Genesis Creation v. Darwin's Macroevolution Myth

Religion and Secularism
41

Just to debunk Behe’s “irreducibly complex” mousetrap.

a. a Human mousetrap is an artificially human created complex pattern, which does not occur naturally and cannot be used as an example of a naturally occurring “irreducibly complex” mechanism. That is a duplicitous, misleading argument.

OTOH

b. the Venus flytrap is a perfectly efficient naturally evolved “insect trap”, fundamentally based on the same principle as a mouse trap.

In fact, it is more than likely that a mousetrap is a human imitation of the Venus flytrap, just as airplanes are a human imitations of winged animals and scuba flippers are human imitations of fish tailfins. None of these examples of human manufactured irreducibly complex mechanisms are useable as an argument for natural irreducible complexity.

Is a star an irreducibly complex construct? Is water an irreducibly complex substance? Of course not. All complex patterns in nature are a result of billions of years of evolutionary chemical and abiogenetic mathematically self-organizational processes.

Behe’s arguments are purely designed to introduce religion into the educational system in spite of the Constitutional Establishment Clause and subsequent Supreme Court findings.

The fundamental principle underlying all these decisions is that the Constitution commands that public schools may not take sides in matters of religion and may not endorse a particular religious perspective or any religion at all.
https://www.aclu.org/other/establishment-clause-and-schools-legal-bulletin

This led to themost recent Kitzmiller trial about the attempted introductio of the creationist childrens book

Of Pandas and People:

The Central Question of Biological Origins is a controversial 1989 (2nd edition 1993) school-level textbook written by Percival Davis and Dean H. Kenyon, edited by Charles Thaxton and published by the Texas-based Foundation for Thought and Ethics (FTE). The textbook endorses the pseudoscientific[1][2][3][4] concept of intelligent design—namely that life shows evidence of being designed by an intelligent agent which is not named specifically in the book, although proponents understand that it refers to the Christian God.[5] The overview chapter was written by young Earth creationist Nancy Pearcey. They present various polemical arguments against the scientific theory of evolution.

Before publication, early drafts used cognates of “creationist”, after the Edwards v. Aguillard Supreme Court ruling that creationism is religion and not science, these were changed to refer to “intelligent design”. The second edition published in 1993 included a contribution written by Michael Behe.[6]

In 1989 the National Center for Science Education published three reviews of the book: Kevin Padian, a biologist at University of California, Berkeley, called it “a wholesale distortion of modern biology”.[7] Michael Ruse, a professor of philosophy and biology, said the book was “worthless and dishonest”.[8]

In the third of these reviews, Gerald Skoog, Professor of Education at Texas Tech University, wrote that the book reflected a creationist strategy to focus their “attack on evolution”, interpreting the Edwards v. Aguillard ruling as though it legitimised “teaching a variety of scientific theories”, but the book did not contain a scientific theory or model to “balance” against evolution, and was “being used as a vehicle to advance sectarian tenets and not to improve science education”.


Earlier in another thread someone mentioned the “hubris of atheism”. I should like to bring attention to the “hubris of creationism” in trying to introduce religious text into public schools under demonstrably false pretenses and contrary to Constitutional Law.

42

Might as well complete the argument about Darwinian Macroevolution

Here is a perfect example of a beneficial genetic mutation.

Human Chromosome 2 is a fusion of two ancestral chromosomes

All great apes apart from man have 24 pairs of chromosomes. There is therefore a hypothesis that the common ancestor of all great apes had 24 pairs of chromosomes and that the fusion of two of the ancestor's chromosomes created chromosome 2 in humans. The evidence for this hypothesis is very strong.
The Evidence
Evidence for fusing of two ancestral chromosomes to create human chromosome 2 and where there has been no fusion in other Great Apes is:

  1. The analogous chromosomes (2p and 2q) in the non-human great apes can be shown, when laid end to end, to create an identical banding structure to the human chromosome 2. (1)

  2. The remains of the sequence that the chromosome has on its ends (the telomere) is found in the middle of human chromosome 2 where the ancestral chromosomes fused. (2)

  3. the detail of this region (pre-telomeric sequence, telomeric sequence, reversed telomeric sequence, pre-telomeric sequence) is exactly what we would expect from a fusion. (3)

  4. this telomeric region is exactly where one would expect to find it if a fusion had occurred in the middle of human chromosome 2.

