A little something regarding the decline of Darwinism and Neo-Darwinists

[Reg the Fronkey FarmerModerator]

Ah, the Kettlewell Hypothesis, the go to “proof” of Creationist science. Thought they had given up on that one.

[DavisModerator]

No Earl that’s not how critical discussion s work here. Don’t type out an enormous list of contentious claims…ignore the numerous cases of people responding to your claims and then type out yet another pile of questionable claims. Deal with our challenges to your original thread first. Return the respect for the users here who took time to read your claims and respond.

• This reply was modified 4 years, 7 months ago by  Davis.
• This reply was modified 4 years, 7 months ago by  Davis.
• This reply was modified 4 years, 7 months ago by  PopeBeanie.

[Simon PayntonParticipant]

Surely it’s not necessary to disprove evolution in order to allow the possibility for God to exist.  Throw out evolution, why not throw out all the rest of science too?

[Reg the Fronkey FarmerModerator]

Earle – The main problem we have with visiting Creationists is that they just cut and paste from Creationist websites. You are posting the same paragraphs that we have seen numerous times before from various “Darwin Debunked” websites which are mostly cut and paste jobs of each other in the first place. There is no point in doing this because you are not making any valid points. You have been given this “information” and taken it as “gospel” with no peer review and the only consensus coming from the people who all agree with it because it also fits with their Biblical worldview.

It is intellectually embarrassing to read. Only today I had someone tell me that there was no way that we could have come from nothing and then evolved from a primate. I had to tell her that Evolution is not about how life on Earth began. Secondly we share ancestry with all other life on Earth and are closely related to chimps and bonobos who are primates, just as humans are.

I asked her if she was ever involved in a law suit over her maternal claim to her daughter would she allow the court to compare their DNA samples to prove their relationship to the judge. She immediately said of course she would because it would prove it beyond any doubt.

She realized what she had said just as she said it…..so I asked her would she accept that she was related to a chimpanzee if DNA could prove it. I asked her would see accept that science has shown that humans are genetically closer to chimpanzees than Gorillas are to Chimpanzees.

She gave some flimsy answer about how science is always changing its mind and asked “How did we get here so” as if answering my question with a question (or claims from ignorance) was an answer.

“So you pick and choose the bits of Science that suit you and reject the parts that contradict your faith? Yes, nothing new here”.

But I could see she was thinking about the contradiction and we did discuss it further. I think she was even relieved to get challenged because deep down she must know there is something wrong with the god version. We are an evolved species. I could tell she is a smart woman and hopefully reading my copy of this book will help. At least she was brave enough to accept the challenge. Now I must go and buy it for the 14th time! I will be sure to deposit a few copies around the bookshops’ “Religion and Theology” shelves in the hope that they will be randomly selected! Maybe Earle you will try to read it too.

 

[DavisModerator]

In fact, almost none of our typical claims is in itself justification for denying God:

Nature is extremely cruel and suffering is common:

There still could be a God. It’s just an asshole of a God.

Religious institutions do horrible violent cruel things

Since God is an asshole…is that really a surprise?

Christians preach against one cruel thing and then do lots of other cruel things

So does God in the Old Testament, and even Jesus does so a little in the New Testament.

The church has been anti-science

Since the God who can act like a total asshole demands total obedience including thought control, that cannot be a surprise either.

The more religious, the more likely there is sexism, homophobia, racism etc.

Yeah, God is extremely sexist and homophobic and he is so racist in the old testament he commanded his army to multiple genocides in several cities. There’s no surprise here.

There is a God and it is a perfect, loving, forgiving, all knowing God

That’s logically impossible

And he created the Earth 6000 years ago and dinosaurs lived with humans and evolution is an illusion

It just keeps getting worse.

And it is the God of the Old and New Testament

The qualities of this God as presented in these two books is so absurd, such a pile of bullshit, so impossible to take seriously…that’s the only explanation we need to not believe in God.

[StregaModerator]

Earle, did you come to Atheist Zone to convert us to your religion?  What on earth was the purpose of that huge cut and paste job?

[Earle SanbornParticipant]

Ladies and Gents, real science has come a long way from Darwin’s time. Used to think a cell was just a blob, but we know better today: each cell is like a mini-city with ingress/egress, bushings, motors, elimination system and on and on. Here’s something for your amusement today: The Complex Structure and Systems of the Cell, followed by Mutations.

