Darwin Defenders Lash Out at Creationist Origin of Species

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Ya - there are soo many transitional forms that it prompted Stephen Gould to develop his "Punctuated Equilibrium" thesis (perhaps you've heard of him, Harvard, Cambrian Explosion, anything ringing a bell ?) He has also said that evolutionary theory is only capable of making GENERAL predictions at best (Campbell, vol3)

Second point, developing the "linkage", as you know is a matter of Taxonomy which is not an exact science by any means.

3rd point - did you happen to see the article in gardian.co.uk titled "Evolution: Charles Darwin was WRONG about the TREE OF LIFE" 1/29/2009 - written by as far as I know card carrying evolutionist . Seems the processes are "more complex" than originally though and that we may not really be able to create specific linkages after all - OH , that must hurt !

So ya - you got SOMETHING !

jeff of NJ of NJ 11:50PM February 02, 2010

Doesn't it figure that in order for so called ID proponents and creationists to make their point they have to LIE and CHEAT if only by omission of important chapters a book. After all, like all good Christians and Muslims, they are so sure in their own minds that God or Allah will forgive them that they can actually justify killing innocent women ind children in the name of God!! What a joke religion has played on the gullible enough to believe it.

Kyle of HI 12:33PM November 08, 2009

I'm not trying to provoke the wrath of god fearing Americans here (of which there are many), but you really can't use the Bible as evidence. First off, the Bible is not consistent. It doesn't even portray Jesus consistently much less provide a working description of the cosmos. In one Book Jesus is knocking over tables in a Jewish temple and scaring the living daylights of his followers, in the next he's a kitten, spreading love and happiness. In one Book Jesus preaches the empowerment of women, in another, he casts them down. Which is it? I'm seriously wondering?

The problem with the Bible is that it was written by (in the opinion of the worlds most respected scholars) SEVERAL different people and over the span of at least 50 years not to mention many, many years after the death of Jesus of Nazareth (possibly 100+). So tell me, are the authors (human beings) really so infallible that they simply get everything right 100 years after the death of Jesus without consultation with either themselves OR God? It's a book written by MAN. Man is capable of not only deceiving and being deceived, but of believing things that have no basis in reality. The Bible itself is a theory. Now, what can we do TODAY to prove the theory of Genesis in the Bible. As far as I understand: nothing.

"Some things have to be taken on faith" Fine. I have faith that certainty is more important than belief. You can BELIEVE in anything, but you can't support an argument with evidence that doesn't exist. When I have this conversation with my Christian friends they say "How do you know God doesn't exist" I say "I don't. But I also don't know if I'll be able to fly someday." It's IMPOSSIBLE to prove I CAN'T do something (for certain), but entirely possible (and indeed necessary) to prove that I CAN. (For example: "I can jump over that ravine." "No you can't." "Prove I can't." - Does this logic work in everyday life? Of course not.)

So now, if God revealed himself so readily 2000 years ago, why is he so shy today? Can't we collect some NEW evidence to support the existence of God? If you can't there is no real reason to believe he exists. I know it's scary to think that your parents, your grandparents, and your great-great grandparents COULD have been mistaken about God, but instead of defending their beliefs so blindly, why not HONOR them and try to discover the truth? I'm not saying that I have the truth, I'm simply saying that I need evidence to even make a claim for truth.

I have traveled to many different countries in this world, and spoken with successful, intelligent, KIND people who barely even ponder the existence of God. It seems strange that the quality of their character could be so great having never heard the wisdom or guidance of God. Not only that, I find it even more curious that the best Christians in the entire world, who happen to live in Africa, and pray harder every single day than you ever have, seem to have nothing to show for it. They die of Ma

Kyle of HI 11:21PM November 06, 2009

It is extremely seldom that one has the opportunity to think a new thought about a familiar subject, let alone an original thought on a contested subject, so when I had a moment of eureka a few nights ago, my very first instinct was to distrust my very first instinct. To phrase it briefly, I was watching the astonishing TV series Planet Earth (which, by the way, contains photography of the natural world of a sort that redefines the art) and had come to the segment that deals with life underground. The subterranean caverns and rivers of our world are one of the last unexplored frontiers, and the sheer extent of the discoveries, in Mexico and Indonesia particularly, is quite enough to stagger the mind. Various creatures were found doing their thing far away from the light, and as they were caught by the camera, I noticed—in particular of the salamanders—that they had typical faces. In other words, they had mouths and muzzles and eyes arranged in the same way as most animals. Except that the eyes were denoted only by little concavities or indentations. Even as I was grasping the implications of this, the fine voice of Sir David Attenborough was telling me how many millions of years it had taken for these denizens of the underworld to lose the eyes they had once possessed.

