much every paper there is discussing several major changes.

{cont}

Regarding whales: please watch the first biology lecture I linked to way back in post 715. It has a very nice discussion of several lines of evidence strongly suggesting modern whales are descended through modification from terrestrial mammals.

Your overall question boils down to “can one species evolve to a related species in the time available?” The short answer is that nothing we have found would suggest otherwise. The best way to address this at present is genome-wide comparisons of species. The organism with the best-characterized genome is our own, and our nearest living relative is thought to be chimp, so let’s look at the genomes of these two organisms.

A full 2.4 / 3 billion nucleotide letters line up between these two species: genes, non-coding sequences, pseudogenes, the works – in essentially the same order. This is called synteny – genes in the same order. There is no reason why these two species need the same genes in the same order. Another issue is redundancy: there are different ways to code for the same proteins with nucleotides. Nucleotides in coding sequence are read in groups of three (codons). For example, GGx = glycine (GGA, GGC, GGG and GGT); for proline, CCx will do (four possible codons as well). Take, for example, the following three amino acid sequence: “Gly-Gly-Pro”. There are 4^3 or ways to code this at the nucleotide level. For longer proteins, the possibilities quickly reach to the tens of millions and beyond.

Despite all the possible ways to encode proteins available to a Designer, what we see with chimps and humans is not only near identical match in amino acid sequence, but that the underlying nucleotide code is also nearly identical (or in many cases, fully identical).

For example, I work on insulin. This protein has 110 amino acids, and there are over 10^53 different ways to code for this at the nucleotide level. Humans and chimps differ by only two of those 110 amino acids, and of the 330 nucleotides, they differ by only six! Of over 10^53 different possibilities, why do we see one that is only six nucleotide changes away?

Now take this basic issue and its implications to the 2.4 / 3 billion nucleotides in common between the two species that differ by only 1.23%. Also bear in mind that the differences we see accrued in two distinct lineages – human and chimp. So, the differences we see today are the combined changes in both lineages from a common starting genome.

In short, I don’t see any problem for “Darwinian” mechanisms to produce this. Yes, we have major changes in phenotype, but they are driven by proportionately small changes at the DNA level.

Geoff at 1105:

As a working Christian biologist, how would you evaluate the views of most of your Christian colleagues in fields relevant to evolution? How many accept it and how many deny it, how do those who deny it do so on scientific grounds and are they open to debating the issues?

Almost all accept it. There are a very few who hold to a Behe-type paradigm (i.e. they accept common ancestry for humans and chimps, but think that God had to “miraculously” intervene with targeted mutations to produce humans). They still want a gap to fill with God.

Any objections I know of are rooted in theological concerns. I know of no legitimate, scientifically-grounded reasons for objecting to human evolution. That includes Behe’s latest. It’s flawed. Behe does’t understand population genetics. He’s trying to find a gap for God that just isn’t there.

biologist Richard Colling says, “I believe that it is a matter of when, not if, the evolutionary paradigm WILL be integrated into the evangelical Christian theology. If not, the Christian faith will be relegated to cultural obsolescence. With the genetic data derived from the human genome project and other sources, the evolutionary connectedness of life on earth can no longer be denied. Therefore to build the foundation of the Christian faith on opposition to evolution is not only silly, it is suicide for the long-term viability and credibility of the faith.”

Is this something that you would agree with?

Yes, it is only a matter of time. The evidence is just too strong to deny. You run into “appearance of descent” problems very, very quickly once you understand the data – and we all know how appealing those “appearance of age” type arguments are.

One could ask a similar question about heliocentrism – when, do you suppose, would it have been ok to teach full-blown heliocentrism in a Catholic school? Certainly not in 1610, but they pretty much all were by the late 1800s. We’re in the same place now with the evolution issue. The day will come when Christians will wonder why anyone ever lost sleep over this issue; but experience shows that denialism can last a long, long time in the church (cf. the modern geocentrism movement).

The pattern in the same: experts change views first, since they see and understand the data; then they attempt to communicate the news to theologians and the average person in the pew, which always meets a hostile reaction at first. Later, after the church has time to muse on the theology, some decide maybe the new ideas fit after all, and so on. Eventually no one has a problem with it except the fringe element.

Saying that rejecting evolution is required for Christian orthodoxy is very dangerous. Back in the day, the same things were said of Galileo’s ideas. Setting up the confrontation in that way caused many to lose their faith as the evidence for heliocentrism grew.

Gabe, I recognise the parallels between denial of evolution and heliocentrism, however I do think that there are certain important differences. The passages that could be interpreted as teaching a stationary earth or geocentrism can be easily glossed over by readers or taken to be simply interpretations from the point of view of the Biblical authors. The Genesis creation account is however familiar to all Christians and there is no way around this, the early chapters of Genesis really do say certain things that can’t be explained away so easily.
Many Christians are absolutely convinced that evolution is a hoax spread by atheists and people who simply want to deny God.
They accept the answersingenesis line that everyone has the same evidence, but that we just have different interpretations of it. For example, the notion of a ‘common designer’ seems to be what creationists resort to when presented with any evidence for common descent. No matter how much nested hierarchies are explained, or SINEs, LINEs, ERVs, and pseudogenes, it is all explainable by ‘common design’ and no amount of reasoning or evidence can change that.

