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The Origin of Specious Nonsense. Twelve years on. Still going. Answer soon.
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You don't have to be a Creationist to have problems ... merely to be associated with any scientific 'heresy' ... is sufficient to get you into trouble ... even if you are otherwise totally scientifically 'orthodox'.PopePalpatine wrote: »Creationists get so severely humiliated. . .that as a result they are too ashamed to show their faces in public. . .and end up dying of hunger rather than venture out to buy food!! Those eeeeeviiiiiiiiil evolutionists have the blood of millions on their hands!1!!!!!11 :eek: :eek:
:eek: :eek:
... its medieval history repeating itself ... as farce !!!:eek:
... and there are plenty of Creationists who are only too happy to show their faces in public ... and tell the world of the physical evidence for direct creation:
https://answersingenesis.org/bios/
http://creation.com/speaker-biographies
http://www.icr.org/events/speakers/
... and here is a profile and list of published science papers from one of these Creationists:-
http://www.icr.org/jeffrey_tomkins/0 -
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My comments in red above.
Text changed back to black for the sake of everyone reading this.
"All mutations are information degrading ... whether this results in harmful results is dependent on whether they affect a critical process that isn't backed up with an alterative mechanism ... or isn't corrected by the cells auto-correction mechanisms."
Well, no. All mutations are not information degrading because "complex specified information" is just a creationist buzzphrase which has been completely refuted. In reality, as I've explained, the vast majority (approx. 97%) of all mutations are neutral. This also refutes the idea that the "information" in human DNA is "tightly specified" as you've previously claimed. Your baseless assertions about auto-correction mechanisms don't really help your argument.
Further, we know that mutations don't really affect the "information" of the genome because we've analysed our DNA (and other species) and the amount of junk DNA correlates with what we expect from a mutation rate which is high and yet mostly neutral. Our DNA is made up of about 1.5% coding DNA. Another 3% are regulatory sequences. Add in the other functional sequences (ribosomal, transfer etc.) and you get another 0.5%. So that's about 5% of the total genome that actually does something. Then you've got about 10% which is just random nonsense caused by vestigial or nonfunctional enzymes. Then you've got 21% which is parasitic viral copies and a further 13% which are duplicates of the viral copies. Another 8% comes from ERVs (endogenuous retroviruses). When we add all this up we get about 5% functional DNA, 10% structural DNA, 45% known useless DNA and about 40% which is non-functional but whose origin is currently unknown. However, in 2004, a group of researchers deleted 2.3 Mbp of similar sequences from a mouse genome without any effect whatsoever.
If DNA were really comprised of such "tightly specified" information as you and other creationists claim then we wouldn't expect to see such massive amounts of useless DNA hanging around in our genome. However, it is exactly what we expect to result from natural selection.
"No transitions between Kinds have been observed."
Well, we could waste time with me asking you for a definition of kind and you evading the question for a dozen posts but since we've already been down this road before and since other creationists have decided to do what you won't I'll use the following page from CreationWiki as a guide:
Created kinds
One of the examples used most often by creationists is the kind Canidae or the dog kind which "creation scientists" call a holobaramin in that it descended from one pair supposedly taken on Noah's ark. The baramin diagram for Canidae looks like this:
However, we can show transitional species between dogs and bears which occupy another baramin or created kind, Ursidae.
For starters, there's Cyondictis which is an undifferentiated arctoid species ancestral to both bears and dogs.
It has features intermediate between bears and dogs. On one hand it walked in a plantigrade fashion like a bear (or human), on the other hand it had larger carnassial teeth like a dog and a tail. We have fossils of 14 individuals collected from Germany, France, Spain, UK and China.
Then of course you have the dinosaur problem. Creationists for the most part would like to pretend that dinosaurs didn't exist. They're not listed as a created kind on CreationWiki but it's rather difficult to slot them into any of the existing created kinds they have identified. It also poses problems for the Noah's ark story. For example, it would have been difficult to get two of these on the ark:
This is Argentinosaurus huinculensis from about 95 million years ago. It weighed approximately 96 tons and was 35m long and 7m high. For reference, the dimensions of the ark are listed in the bible as 137x22.9x13.7m. So with two of these on board, there wouldn't have been room for much else.