If you follow the continuing argument between the advocates of Darwin's natural selection theory and the partisans of creationism or "intelligent design," you will instantly see what I am driving at. The creationists (to give them their proper name and to deny them their annoying annexation of the word intelligent) invariably speak of the eye in hushed tones. How, they demand to know, can such a sophisticated organ have gone through clumsy evolutionary stages in order to reach its current magnificence and versatility? The problem was best phrased by Darwin himself, in his essay "Organs of Extreme Perfection and Complication":

To suppose that the eye, with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree.

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His defenders, such as Michael Shermer in his excellent book Why Darwin Matters, draw upon post-Darwinian scientific advances. They do not rely on what might be loosely called "blind chance":

Evolution also posits that modern organisms should show a variety of structures from simple to complex, reflecting an evolutionary history rather than an instantaneous creation. The human eye, for example, is the result of a long and complex pathway that goes back hundreds of millions of years. Initially a simple eyespot with a handful of light-sensitive cells that provided information to the organism about an important source of the light …

Hold it right there, says Ann Coulter in her ridiculous book Godless: The Church of Liberalism. "The interesting question is not: How did a primitive eye become a complex eye? The interesting question is: How did the 'light-sensitive cells' come to exist in the first place?"

The salamanders of Planet Earth appear to this layman to furnish a possibly devastating answer to that question. Humans are almost programmed to think in terms of progress and of gradual yet upward curves, even when confronted with evidence that the past includes as many great dyings out of species as it does examples of the burgeoning of them. Thus even Shermer subconsciously talks of a "pathway" that implicitly stretches ahead. But what of the creatures who turned around and headed back in the opposite direction, from complex to primitive in point of eyesight, and ended up losing even the eyes they did have?

Whoever benefits from this inquiry, it cannot possibly be Coulter or her patrons at the creationist Discovery Institute. The most they can do is to intone that "the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away." Whereas the likelihood that the post-ocular blindness of underground salamanders is another aspect of evolution by natural selection seems, when you think about it at all, so overwhelmingly probable as to constitute a near certainty. I wrote to professor Richard Dawkins to ask if I had stumbled on the outlines of a point, and he replied as follows:

Vestigial eyes, for example, are clear evidence that these cave salamanders must have had ancestors who were different from them—had eyes, in this case. That is evolution. Why on earth would God create a salamander with vestiges of eyes? If he wanted to create blind salamanders, why not just create blind salamanders? Why give them dummy eyes that don't work and that look as though they were inherited from sighted ancestors? Maybe your point is a little different from this, in which case I don't think I have seen it written down before.

I recommend for further reading the chapter on eyes and the many different ways in which they are formed that is contained in Dawkins' Climbing Mount Improbable; also "The Blind Cave Fish's Tale" in his Chaucerian collection The Ancestor's Tale. I am not myself able to add anything about the formation of light cells, eyespots, and lenses, but I do think that there is a dialectical usefulness to considering the conventional arguments in reverse, as it were. For example, to the old theistic question, "Why is there something rather than nothing?" we can now counterpose the findings of professor Lawrence Krauss and others, about the foreseeable heat death of the universe, the Hubble "red shift" that shows the universe's rate of explosive expansion actually increasing, and the not-so-far-off collision of our own galaxy with Andromeda, already loomingly visible in the night sky. So, the question can and must be rephrased: "Why will our brief 'something' so soon be replaced with nothing?" It's only once we shake our own innate belief in linear progression and consider the many recessions we have undergone and will undergo that we can grasp the gross stupidity of those who repose their faith in divine providence and godly design.

karen of DE 11:00PM November 06, 2009

Jesus Christ died to save all...including the atheist. He is also risen and one day, we will see him again. Then every knee will bow and every tounge confess that He Is Lord. Come quickly Lord Jesus....come quickly!