P.S. Since we are on the topic of heliocentrism, I’m not sure whether you are aware of the responses Gordon Glover’s Youtube series has elicited;

Hi Geoff,

Indeed, there are some for whom no amount of evidence will suffice. So be it. If they wish to hold to a “common designer” type approach that says that God independently created species with an appearance of descent, well, not much a biologist can do there. Witness the strident denial of the age of the earth in this very thread, despite the mountains of evidence John has brought forward.

I think the redundancy issue kills the “common design” argument. That argument rests on the idea that certain genes need certain sequences to function – mammalian insulin for example. Most non-specialists don’t appreciate that there are so many ways to encode the exact same amino acid sequence (over 10^53 in the case of insulin, a relatively short protein!). To hold to a common design point of view you need to find a way to explain why the Designer didn’t make the nucleotide sequences more different when, from a design point of view, it would be easy to do so. You can drive the nucleotide similarity below 60% easily without changing the amino acid sequence at all. Yet we see identical nucleotide sequences for gene after gene, arranged in the same order on the chromosome, with the same intervening unitary pseudogenes, LINEs, SINEs, etc etc – and on it on it goes.

So, the question remains: if common design, why a design that looks like common descent?

I’ve seen that geocentrist’s response to Gordon’s video. Highly recommended. Anti-evolutionists can get a foretaste of how their position will sound 200 years from now. 🙂

I agree that the theological issues are thornier because of the centrality of the Genesis accounts to Christian theology. I expect the fight will last longer for this reason – but already there are respected evangelical theologians who are experts in Genesis who are saying that evolution is not in conflict with the intent or theology of the creation accounts. So, that gives me hope.

best,

gabe

To hold to a common design point of view you need to find a way to explain why the Designer didn’t make the nucleotide sequences more different when, from a design point of view, it would be easy to do so.

That’s actually funny. Unless I’m misunderstanding, that implies:

‘common design’ is evidence against a ‘common designer’

Richard, you’ve misunderstood. My argument is this: if one accepts common design, it falls to you to explain why that “design” looks exactly like what would be predicted for common descent.

More specifically: suppose that a Designer was constrained to the exact amino acid sequence we observe for human insulin in both humans and chimps. There are 10 to the 53rd power nucleotide coding options for that exact amino acid sequence. Of this vast, vast array of possible codes, we see the codes in these two organisms are barely different at all.

If a Designer was going to design insulin in these two species, why not pick one of the other billions of sequences available for these exact amino acids? Why pick sequences so close to one another that it strongly supports the idea of common ancestry?

And why do this exact same thing at a genome-wide level? And then arrange these same genes with the same sequences into the same spatial pattern (when that isn’t required from a design standpoint either)? And then include non-functional sequences with clear signs of prior adaptation to other manners of life in the same places in both genomes, with the same inactivating mutations?

That’s “evidence that demands a verdict”, to coin a phrase.

Gabriel,

I think you just said the same thing with more words. You’re implying that a designer is obligated or expected to NOT use common design techniques just because there exist options to do things differently.

I’ve spent many years designing and implementing complex systems which often were targeted to similar, but not exact environments of operation. If one of my designers deliberately chose to introduce differences when not necessary, they’d better have a very good reason. And “just because it’s possible” is not a good reason.

Furthermore, there is an unstated assumption that commonality implies common ancestry, however, just such commonality is often NOT considered to be evidence of ancestry. Evolution theory has many tools … choose homology and claim evidence of common ancestry when convenient, or claim it’s the result of convergent evolution (and thus not evidence of common ancestry) when inconvenient.

Richard,

I don’t think you understand my argument. I’m saying that even if one holds amino acid sequence constant (i.e. the functional aspect of the gene) it is still possible to design the underlying code differently.

So God designed by cutting-and-pasting common sequences, pseudogenes and all? When I find copied sequences with shared errors in my student’s work, I report them for academic probation. So God’s a self-plagiarist in your mind?

If you’re saying God chose not to change the underlying code, then you’re basically saying (in my mind) that God has no problem with the appearance of common ancestry at a genomic level.

I agree, of course, but it’s because I see common ancestry as God’s ordained method of creation.

Richard, the evidence for convergence is simple: superficial similarity based on different underlying code. Penguin wings and whale flippers, for example – same basic design requirements, but with different underlying codes that converge on a solution to a common problem (a shape adapted to swimming).

Yet we see a penguin arrives at this shape by a modified avian wing, and the whale via a modified tetrapod forelimb.

Have you ever remodeled an old house? I once had a house built in 1910 that had been added to a few times. Once you open up the walls you see clear evidence for former functionality – why are there pipes for a shower buried in a bedroom wall? Why is there a drain opening buried in the floor? Maybe this room wasn’t originally designed as a bedroom, but as a bathroom!

Now, imagine if you could walk down the street to another house built at the same time by the same architect to the same external shape and basic floorplan, and in that exact place in the house there was a functional bathroom! Would you seriously argue that your house was designed from the start to have a bedroom there?

That’s basically the argument you’re making with genomes.