Anyway, I'm getting away from the point. This is about transitional species. Behold, Archaeopteryx lithographica:
This is as textbook an example of a transitional species as you're ever likely to come across. It is intermediate between Mesozoic dinosaurs and modern birds. It has an opposable hallux, an avian trait not shared by other coelurosaurs. It has feathers, a wishbone, a gizzard, a four-chambered heart and an elongated pubis bone directed backwards. It lacks certain modern distinctly avian features such as fused thoracic vertebrae, fused hand bones and some fused foot bones. It also has a number of distinctly saurian features, shared with other coelurosaurs and other dinosaurs but not with most (and in some cases all) birds including no beak, reptilian teeth, a posterior nuchal joint, ventral ribs and an unreduced preorbital fenestra.
Staying with dinosaurs for the moment, we have another transition this time between dinosaurs (specifically archosaurs) and another created kind from CreationWiki, Crocodilia. This is Montealtosuchus:
a species intermediate between archosaurs like Euparkeria:
and modern crocodiles. Euparkeria was already itself a transitional species with longer forelimbs than preceding dinosaurs meaning that it wasn't truly bipedal. This means that the forelimbs were held slightly sideways for balance, a feature that is even more pronounced in Montealtosuchus and complete in modern crocodiles.
Finally, of course there's the baramin of humanity, the claim as referenced in my last post that humans were specially created. Therefore, no transitional fossils should exist between humans and earlier apes. Except that they do.
JC, meet Lucy:
This is Australopithecus afarensis. It is a transitional species between earlier primates and modern humans. It is fully bipedal unlike earlier apes but it still has a small brain (375-500 cm^3). The small brain is one of the ways we can trace human evolution. Firstly, brain size, in general increased over time:
However, there was a limit to how much this could be extended in most apes. One of the features that appeared or developed for the first time in Australopithecus and became a feature of later apes such as chimpanzees and gorillas is an immense bite strength. These apes have extremely strong masticatory muscles which we just don't have (we do have masticatory muscles but nowhere near as strong as other apes). One of the features of apes like gorillas is a pronounced bony ridge in the skull known as the sagittal crest, which acts as an anchor point for these incredibly powerful muscles. The cranial pressure determined by the sagittal crest means that there's a hard limit as to how much the brain can grow. But since humans lack the jaw muscle adaptation our brains were able to get much bigger. We have now identified the gene which is responsible for all this, MYH16. This gene is present in all primates including lemurs and monkeys. However, in humans the gene is non-functional, a vestigial relic of our primate ancestry. This was outlined in a 2004 paper by Stedman et al.
Myosin gene mutation correlates with anatomical changes in the human lineage
However, it doesn't end there. We can also trace our evolution backwards in time, showing that we share a common ancestor with our closest relative, the chimpanzee. We have discussed this point several times before but it bears repeating here.
The image above shows human chromsome 2 next to chimp chromosomes 12 and 13. The fact that we have 46 chromosomes when other apes have 48 was unknown for a long time. Eventually we found that sometime around 5-7 million years ago two chromosomes present separately in chimps fused together. This resulted in the development of a neocentromere (a sequence of DNA which marks the centre of a chromosome) in our chromosome 2. This also shows the many concordant lines of evidence which shows our evolution. It's not just based on morphology or genetics, it's all of them, all telling the same story.
Finally, I should point out that it can be difficult to see transitions when you're only picking a single species intermediate between two higher taxa. However, we also have collections of fossils which show a more fluid transition like this collection of hominid skulls:
For anyone who's interested in tracing another series of transitions for themselves, here is a gradual sequence from ancestral land-based arctoids (bear-like creatures) to modern sea-lions:
Pachycynodon -> Enaliarctos -> Neotherium -> Imagotaria -> Pithanotaria -> Thalassoleon -> Otariinae
On a side note JC, unlike the evolutionary tree of life like this:
creationists claim that there are a number (one they're unwilling to commit to) of created kinds with no common ancestry like this:
So at the root of each of these created kinds is a discontinuity where each of these kinds cannot obviously be related to any other kind. In fact, since there are a number of identified kinds, there must be multiple points of discontinuity. So where are they? Pick any two examples of created kinds which you claim cannot be related and I'll show you why you're wrong.