  5. the centromere of human chromosome 2 lines up with the chimp chromosome 2p chromosomal centromere.

  6. At the place where we would expect it on the human chromosome we find the remnants of the chimp 2q centromere (4).

Not only is this strong evidence for a fusion event, but it is also strong evidence for common ancestry; in fact, it is hard to explain by any other mechanism.


43

Is this thread worth continuing? Neither side is listening to the other. On either, there is a need for a desire to want to learn what the other is saying. One requires investigating the points made, having evidence that backs up the statements made. But first you have to want to learn about that evidence and even learn how evidence and empiricism and logic work.

The other requires a leap to accepting an explanation with a specific name, an explanation that has many names. It requires a desire to know something that no one has demonstrated an ability to prove is true, but many have repeated the explanation, just with different names for it. It speaks to the part of our brain that tells us to avoid difficult explanations because we don’t have time for them, because we need to get the harvest in and protect ourselves from enemies.

Logic might eventually win this argument, but there won’t be a clear path, there isn’t a “better” logic. It’s different for every listener. I think it depends on so many factors in each of our pasts that it is nearly impossible to know what one person can hear and accept and what another can dismiss. Faith probably won’t win in this forum, but it wins for many for the same reasons.

44
AlterEgo2 said,

The reality is that there is not one single transitional fossil showing how, for example, Creature A evolved into Creature D.


Of course not. Because your logic is based on a false premise. NO ONE claims that Creature A evolved into Creature D in one giant leap.

You do by claiming that God changed a handful of mud into a human male! Now that is truly a “leap of faith”!

But ask yourself is there transitional evidence that mud suddenly changed into a man? Any fossil evidence?

The way it works in nature is;

Creature A evolved into Creature A+, which evolved into Creature B, which evolved into Creature B+, which evolved into Creature C, which evolved into Creature C+, which evolved into Creature D, which is evolving into Creature D+ as we speak.

The fossil evidence does show fossil remains of Creatures A, B, C, and D in that chronological order over a time span of about 100,000 years of human history and about 3.5 billion years of fossil evidence from very simple Creatures (single celled organisms) gradually changing into more complex organisms.

Fossils

A fossil (from Classical Latin fossilis; literally, "obtained by digging")[1] is any preserved remains, impression, or trace of any once-living thing from a past geological age. Examples include bones, shells, exoskeletons, stone imprints of animals or microbes, objects preserved in amber, hair, petrified wood, oil, coal, and DNA remnants. The totality of fossils is known as the fossil record.

Paleontology is the study of fossils: their age, method of formation, and evolutionary significance. Specimens are usually considered to be fossils if they are over 10,000 years old.[2] The oldest fossils are around 3.48 billion years old to 4.1 billion years old.

The observation in the 19th century that certain fossils were associated with certain rock strata led to the recognition of a geological timescale and the relative ages of different fossils. The development of radiometric dating techniques in the early 20th century allowed scientists to quantitatively measure the absolute ages of rocks and the fossils they host.


45
AlterEgo2 said,

The reality is that there is not one single transitional fossil


We don’t need fossils. Here is a living transitional species. It’s a woodpecker that lives where there isn’t much wood. It’s woodpecker variations are a little weaker than other woodpecker species, it’s beak is not quite as strong for instance.

Darwin addresses your concerns in Chapter 6 of his book.

46

Science - Tens of thousands of trained professionals over the last 150+ years have examined the evidence and repeatedly come to the conclusion the evolution is the reality.