If you’re saying God chose not to change the underlying code, then you’re basically saying (in my mind) that God has no problem with the appearance of common ancestry at a genomic level.

First, God is under no obligation to stop you from making whatever interpretations you wish. Secondly, as I noted, evolution theory requires that the interpretation of commonality be done inconsistently. Commonality occurs in creatures in such a way that it defies being interpreted as the result of common ancestry (ie convergent evolution).

Thus you can’t try to claim that the overall evidence of commonality is such that God would be deceiving anyone.

I just saw your post 1121 – you are ignoring the cases in which the non-ancestral commonality is at the molecular level, not the phenotype level.

No, I’m not ignoring such cases. In those cases we see convergence at the amino acid level at some points in a gene, but based on a different underlying nucleotide sequence reflecting a disparate origin. Again, these differences are possible because of redundancy in the codon code.

Perhaps you have an example of molecular convergence from the scientific literature you’d like me to address? Pick the one you think best supports your ideas.

Gabriel,

I’m enjoying our discussion. Can you please respond to post 1005 so that we have a better definition of how you are defining evolution?

Sorry Richard, missed that one.

This is a sincere question. Would any of the TEs please define which theory or theories of evolution they believe is/are correct, and/or proven scientifically?

darwinism (I don’t expect any takers here…),

Neo-Darwinian Theory (NDT),

evo-devo,

gradualism,

punctuationalism,

neutral theory of molecular evolution,

other?

And please specify what role God has. Does he just wind everything up and let “natural laws” take over? If so, at what point? Does God intervene in adding new information into the genome as needed for new structures or is this accomplished by one of the above theories? Please be specific.

These are not competing versions of evolutionary theory. These are all sub-categories within the Modern Theory of Evolution (MET). To these ideas we can add genetic drift, molecular convergence (found a reference you want me to address yet Richard?) meiotic drive, and others.

There is good evidence for each of these lines of thinking within MET. The only quibble would be “Darwinism” – this term gets misused so I’d like your definition of it before I can tell you how it fits into MET.

As for God’s role in MET? He ordains and sustains it all, just like for other processes we observe in nature. See post 868. I don’t see anything that makes me need what we call a miracle, although it’s always a formal possibility.

Missing Transitional Fossils

Richard raises an excellent point with respect to the lack of transitional fossils for plant evolution, and this phenomena (missing transitions) is a problem that permeates evolutionary theory. If gradualism is correct, then there should be many fossils that are very closely similar. What we see instead in the fossil record is the appearance of a morphological form (skeleton) which is then stable for a long period of time, and then disappears. This problem, which is admitted in the current literature, is one reason for the development of “jump evolution” or discontinuous equilibrium, etc.

Because evolution is a theory proposed to explain the evident data, it bears the burden of proof. Furthermore, the absence of evidence does become evidence of absence where causal links are proposed and where statistical predictions are made.

The absence of evidence for a link, etc. is evidence of absence of a link or an entity when it is more likely that there will be no evidence if the link or entity doesn’t exist than if it does. In better English, if we expect that something will have observable effects if it exists, and it doesn’t have observable effects, it probably doesn’t exist. The stronger our prior belief that something would, if it existed, have observable effects, the more absence of evidence is evidence of absence.

The problem is compounded for evolutionary theory by the fact that DNA cannot be extracted from mineralized fossils. Consequently, most evolutionary taxonomies are based on phenetics, which is a numerical taxonomy. That is, it is a classification of organisms based on overall similarity, usually in morphology or other observable traits. However, a phenetic classification cannot tell us if an observed difference is an inherited trait, the loss of a trait, or a new trait. I am more familiar with this phenomena in the area of linguistics and langguage evolution (because of my 4 year undergrad in this), but the problem does apply to fossils as well.

The bottom line is that the fossil record does not bear out or provide proof for a Darwinian theory of gradual evolution by population replacement due to breeding success.

Lenski’s experiments

Gabe’s response to my criticism of Lenski’s results (i.e., they don’t support evolution) miss the mark to a large extent. First, the habitat of the bacteria was unusual with respect to the levels of citrate and glucose (though of course the other variable aspects of their habitat were controlled and “normal”). Second, the fact that two mutations were required to enable digestion of citrate actually supports my argument because in my calculations I gave evolution the benefit of the doubt by assuming that each mutation would be individually adaptive (hence my doubling of useable mutations). Furthermore, from the perspective of natural selection, the type of mutation is irrelevant (alleles, etc.), all that counts is effect in the…

[continued from my post 1126 on Lenski’s experiments]

. . . all that counts is the effect or trait produced in the organism. Natural selection can only remove DNA information, not produce it. Natural selection involves the death of those members of a species that can’t reproduce fast enough, successfully enough, or numerically enough, or have dominant traits. The animals that die, don’t pass on their DNA. But natural selection does not produce new traits, only DNA mutation does.

So, in 30,000 generations of millions of bacteria, there were only two mutations that produced a trait that had adaptive success.