______________

The complex structure of the living cell was unknown in Darwin’s day and at the time, ascribing life to “coincidences and natural conditions” was thought by evolutionists to be convincing enough. Darwin had proposed that the first cell could easily have formed “in some warm little pond.”238 One of Darwin’s supporters, the German biologist Ernst Haeckel, examined under the microscope a mixture of mud removed from the sea bed by a research ship and claimed that this was a nonliving substance that turned into a living one. This so-called “mud that comes to life,” known as Bathybius haeckelii (“Haeckel’s mud from the depths”), is an indication of just how simple a thing life was thought to be by the founders of the theory of evolution.The technology of the twentieth century has delved into the tiniest particles of life, and has revealed that the cell is the most complex system mankind has ever confronted. Today we know that the cell contains power stations producing the energy to be used by the cell, factories manufacturing the enzymes and hormones essential for life, a databank where all the necessary information about all products to be produced is recorded, complex transportation systems and pipelines for carrying raw materials and products from one place to another, advanced laboratories and refineries for breaking down external raw materials into their useable parts, and specialized cell membrane proteins to control the incoming and outgoing materials. And these constitute only a small part of this incredibly complex system.
In Darwin’s time, it was thought that the cell had a very simple structure. Darwin’s ardent supporter Ernst Haeckel suggested that the left mud pulled up from the bottom of the sea could produce life by itself.
W. H. Thorpe, an evolutionist scientist, acknowledges that “The most elementary type of cell constitutes a ‘mechanism’ unimaginably more complex than any machine yet thought up, let alone constructed, by man.”239
A cell is so complex that even the high level of technology attained today cannot produce one. No effort to create an artificial cell has ever met with success. Indeed, all attempts to do so have been abandoned.

The theory of evolution claims that this system-which mankind, with all the intelligence, knowledge and technology at its disposal, cannot succeed in reproducing-came into existence “by chance” under the conditions of the primordial earth. Actually, the probability of forming a cell by chance is about the same as that of producing a perfect copy of a book following an explosion in a printing house.
Sir Fred Hoyle
The English mathematician and astronomer Sir Fred Hoyle made a similar comparison in an interview published in Nature magazine on November 12, 1981. Although an evolutionist himself, Hoyle stated that the chance that higher life forms might have emerged in this way is comparable to the chance that a tornado sweeping through a junk-yard might assemble a Boeing 747 from the materials therein.240 This means that it is not possible for the cell to have come into being by chance, and therefore it must definitely have been “created.”

One of the basic reasons why the theory of evolution cannot explain how the cell came into existence is the “irreducible complexity” in it. A living cell maintains itself with the harmonious co-operation of many organelles. If only one of these organelles fails to function, the cell cannot remain alive. The cell does not have the chance to wait for unconscious mechanisms like natural selection or mutation to permit it to develop. Thus, the first cell on earth was necessarily a complete cell possessing all the required organelles and functions, and this definitely means that this cell had to have been created.

238 Charles Darwin, Life and Letter of Charles Darwin, vol. II, From Charles Darwin to J. Do Hooker, March 29, 1863
239 W. R. Bird, The Origin of Species Revisited, Thomas Nelson Co., Nashville, 1991, pp. 298-99.
240 “Hoyle on Evolution,” Nature, vol. 294, November 12, 1981, p. 105

______________

Mutations- never a good thing

Mutations are defined as breaks or replacements taking place in the DNA molecule, which is found in the nuclei of the cells of a living organism and which contains all its genetic information. These breaks or replacements are the result of external effects such as radiation or chemical action. Every mutation is an “accident,” and either damages the nucleotides making up the DNA or changes their locations. Most of the time, they cause so much damage and modification that the cell cannot repair them.

Mutation, which evolutionists frequently hide behind, is not a magic wand that transforms living organisms into a more advanced and perfect form. The direct effect of mutations is harmful. The changes effected by mutations can only be like those experienced by people in Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Chernobyl: that is, death, disability, and freaks of nature…

The reason for this is very simple: DNA has a very complex structure, and random effects can only damage it. Biologist B. G. Ranganathan states:

First, genuine mutations are very rare in nature. Secondly, most mutations are harmful since they are random, rather than orderly changes in the structure of genes;any random change in a highy ordered system will be for the worse, not for the better. For example, if an earthquake were to shake a highly ordered structure such as a building, there would be a random change in the framework of the building, which, in all probability, would not be an improvement.19
Not surprisingly, no useful mutation has been so far observed. All mutations have proved to be harmful. The evolutionist scientist Warren Weaver comments on the report prepared by the Committee on Genetic Effects of Atomic Radiation, which had been formed to investigate mutations that might have been caused by the nuclear weapons used in the Second World War:

Many will be puzzled about the statement that practically all known mutant genes are harmful. For mutations are a necessary part of the process of evolution. How can a good effect-evolution to higher forms of life-result from mutations practically all of which are harmful?20
Every effort put into “generating a useful mutation” has resulted in failure. For decades, evolutionists carried out many experiments to produce mutations in fruit flies, as these insects reproduce very rapidly and so mutations would show up quickly. Generation upon generation of these flies were mutated, yet no useful mutation was ever observed. The evolutionist geneticist Gordon Taylor writes thus:

Since the beginning of the twentieth century, evolutionary biologists have sought examples of useful mutations by creating mutant flies. But these efforts have always resulted in sick and deformed creatures. The left picture shows the head of a normal fruit fly, and the picture on the right shows the head of fruit fly with legs coming out of it, the result of mutation.
It is a striking, but not much mentioned fact that, though geneticists have been breeding fruit-flies for sixty years or more in labs all round the world- flies which produce a new generation every eleven days-they have never yet seen the emergence of a new species or even a new enzyme.21

Mutant frogs born with crippled legs.
Another researcher, Michael Pitman, comments on the failure of the experiments carried out on fruit flies:

Morgan, Goldschmidt, Muller, and other geneticists have subjected generations of fruit flies to extreme conditions of heat, cold, light, dark, and treatment by chemicals and radiation. All sorts of mutations, practically all trivial or positively deleterious, have been produced. Man-made evolution? Not really: Few of the geneticists’ monsters could have survived outside the bottles they were bred in. In practice mutants die, are sterile, or tend to revert to the wild type.22
The same holds true for man. All mutations that have been observed in human beings have had deleterious results. All mutations that take place in humans result in physical deformities, in infirmities such as mongolism, Down syndrome, albinism, dwarfism or cancer. Needless to say, a process that leaves people disabled or sick cannot be “an evolutionary mechanism”-evolution is supposed to produce forms that are better fitted to survive.
A mutant fly with deformed wings.
The American pathologist David A. Demick notes the following in a scientific article about mutations:

Literally thousands of human diseases associated with genetic mutations have been catalogued in recent years, with more being described continually. A recent reference book of medical genetics listed some 4,500 different genetic diseases. Some of the inherited syndromes characterized clinically in the days before molecular genetic analysis (such as Marfan’s syndrome) are now being shown to be heterogeneous; that is, associated with many different mutations… With this array of human diseases that are caused by mutations, what of positive effects? With thousands of examples of harmful mutations readily available, surely it should be possible to describe some positive mutations if macroevolution is true. These would be needed not only for evolution to greater complexity, but also to offset the downward pull of the many harmful mutations. But, when it comes to identifying positive mutations, evolutionary scientists are strangely silent.23
The only instance evolutionary biologists give of “useful mutation” is the disease known as sickle cell anemia. In this, the hemoglobin molecule, which serves to carry oxygen in the blood, is damaged as a result of mutation, and undergoes a structural change. As a result of this, the hemoglobin molecule’s ability to carry oxygen is seriously impaired. People with sickle cell anemia suffer increasing respiratory difficulties for this reason. However, this example of mutation, which is discussed under blood disorders in medical textbooks, is strangelyevaluated by some evolutionary biologists as a “useful mutation.”
The shape and functions of red corpuscles are compromised in sickle-cell anemia. For this reason, their oxygen-carrying capacities are weakened.
They say that the partial immunity to malaria by those with the illness is a “gift” of evolution. Using the same logic, one could say that, since people born with genetic leg paralysis are unable to walk and so are saved from being killed in traffic accidents, therefore genetic leg paralysis is a “useful genetic feature.” This logic is clearly totally unfounded.

It is obvious that mutations are solely a destructive mechanism. Pierre-Paul Grassé, former president of the French Academy of Sciences, is quite clear on this point in a comment he made about mutations. Grassé compared mutations to “making mistakes in the letters when copying a written text.” And as with mutations, letter mistakes cannot give rise to any information, but merely damage such information as already exists. Grassé explained this fact in this way:

Mutations, in time, occur incoherently. They are not complementary to one another, nor are they cumulative in successive generations toward a given direction. They modify what preexists, but they do so in disorder, no matter how…. As soon as some disorder, even slight, appears in an organized being, sickness, then death follow. There is no possible compromise between the phenomenon of life and anarchy.24
So for that reason, as Grassé puts it, “No matter how numerous they may be, mutations do not produce any kind of evolution.”25

19 B. G. Ranganathan, Origins?, Pennsylvania: The Banner Of Truth Trust, 1988. (emphasis added)
20 Warren Weaver et al., “Genetic Effects of Atomic Radiation”, Science, vol. 123, June 29, 1956, p. 1159. (emphasis added)
21 Gordon Rattray Taylor, The Great Evolution Mystery, Abacus, Sphere Books, London, 1984, p. 48.
22 Michael Pitman, Adam and Evolution, River Publishing, London, 1984, p. 70. (emphasis added)
23 David A. Demick, “The Blind Gunman”, Impact, no. 308, February 1999. (emphasis added)
24 Pierre-Paul Grassé, Evolution of Living Organisms, Academic Press, New York, 1977, p. 97, 98.
25 Pierre-Paul Grassé, Evolution of Living Organisms, Academic Press, New York, 1977, p. 88. (emphasis added

[Reg the Fronkey FarmerModerator]

Earle, as I mentioned earlier in this post, there is no point in copying and pasting from “Darwin Debunked” websites. Then you go an paste an entire page from “Darwinism Refuted“????