Religion - Look! It says right here in my 2000+ year old book of unproven magical stories, written in a time when all explanations were magical in nature, all of which I, personally, reject as ridiculous unless they are in this particular boot, that magic is the reality!

Which to believe, which to believe?

47

WRITE4U said:

@ Alter2Ego

Do you realize that cancer is a result of mutation in the DNA coding? Are you suggesting that God is responsible for cancer in children? Or would you suggest that cancer is God’s punishment for some “deadly sin”?

You obviously do not understand the definition of the term “mutation”.

WRITE4U:

I asked you a direct question, which you are now dodging. What you did instead was paste a wall of text, in a lame attempt at proving your fallacious claim that evolution resulted from mutations. I will respond to your claim about mutations after you respond to my question. Below is the text that preceded my question, followed by the question. Note that I have now expanded the question.

 

QUESTION #1 TO WRITE4U: “Who or what could miniaturize such information and place this enormous number of ‘letters’ in their proper sequence as a genetic instruction manual? Could this have happened by chance, in light of the fact that all codes known to humans are written by intelligent beings (usually humans) AND in light of the fact that the genetic code is more complex than any codes that humans have ever written?”

 

Alter2Ego

“That people may know that you, whose name is JEHOVAH, you alone are the Most High over all the earth.” ~ Psalms 83:18

48

This is actually a compound question, but I’ll attempt to give short answer.

Alter2Ego

QUESTION #1 TO WRITE4U: “Who or what could miniaturize such information and place this enormous number of ‘letters’ in their proper sequence as a genetic instruction manual? Could this have happened by chance, in light of the fact that all codes known to humans are written by intelligent beings (usually humans) AND in light of the fact that the genetic code is more complex than any codes that humans have ever written?”


Well, a thousand years of human experimentation in a lab is not even a single second of the total chemical experimentation the earth has performed in its 4.6 billion years existence. Chemistry is a mathematical function based on the values and interactions of the elemental atoms, which appears to be infinite in expression. All that you see today is made up from and reducible to just three fundamental particles.

Nothing just appeared fully formed, chemistry does not work that way.

The earth itself has naturally (by chance) performed…2 trillion, quadrillion, quadrillion, quadrillion … chemical experiments, resulting in all of the natural wonders in earth we can see today. That is just natural chemistry on earth. Now consider that the process of combining H and O and C (and the rest of the table of elements) started shortly after the “beginning”, some 14 billion years ago all throughout the universe, its stars and planets of every possible size and chemical composition. The chemical reactions are not computable at all, only a computer the size of the universe would be big enough.

We can add that some 95 % of all living organisms on earth (including some human kind) have gone extinct from natural causes.

So we may also ask who or what is the cause for such wanton destruction? Can’t very well propose an intelligent designer, without the concept of an intelligent destructor. Fact is, that it’s not an intelligent designer but a quasi-intelligent process which functions in accordance with relative chemical values and mathematical functional processes.

Let me give this a little different answer than you may expect.

You may not realize that the human organism consisting of only 1 % human DNA (complex as it may seem) and could not live by itself. We. and every living thing depends also on the DNA of trillions of bacteria of many kinds, which perform all the tasks that keep us alive, such a digesting out food and keeping our skin from rotting off our bones.

The human biome (the complete organization that makes up a viable human life-form) consists 1% human DNA and 99% bacterial DNA.

A complete human biome is more bacterial than human, which does not point to an intelligent creator/designer, but to mathematical interactions based on the fundamental chemistry of the unverse.

If this was by design, why should the designer make humans so dependent on their bacterial symbionts? Is it any wonder that bacteria are the oldest living things on earth. If there was ever a creator he made single celled bacteria first from very little and simple DNA (RNA), before any other creature.

Yep, bacteria are the common ancestor of all life on earth. Neat huh?

49

This may be more scientific and pertinent to the question.

What is DNA?