The problem of available mutations is compounded by two significant factors: size of population and resistance to mutation. Organisms have multiple protections against DNA mutation and in favour of stability of their DNA. That is why even harmful mutations are not common–mutations overwhelmingly do not produce helpful traits that lead to greater reproductive success. Instead, they overwhelming lead to death and reproductive failure. Hence, it is highly beneficial for organisms to be resistant to mutations. So we have a very low rate of mutations in the first place.

Second, that statistical frequency of mutations is related to the size of the population. That population, for any organism above an insect (and even for many of those) is relatively low.

Beneficial mutations just do not occur frequently enough to provide sufficient changes in animals in the time periods allowed. Even 15 million years is not a sufficient time period to produce the mutations necessary to evolve from a four footed land creature to a whale.

One of the major problems with discussions of evolution is that no one produces mutation rates for the species under consideration, the expected numbers of mutations given the population size and time period available, and calculates the number of mutations available to get from organism A to organism B. The evolutionary discussion is, rather, quite simplistic and based on a phenetic taxonomy of features: that is, here at time A we have a creature with features 1, 2, 3 . . . and later at time B we have a creature that is morphologically similar but with some different traits 23, 24, 25, . . .

The fallacy involved is the Post Hoc fallacy discussed in one of my earlier posts. That is, a fallacy with the following form:

A occurs before B.
Therefore A is the cause of B.

It is invalid to assume that because a creature A occurs in early rocks, it must be the ancestor of morphologically similar creature B that occurs in later rocks. Consequently, it is no wonder that hypothesized lines of evolutionary descent keep getting redrawn every few years: neither precedence in time nor morphology is any proof of relationship. It may warrant an inference and hypothesis, but other evidence is needed to corroborate and justify the inference.

Two good articles on the fossil record are by Keith Miller, a geologist at Kansas State University and an evangelical Christian;
Taxonomy, Transitional Forms,
and the Fossil Record – http://www.asa3.org/ASA/resources/Miller.html
The Precambrian to Cambrian Fossil Record and Transitional Forms – http://www.asa3.org/ASA/PSCF/1997/PSCF12-97Miller2.html

It’s also worth noting that these articles are about a decade or so old, and paleontologists have uncovered a great many transitional fossils since then.

Under closer examination the ‘no transitional fossil’ argument simply doesn’t hold water. For anyone prepared to look and listen to the paleontologists who work in the field, they will discover that we have far more transitional fossils than we could reasonably hope for. The discovery of new transitional fossils is now so commonplace that it receives little attention outside of the scientific community (‘Ida’ being the exception, as it was thought to represent part of lineage that eventually led to us).

Also, for anyone else interested I would recommend looking up Kevin Padian’s presentation that he made in the Dover trial, where he exposed the glaring mistakes and outright misinformation present in the ‘Of Pandas and People’ textbook, produced by the Discovery Institute. Google ‘Kevin Padian Dover Testimony’ or something.

Burden of Proof

Not only does evolution bear the burden of proof because it is a theory proposed to explain certain data, but theistic evolution bears a particular, extra burden. The Bible states that “For since the creation of the world his invisible attributes – his eternal power and divine nature – have been clearly seen, because they are understood through what has been made. So people are without excuse.” (Romans 1:20). So the Bible presumes, and asserts, that we can see the handiwork of God when we look at nature. In cosmology, we see this in the fact that the universe had a beginning and in the fact that it is highly tuned for human life. Where would we see the handiwork of God if materialist evolution is true?

Biology is different from the physical sciences in that the physical sciences are exclusively mechanistic and probabalistice and devoid of information content. That is why one cannot have “theistic” meteorology (other than noting the fact that the universe could not exist but for the fine tuning of cosmological and physical constants).

Biology, on the other hand, makes use of information. The intelligent design movement has been important for its work in this area. Even secular and atheist scientists acknowledge the presence of information and coding as something that is supervenient on the physical constructs themselves. There is no materialist explanation for the origin of information, nor is there a materialist explanation for the origin of life from non-life.

What a Designer “Must” Do, and Burden of Proof

The evolutionist is making a warranted assumption regarding common descent, based on common coding.

However, the evolutionist is not warranted in assuming that a designer would do things differently, nor is there any warrant at all for making any assumptions whatsoever about what a designer would, should or must do. The designer in question, God, is unique, and is substantially different from humans. There are not other gods we can observe to see how gods typically design things.

The creationist, on the otherhand is warranted because he/she is not making hypotheses about how things might be designed differently, nor is the creationist using the common strands of DNA as proof for the existence of God. Rather, the creationist is dealing with two factual premises and the deductive logical connection between them. Premise 1: living organisms were designed. Premise 2: living organisms share common DNA coding. Logical deduction: the Designer designed using common DNA coding.

It is not, as suggested in post 1118, “evidence that demands a verdict”.