On another side note, pone2012, this is what I mean when I said the science shows that creationists are wrong.
"Quite true ... most biological systems are irreducibly complex i.e. if any part of the system is removed functionality is destroyed."
Well, no. So far every example put forward by a creationist has been completely debunked (bacterial flagellum, bombardier beetle, the eye, the immune system). Most of this mistake stems from a fundamental misunderstanding of evolution in the first place, a false assumption that a complex system evolves by adding parts together rather than successive iterations of the entire system. Just like above, here's a challenge, pick a biological system which you think is irreducibly complex, explain why it's irreducibly complex and I'll show you why you're wrong.
No new kinds have been observed to arise.
Just like above, we're going to need a definition of kind to properly debate this point. You see, the bible which is creationists source for the notion of kinds in the first place is unbelievably vague:
" Then God said, “Let the earth bring forth living creatures after their kind: cattle and creeping things and beasts of the earth after their kind”; and it was so. God made the beasts of the earth after their kind, and the cattle after their kind, and everything that creeps on the ground after its kind; and God saw that it was good."
Genesis 1:24-25
What exactly comprises the "beasts of the earth" kind or the "creeping things" kind. Does creeping thing include insects, rodents, snakes, lizards, what? And what distinguishes cattle from "beasts of the earth"? The further you go into Genesis the worst the ambiguity problem becomes. In Genesis 7 we see this line:
"they and every beast after its kind, and all the cattle after URL="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis+7&version=NASB#fen-NASB-174l"]l[/URLtheir kind, and every creeping thing that creeps on the earth after its kind, and every bird after its kind, all sorts of birds"
So are birds one kind or multiple kinds. What exactly is a sort? Is it like a genus or family or phylum? Which species belong in which sort?
In any case, since creationists use sexual discontinuity as a border between created kinds, we can see that kind is, for all intents and purposes, analogous to species. Species is the only taxonomic level of any significance. We have observed new species to arise even according to the creationist definition of sexual discontinuity:
Culex pipiens in London Underground tunnels: differentiation between surface and subterranean populations
We also have ring species which show the process of speciation in action.
"Humans were specially created (Adam in the city)
True"
Dealt with above.
"True ... to locally reverse the effects of the second law requires an input of both energy and intelligence applying energy on its own just destroys and increases entropy."
No. In case you missed that class in your physical chemistry module, the second law of thermodynamics only applies in closed systems, which Earth isn't. Also, intelligence has no bearing on thermodynamics, it's not required at all. Of course, the creationist claim about the relationship between evolution and thermodynamics has been directly refuted and the opposite has been shown to be true, not only does thermodynamics not prohibit evolution, evolution is an inevitable result of thermodynamics:
Statistical physics of self-replication
Life as a manifestation of the second law of thermodynamics
The so-called 'Cambrian Explosion' did exactly this.
No, it really didn't. Since we were talking about arthropoda as Simon Conway Morris talks about in The Crucible of Creation, let's start there. Morris claims that arthropoda arose suddenly in the Cambrian period with no precursors. Except he's dead wrong.
For a start, there's Spriggina:
This dates from the Ediacaran period around 550 million years ago before the Cambrian period. This then developed into species like Anomalocaris:
a species intermediate between annelidae and arthropoda and the basal species of Arthropoda. So we can see where arthropods came from and they didn't just appear suddenly.
In addition to Anomalocaris we also have Aysheaia another basal arthropod, Halkieria a proto-brachiopod and Wiwaxia, a precursor of modern molluscs.
Creationists base their claims on either wilful or outright ignorance or hopelessly outdated information. The fossil record is so much richer than any creationist can conceive of and every claim they make about can and has been shown to be dead wrong.
"That the odds of life forming by chance are incredibly small (No Free Lunch)
... so incredibly small as to be an impossibilty."
Yes, and as I explained in our previous exchange on this topic, if chance were a relevant factor in abiogenesis that would mean something but it isn't. Chance is not necessary to go from a prebiotic world to an RNA or DNA world. Simple chemistry is all that you need.0 -
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