The paragraph “Mutations- never a good thing” clearly shows that the author has no scientific understanding of what genetic mutation means.

“First, genuine mutations are very rare in nature. Secondly, most mutations are harmful since they are random, rather than orderly changes in the structure of genes;any random change in a highy ordered system will be for the worse, not for the better.”

Absolute rubbish!

“One of the basic reasons why the theory of evolution cannot explain how the cell came into existence is the “irreducible complexity” in it.”

He is confusing abiogenesis with evolution. This is a common mistake by Creationists who learn all their Science from non-scientific sources.

We will leave the post up as there are people who will read this post without ever commenting on it (or even being site members). If it helps them with their doubts or helps educate them and they get free of their religion by seeing the fallacious arguments Creationists use, then that can only be a good thing.

“Literally thousands of human diseases associated with genetic mutations have been catalogued in recent years, with more being described continually.”

As you believe Evolution is not true, do you blame your god for all these diseases?

(rhetorical question, no need to answer as we heard it already).

 

[Simon PayntonParticipant]

Thank you Earle for making a point of your own.

“Used to think a cell was just a blob, but we know better today: each cell is like a mini-city with ingress/egress, bushings, motors, elimination system and on and on. Here’s something for your amusement today: The Complex Structure and Systems of the Cell, followed by Mutations.”

– I think this is fascinating scientifically, and far more fascinating than your version, whatever it might be, we don’t know.

There is such a thing as complexity and order arising out of chaos, as a phenomenon of self-organising systems.  It is about small simple elements – in the case of living things, many kinds of elements – organising themselves according to simple rules.  If you think about it, proteins and living systems are so complex that there is a lot of room for rich variety of forms and behaviour at all levels of conceptual size.

The elements don’t even have to be alive – a computer simulation will do.  A flock of birds can be simulated on the computer using simple rules for the way elements (birds in the flock) interact and behave.  It must be hard to coordinate a flock of birds otherwise.

[Simon PayntonParticipant]

There is a very good book called “The Making of the Fittest – DNA and the ultimate forensic record of evolution” by Sean B. Carroll, which deals with the kinds of issues Earle brings up in this excerpt from the Intelligent Design site.

If I get the chance I will try to consult it to tackle some of the points head on.  The book is well worth reading as a good set of lessons in modern evolutionary theory.  What strikes you is how logical the theory of evolution is, and as we all know, reality is logical.

[DavisModerator]

Earle Sanborn wrote:

Ladies and Gents, real science has come a long way from Darwin’s time

Earl. You’ve been repeatedly called out for cut and paste trolling, making contentious claims and ignoring our responses and for proselytizing. Respect the rules of this forum and the principles of rational debate…or get the hell out of here.

[Simon PayntonParticipant]

@davis – please forgive Earle, he’s not trolling or proselytizing, he’s just making points, but on this forum, it’s not how we do things.

@earlesanborn – it’s best if you can just summarise the points you want to make, succinctly, in your own words.  It is much more interesting for other people to read like that as well.  There is no need for mountains of detail.  If there is, then you need to summarise the detail in your own words, so as to make it understandable for the rest of us.

[Reg the Fronkey FarmerModerator]

@ Earle – “Used to think a cell was just a blob, but we know better today”.

Who used to think this? Are you claiming Science understood the cell was “just a blob”?

Cell theory began long before Darwin and when Robert Hooke discovered it back in the 1660’s he recognized the complex nature of it immediately. He certainly did not think it to be “just a blob”. Later, in the 1830’s Schwann and Schleiden understood they were “power houses” in their own right and that they were the building blocks of organic matter. Even mitochondria was described a few years before Darwin published his work in 1859. So when did people think the cell was just a blob?

[Reg the Fronkey FarmerModerator]

Sorry Simon but Earle is just cutting and pasting directly from other sites. It is not his own “work”.

@simon “reality is logical”?

Not down at the  level where quantum mechanics is involved in the production of DNA. That is why so many physicists are now working in “quantum biology“.

[Simon PayntonParticipant]

“just a blob”

– it’s true that science’s preliminary knowledge of cells was not very sophisticated like it is now, and we could only see the most visible big parts under the microscope.

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