Now of course the question arises, did the Designer front load the system to develop with common DNA coding, or did the Designer periodically intervene, or did the Designer use common coding across different instances of special creation? Those questions cannot be answered solely by looking at the coding

#John1453, anti-evolutionists’ ideas of a common designer are woefully inadequate to explain the data we have. We are talking about an unmistakable pattern of similarities and differences, a nested hierarchy. When anti-evolutionists try to explain the similarities between closely related organisms (in this case humans and chimps) as evidence for a common designer, the only logical response can be “so did other more different organisms have a different designer? And yet more different organisms another more different designer still?”
Ideas of a designer are apparently able to explain absolutely anything at all, which renders it meaningless as a scientific explanation. What are the criteria by which we decide whether or not organisms have a common designer? Why did the designer only manage to design organisms with unique combinations of characters? Why not mix and match different traits from various parts of the phylogenetic tree when designing? Why limit the designing to ‘groups within groups’ and add to the appearance of descent charade? Why not for example provide cetaceans with gills? What was so evidently preventing the designer from making an organism that was to all intents and purposes a mammal but which also had gills? Why not design at least a few organisms that have no relationship at all to any other, and share nothing at all in common? Why does it appear that everything that has ever existed is quite obviously, at some level, related to everything else?
Todd Wodd was trying to deal with the data honestly from a creationist perspective and although he had no answers, he knew one thing for certain; saying “God just did it that way,” is not an answer to anything.

Re post 1128 on Transitional Forms

It is a logical fallacy to assume that morphological similarities are evidence of genetic linkage and of evolution by DNA mutation. The complete lack of gradualist transitional forms is evidence that the predictions of gradualist Darwinist evolution are unsupported by the evidence and thus false, and therefore require a different explanation.

Re posts 113, 116, 118 on Common Design and the Designer

Gabe has made a number of statements similar to “If a Designer was going to design insulin in these two species, why not pick one of the other billions of sequences available for these exact amino acids? Why pick sequences so close to one another that it strongly supports the idea of common ancestry?”

Such statements conflate and confuse arguments relating to apologetic evidences for God, with arguments relating to the bilogical nature of organisms. We have no evidentiary basis for making predictions about what a designer God might do, or how he might design organisms, so it is fallacious and wrongheaded to assert that a Designer should or would use different coding sequences.

Separately, one could argue that commonality of design is an evidence for a common, non-natural designer. I do not make such an argument and I do not think that that argument holds water either as deductive or inductive argument. On the other hand, one could point to teh same evidence and argue that there is evidence against a common designer. Again, this is an apologetic type argument about the existence of a Designer, and not relevant to the discussion of evolution by way of genetic descent.

If one is a Christian theist, then one presumes from the Bible that God had a hand in designing all life, whether directly or by secondary causes. Since one assumes the existence of God, the presence or absence of common design elements is irrelevant to the question of whether there is a designer.

The question moves to the level of, do the characteristics of DNA coding provide evidence that God did things directly, or by secondary causes? Even there one can only make non-conclusive inferences because the Bible is only suggestive as to how God did things, and God could have used special creation to create what we do see at the DNA level.

When I say that the Bible is suggestive of secondary causes, it is because I note that the Genesis text does not state that organisms appeared instantly, in full maturity, on the surface of the earth. Rather, the text says that the “earth brought forth . . .”, which suggests secondary causation.

Regards,
#John

As just one piece of evidence for common descent of humans and the other extant apes, how about SINEs and LINEs?
Short interspersed elements (SINEs) and long interspersed elements (LINEs) are certain portions of non-coding DNA that are inserted near genes. When these insertions occur a gene in a species becomes marked, and this is then inherited by all the descendents of that species. As a result, SINEs and LINEs provide an excellent way to determine genealogy, as their presence in the same place of different organisms’ DNA can only be explained by those organisms having shared a common ancestor.
http://img80.imageshack.us/img80/4825/sinesxl7.jpg

What anti-evolutionist websites tend to do when dealing with DNA is to attempt to lump everything they consider to be ‘junk DNA’ together and then argue that it has some kind of important function. This is however just misleading, given that we know how these come about it is really irrelevant whether or not they are entirely without use, their presence in the same places of different organisms is most parsimoniously and easily explained by those organisms have descended from a common ancestor.

It really is not all that disimilar from paternity testing, comparing the distribution of inherited genetic markers to determine who the father of a child is operates by the same principles by which species’ relationships can be determined.

Re post 1129 on Kevin Padian and the Dover trial

For a response by David Tyler to Padian’s historical revisionism and inaccurate reportage, go here:

http://www.arn.org/blogs/index.php/literature/2007/07/19/the_dover_trial_revisited

Re post 1131 on What a Designer Does

My post 1132 was done before I saw #1131. However, the same arguments still apply. An argument to a Designer from facts of common design is an apologetic argument for the existence of a Designer. It is a weak argument, if it has any substance at all, and is not an apologetic argument that I would make.

Moreover, it is not possible to construct any arguments about what a designing deity would or should do, and any comments thereon are pure speculation from a solely human vantage point, and thus without warrant.

Furthermore, it is an argument that is irrelevant to the truth or falsity of either design in nature or to the presence of some kind of evolutionary descent through mutation of DNA.

Regards,
#John

John,

your arguments about Lenski’s experiments are flawed because you’ve only considered two mutations when the experiment has documented many, many more. Read the papers I linked to.

You also didn’t seem to have any problem inferring how a Designer might design coral reefs from the physical evidence. Why suddenly say that no conclusions can be drawn here? Richard might as well pick up your line of argument but use it for reefs – what would you say to him then?