NATALIE of MD 5:53PM November 02, 2009

I really look forward to, frustrated bio student of PAs PHD dissertion

I have always believed that fame awaits any YEC that wants to get off of his/her fat proverbial and does some honest field work

If you guys are right there will be evidence out there that will debunk evolution

Fame awaits you, find a bunny rabbits fossil mixed up with an Allosaur fossil in the same geological layer; i guarantee you will receive a nobel prize

I for one cannot believe someone studying biology still believes in young earth creation

I await your peer reviewed papers proving your position with bated breath

Hovinds Wart 4:34AM October 23, 2009

I am a college student majoring in Biology, allied health services, pursuing my DPT. I am a firm believer in creationism and that our awesome God beautifully handcrafted every single organism on this planet. Learning about the intricacies of how the human body works on the molecular level, and how organisms interact with each other and their environments allows for no other explanation then a created universe.

For example, do you really believe that our bodies natural defense mechanisms such as raising our core temperature with fever to destroy harmful bacteria that can't withstand heat, or our bodies ability to with hold iron from our bodies when we are sick in the presence of bacteria that feed off of iron, all happened by chance?

Can those who believe in evolution, really sit here and tell me that they believe a giraffe and a goldfish came from the same common ancestor?? I am left clueless on how some of the most educated people in this world believe that somehow by randomness nothing created everything? It takes more faith to believe in evolution then it does in creationism. All that evolution has to offer us is an estimate on when these things could have happened and by chance, due to construed fossil records and carbon dating.

In the word of God it clearly states when He created the atmosphere, the oceans, the land, the organisms, and man, and on which day.

For those who believe in evolution...you believe in natural selection correct? So, any trait of an organism that proves to have successful survival and reproductive rates would be passed down from parent to offspring. My college professor, a firm believer in evolution, claims if survival and reproductive rates showed success, humans would evolve to have no lower limbs. That is what we are being taught in the classroom.

Why aren't we given the ability to choose. Who mandates that we have to learn evolution....Why not teach about creationism and then let us choose what we want to believe in?

I spend hours of my collegiate life studying useless facts and methods that HAVE NO TRUTH, because people believe that atoms randomly collided in dark space and all of this beauty developed of millions of years.

Answer me one question...why is it that all of science is so precise when describing experiments and how to relay information via a scientific report in a lab setting. The goal is to be as descriptive as possible with the least amount of words. How come whenever it comes to evolution there is no specifics...Everything is generalized. This happend 490 millions years ago, and somehow this organism came to be such and such. Why can't people step back and see that God created this universe, and you. Everyday he created is a blessing, so give him credit not Charles Darwin.

frustrated bio student of PA 9:53PM October 05, 2009

I find it curious that Creationists feel compelled to lie about evolution and Darwin, and to misstate what they are and what they said. I say that because ... if evolution were truly as wrong as Creationists claim and if their view had any veracity ... that would, eventually, bear itself out after scrutiny. There would be no need to lie about them or misrepresent them; everyone would figure out that they were wrong. It would be obvious and plain to see.

The lying and misrepresentation, then, implies that either they know their Creationism is not really as "true" as they believe it to be, or else, they fear it might not be. Neither of these, however, comprise a moral imperative permitting deception in the name of Creationism.

It could also be that they haven't actually made a calculated decision to lie about evolution and Darwin ... they're simply operating out of raw emotional compulsion. The problem with this, of course, is that emotions are not fact. They may SEEM to be fact, and they may FEEL as though they're fact, but the truth is, emotion can be, and often is, very wrong.

No matter how you slice it, then, there's something rotten in American Creationism. Either Creationists fear they might be wrong and are misrepresenting evolution in order to alleviate that fear, or else, they have no idea they might be wrong and are misrepresenting evolution because they neither know any better nor do they wish to.

But in neither case should these people be granted a license to lie in the name of their beliefs. If someone wants to be a Creationist, fine. Be one. Have at it. Enjoy your beliefs. Americans are entitled to worship and believe as they wish ... so go ahead and do so! But by all means, Creationists need to STOP misstating evolution, STOP maligning Darwin, and STOP telling everyone that they all MUST believe EXACTLY as they do. Just grow up and STOP it already.

PsiCop of CT 9:58AM October 05, 2009

Maybe Banana Boy and Crocoduck should read more then one book.

Tim 1:03PM September 29, 2009

Circular argument. You can't accuse evolutionist beliving that something was created from nothing and then state that's what your god did. Not only that but you say that god himself came from nothing! Or was not created. Ok so if he wasn't created that means there was something so your argument disproved itself.

Phil 9:05AM September 29, 2009

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