Your assertion that mutation only removes information is an old canard. For example, the Lenski experiment: the ability to transport citrate is a loss of information? Please explain.

Beyond that, gene duplication happens all the time. The copy is then free to diverge to another function through mutation. I could point you to reams of papers on this type of thing. There is even good evidence that the ancestral vertebrate genome underwent two rounds of whole-genome duplication followed by divergence and loss. So, again you confidently assert that which you do not know.

Even Todd Wood and Kurt Wise don’t make these types of poor, long-refuted arguments. Read their papers (linked above) and see for yourself. If your arguments were valid you can be sure that they would use them – but they don’t – and critique them to boot.

I’ll be away from email again for the weekend. See you all monday…

#John1453, it is very easy to post internet responses to things (for the record who is David Tyler? Do his scientific credentials in relation to evolution bear any comparison to Kevin Padian’s?), however when the Intelligent Design people had their chance in court to demonstrate their ‘evidence’ they were blown completely out of the water. Many of their ‘experts’ didn’t even have the nerve to appear to defend their ideas, and those that did were demonstrated to show incredible ineptitude in the very areas that they claimed expertise. Why did the judge describe the school board’s decisions concerning ID as “‘breathtaking inanity” and say that was not science? Why did Behe admit that his definition of ‘science’ is so broad that it would include astrology? Why didn’t they challenge Padian at the time with their ‘refutation’? Why is it that Intelligent Design is not anywhere an area of scientific investigation? Where is their research? Why did their journal cease publication as soon as they were embarrassed in Dover? Why are they not at cell biology meetings trying to convince other scientists their ideas have some scientific merit? Why instead do they attempt to push their ideas into schools via political lobbying? Why does every major scientific organisation reject ID as science? Why do they continue to attempt to push their ‘teach the controversy’/’strengths AND weaknesses of evolution’ and so on, where real scientists have to waste their time appearing before school boards to respond to erroneous claims about the Cambrian explosion, ‘molecular machines’, Haeckel’s embryos, or that New Scientist claimed that evolution was wrong (Casey Luskin subsequently appeared on Fox News to repeat this lie).

Geoff,

As you well know, the answer to your questions is simple.

ID is not a scientific movement, but a religiously-motivated antievolution apologetics movement. The evidence for this is everywhere and compelling. In their own words:

“Without solid scholarship, research and argument, the project would be just another attempt to indoctrinate instead of persuade.”

Well, 25 years on, and where’s the research?

They have openly declared their motivations in their own internal planning documents – one (the “wedge” document) was leaked to the web in 1999 and can be seen here.

To all the pro-IDers out there, read the Wedge document ask yourself: does this sound like a scientific enterprise?

You can also watch a PBS NOVA documentary on the Kitzmiller case here. Watching Behe define astrology as science is worth the price of admission alone.

Do Christians really want to open the doors of science to astrology?

John, if you’re convinced that Padian was off and the ID team was correct, why didn’t they refute ANY of the paleontological evidence at trial?

And if Dembski was really going to blow to doors off his critics, why did he pull out of the trial and refuse to testify?

And why did the ID movement’s very own journal cease publication after Kitzmiller? Surely that would be the place to present evidence for ID?

Aren’t you a lawyer? Have you read the Kitzmiller decision? It’s scathing.

Well, I don’t know much about Intelligent Design, but I did watch Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed with Ben Stein!

(And I have stayed at a Holiday Inn Express, too.) 🙂

re: Expelled

I was invited to review this film before its release along with a film critic for a major Christian publication. I wanted to bang my head on the wall pretty much for the whole film.

The editor decided the reviewer’s review wasn’t positive enough, so he discarded the professional review and wrote his own favorable one. Expelled!

If you want the real story on being “expelled” try being a Christian biologist teaching at an evangelical university: Darrel Falk, and Richard Colling come to mind – or just being a Christian biologist and having pretty much your whole church decide you’re a heretic.

Again, the parallels between 1609 and 2009 are striking.

or just being a Christian biologist and having pretty much your whole church decide you’re a heretic.

That’s okay. As far as most Christians are concerned, most of those heretic-calling Evangelical Protestants are themselves heretics for denying/rejecting the Traditions and doctrines of the majority of Christians in the world – i.e., the Roman Catholic and/or Orthodox (Eastern, Oriental, Arminian, Ethiopian, etc.) Churches.

one other comment of John’s that underscores the point I am making:

So, in 30,000 generations of millions of bacteria, there were only two mutations that produced a trait that had adaptive success.

Emphatically not so. Read the articles I linked to. There have been documentation of many, many adaptive mutations in those experimental populations. I’ve been following this experiment for many years. Your misunderstanding of it does not constitute evidence.

I don’t know how many people paid attention to the fiasco in Texas at the end of last year and earlier this year, but Texas biologist David Hilllis at the school board meeting pointed out that in the last 20 years there had been around 500,000 (yes, five hundred thousand) peer reviewed articles with ‘evolution’ in the title or topic (not including articles that used other related terms) and that not one of these articles suggested anywhere that evolution was wrong or that it didn’t occur.
Intelligent Design in contrast has absolutely no research, just a few books containing ideas about ‘irreducible complexity’ or ‘specified complexity’ (Teach the controversy – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RMzdR1tepig
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ThQQuHtzHM )

So I would like to ask anti-evolutionists some simple questions;

1). In what other area would you deny such an enormous amount of scientifically established evidence?

2). Given that we are now able to actually compare organisms’ genomes, do you not think that this is the ultimate place where we should find evidence of evolution, if it were true?

3). Regardless of all other areas; the fossil record, comparative anatomy etc, do you not think that it is organisms’ DNA that should contain the ultimate answers to their evolutionary (or non-evolutionary) history?

4) Given this, is there any conceivable evidence from the DNA record that you would accept as evidence for common descent? Or are you simply going to explain any evidence presented away by resorting to a ‘common designer’ argument?

5) Why is it that essentially every single qualified scientist who has looked at the DNA record (including YEC Todd Wodd) has concluded that it overwhelming supports common descent?

Re point #5: Todd has even been accused of being a “closet evolutionist” by other YECs as a result of that 2006 paper. You will find no mention of that paper on any YEC, OEC or ID creationist site, even though AiG publishes a lot of Todd’s “less controversial” material.

So, I guess you could argue that this paper of Todd’s has been “expelled.”

Re point #5: Todd has even been accused of being a “closet evolutionist” by other YECs as a result of that 2006 paper. You will find no mention of that paper on any YEC, OEC or ID creationist site

Wrong. You didn’t look closely…
http://creation.com/decoding-the-dogma-of-dna-similarity

Questions:

As only a rough draft is referenced, how much of the total chimp genome has actually been sequenced?

I’ve read that the chimp genome is 10-12% larger than human. Do you have other info?

I reject evolution for the same reason I reject YEC young earth. It is a conclusion driving a research project. Materialist scientists have no other option for explaining the presence and diversity of life. Therefore they assume that it is true, notwithstanding that it is full of assumptions, “ifs”, “maybes”, “possibly” and the like. So of course no paper on evolution is going to suggest that it is wrong or didn’t occur.

Hillis could point to 500 million papers, but that proves nothing except that he has fallen for the fallacy of ad populum, also known by its non-Latin name of Appeal to Popularity. The Appeal to Popularity has the following form:

Most people approve of X (have favorable emotions towards X).
Therefore X is true.

The basic idea is that a claim is accepted as being true simply because most people are favorably inclined towards the claim. More formally, the fact that most people have favorable emotions associated with the claim is substituted in place of actual evidence for the claim. A person falls prey to this fallacy if he accepts a claim as being true simply because most other people approve of the claim.

So whoop-dee-doo. The intelligent design people have come up with some very trenchant criticisms of current theories of evolution (and there are several competing theories) and also research projects in mathematics at least, which cannot be dismissed so cavalierly. Moreover, for Christians who subscribe to evolution there is the issue of Romans 1:20, which I raised and quoted above. God says that we see His handiwork, so for theistic evolutionists the question put to them is: where do you see it?

Further to post 1142: the fact remains that the mutations within a huge population over a huge number of generations is meagre, and provides suggestive evidence that the requisite number of mutations could not be achieved in higher orders of animals in the time frames available. The issue of the number of mutations to get from A to B, the the size of the populations, the length of time from A to B, the mutation rate, and the statistical likelihood of individuals surviving other hazards to the passing on of their individual mutations, are all matters not addressed to any significant or meaningful extent in any evolution literature.

The Kitzmiller decision is a piece of garbage that I would fail articling students for submitting. It is basically a rehash of submissions by the side he favoured, with little original thought–even to the point of copying errors. Not that I expected much from a guy who served on a tribunal previously. In addition, Padian is on record as mocking people who don’t believe in evolution, so he’s hardly one to give an unbiased report. The reason some people did not testify is unrelated to lack of nerve, as anyone who closely followed the history of the trial would know. And it’s another logical fallacy to hold that their failure to testify affects the truth value of their arguments.

Re post 1185 by Gabe

In my post I said nothing about mutations removing information; I spoke only with reference to natural selection. I state that natural selection only removes DNA because the organisms die. It’s mutations that would create the new information.

On coral reefs, I don’t get your point. There’s nothing in my coral reef argument that relies on what a designer would do; I relied on what we observe in coral reefs.

Gabriel, what would you take the rate of beneficial mutations to be in the Lenski experiments?

re post 1186

The leaders of the ID movement pointedly and expressly state that ID should not be taught in schools, and they do not engage in political lobbying for it to be taught. Some sympathizers or creationists might, but not the leaders of the movement, in particular the people at the Discovery Institute.

re post 1187

Motivation is irrelevant to the truth and validity of an argument. At this rate, I’m going to make it through all 40 or so definitions of logica fallacies. A Circumstantial ad Hominem is a fallacy in which one attempts to attack a claim by asserting that the person making the claim is making it simply out of self interest. In some cases, this fallacy involves substituting an attack on a person’s circumstances (such as the person’s religion, political affiliation, ethnic background, etc.). The fallacy has the following forms:

Person A makes claim X.
Person B asserts that A makes claim X because it is in A’s interest to claim X.
Therefore claim X is false.

Person A makes claim X.
Person B makes an attack on A’s circumstances.
Therefore X is false.

A Circumstantial ad Hominem is a fallacy because a person’s interests and circumstances have no bearing on the truth or falsity of the claim being made. While a person’s interests will provide them with motives to support certain claims, the claims stand or fall on their own. It is also the case that a person’s circumstances (religion, political affiliation, etc.) do not affect the truth or falsity of the claim. This is made quite clear by the following example: “Bill claims that 1+1=2. But he is a Republican, so his claim is false.”

Finally, since this thread is about theistic evolution and not non-theistic evolution, what (Gabe, Geoff) makes your version of evolution theistic? How do you relate evolution to Romans 1:20?

Regards,
#John

Richard – Have you read Wood’s paper?
“Since the Bible clearly teaches the special creation
of human beings (Gen. 1:26-27; 2:7, 21-22), what
does the similarity of humans and chimpanzees mean
for creationists? Creationists have responded to these
studies in a variety of ways. A very popular argument
is that similarity does not necessarily indicate common
ancestry but could also imply common design (e.g.
Batten 1996; Thompson and Harrub 2005; DeWitt
2005). While this is true, the mere fact of similarity
is only a small part of the evolutionary argument. Far
more important than the mere occurrence of similarity
is the kind of similarity observed. Similarity is not
random. Rather, it forms a detectable pattern with
some groups of species more similar than others. As
an example consider a 200,000 nucleotide region from
human chromosome 1 (Figure 2). When compared to
the chimpanzee, the two species differ by as little as 1-
2%, but when compared to the mouse, the differences
are much greater. Comparison to chicken reveals
even greater differences. This is exactly the expected
pattern of similarity that would result if humans and
chimpanzees shared a recent common ancestor and
mice and chickens were more distantly related.”

“More recently, creationists have begun to argue
that the similarity between chimpanzees and humans
is less – sometimes much less – than claimed by evolutionary biologists (DeWitt 2003, 2005;
Criswell 2005; Thompson and Harrub 2005). These
arguments are inspired in part by a study by Britten
(2002) that concluded that the overall similarity of
human and chimpanzee genomes is 95%. Britten
arrived at this greater dissimilarity by including in his
calculations not only nucleotide mismatches but also
alignment gaps. Creationists also tend to emphasize
other important differences between the human
and chimpanzee genomes, including the differing
chromosome numbers (DeWitt 2003, 2005) and the
differences in gene expression in the humans and
chimpanzees (Rana 2001).
Differences are certainly important, and there are
many differences between the human and chimpanzee
genomes, as detailed above. However, emphasizing
these differences does not resolve the problem of
similarity. Even if the chimpanzee genome were
more than 5% or 10% different from the human
genome, the differences are still vastly outnumbered
by the similarities (at least 9 to 1). The major pattern
that requires explanation is the surprising degree
of genomic similarity, as King and Wilson (1975)
noted thirty years ago. Listing differences between
the genomes does not alter the overall pattern. If
anything, the differences are more striking because of
the overwhelming similarity.”

John, reams of scientific literature converging on the same conclusion is hardly an argument “ad populum.” Should Richard discard your evidence for the age of the earth for the same reason? How can you on the one hand throw scientific paper after scientific paper at the YEC camp and then say this?

Hillis could point to 500 million papers, but that proves nothing

So, you think there is a global conspiracy for Darwin or something? Please.

You’re grasping at straws, and like you’ve chided Richard and others for, you have not responded to the evidence presented to you except to essentially say that NO amount of evidence would suffice. Sound familiar?

For example:

why do humans and chimps share thousands of pseudogenes in the same places in their genomes?

why do many of those pseudogenes show clear evidence of being adapted to a prior manner of life (such as the vitellogenin gene used for egg yolk that is found in humans, chimps and other placental mammals) but is in the same place and is functional in egg-laying mammals like the platypus?

why do humans have one chromosome that is exactly what you would predict it to be based on fusion of what we see as separate chromosomes in other apes? Why are there markers on this human chromosome indicative of such a fusion in exactly the right places?

why, in the face of such evidence, do you suddenly decide that the scientific literature you have relied on to debunk YEC claims cannot be trusted anymore? Why should YECs accept your arguments about the age of the earth if the scientific literature is thusly suspect?

You’re burying your head in the sand, my friend.

Romans 1:20 won’t help either: even the ID paradigm says that you need to sequence DNA before you have what they call evidence for design. Romans 1:20 means looking at the cosmos and concluding God was involved. That is something every TE affirms.

Re: what makes TE theistic – are you saying that for something to be “theistic” there has to be a gap for God in it? Something miraculous?

When I said God designed coral reefs I was serious. Everything is ordained and sustained by God. There isn’t “the miraculous bits” and the “natural bits.” ALL is ordained and sustained by God. Anything less is a universe I don’t want to live in…

Richard, if you have a link to a creationist website dealing with Todd’s 2006 chimp paper I’d be very interested to see it. I fully accept I may have not found something that is out there. Links please (and thank you)!

Richard, at least you’re being consistent. You reject the majority of modern science because you feel it conflicts with your interpretation of Genesis. I disagree with your interpretation, as I have explained, but I can respect the integrity of your position.