DNA, or deoxyribonucleic acid, is the hereditary material in humans and almost all other organisms. Nearly every cell in a person’s body has the same DNA. Most DNA is located in the cell nucleus (where it is called nuclear DNA), but a small amount of DNA can also be found in the mitochondria (where it is called mitochondrial DNA or mtDNA). Mitochondria are structures within cells that convert the energy from food into a form that cells can use.

The information in DNA is stored as a code made up of four chemical bases: adenine (A), guanine (G), cytosine (C), and thymine (T).

Human DNA consists of about 3 billion bases, and more than 99 percent of those bases are the same in all people. The order, or sequence, of these bases determines the information available for building and maintaining an organism, similar to the way in which letters of the alphabet appear in a certain order to form words and sentences.

DNA bases pair up with each other, A with T and C with G, to form units called base pairs. Each base is also attached to a sugar molecule and a phosphate molecule. Together, a base, sugar, and phosphate are called a nucleotide.

Nucleotides are arranged in two long strands that form a spiral called a double helix. The structure of the double helix is somewhat like a ladder, with the base pairs forming the ladder’s rungs and the sugar and phosphate molecules forming the vertical sidepieces of the ladder.

An important property of DNA is that it can replicate, or make copies of itself. Each strand of DNA in the double helix can serve as a pattern for duplicating the sequence of bases. This is critical when cells divide because each new cell needs to have an exact copy of the DNA present in the old cell.


The little self-assembled machine (from just 2 tubulins) that facilitates cell division (mitosis) are called microtubules. See elsewhere for detailed descriptions of micro-tubules)

When something goes wrong in the duplication of cells, that is called a mutation. Most mutations are harmful, but occasionally (per chance) a mutation may be beneficial and survives to copy itself in the endless process of replication.

and

Mitochondria

Mitochondria are specialized structures unique to the cells of animals, plants and fungi. They serve as batteries, powering various functions of the cell and the organism as a whole. Though mitochondria are an integral part of the cell, evidence shows that they evolved from primitive bacteria.
(i.e. a beneficial mutation of a bacterial cell later used by human mitochondria!) Just one small beneficial evolutionary process)
50

@ Alter2Ego,

Finally,

If there is a God, it would have taken him 14.6 billion years to create what you see today. Regardless of the creative causality you cannot change the numbers. The universe is 14.6 billions years old. That’s a fact. And it has evolved from how it started to what you see today, that’s a fact. And it will keep changing (evolving) for a long , long time to come. That’s a fact.

If you wish to assign a spiritual meaning to all of this, you’re welcome to do so, just don’t change the numbers. They are observed facts, which cannot be conveniently set aside to suit a 3000 year old story told by people who could barely count.

 

51
Q1

Who or what could miniaturize such information and place this enormous number of ‘letters’ in their proper sequence as a genetic instruction manual? Alter2Ego


Molecules acting over time.

Consider a single snowflake, intricate, regular patterns, yet each crystal of water grew by nothing more than H2O bonding to H2O, over and over and over a billion billion times.

Organic molecules can also form crystals, such as simple sugar. Proteins can form crystals, and DNA is just a repeating molecular structure.

 

Imagine trying to write an engineering specification for just one single snowflake. Human beings would require massive resources and time to specify all the dimensions, angles, and intricate interlocking bonds of all those billion billion H2O molecules.

 

Does that mean every snowflake was hand assembled, say, by angels perhaps?

 

Your error is in looking at a complex molecular structure that has built up over billions of years and imagining the odds of that particular structure just coming together by random. You are thinking about this backwards.

 

The odds against any particular snowflake having the precise arrangement that it does are astronomical, yet each snowflake does in fact form as it does. That is how crystal growth works, but you are looking at the process backwards, hence your lack of understanding of it.

52
Stardusty Psyche said,

Imagine trying to write an engineering specification for just one single snowflake. Human beings would require massive resources and time to specify all the dimensions, angles, and intricate interlocking bonds of all those billion billion H2O molecules.


I agree with your entire post, but a snowflake, complicated as it may seem is actually based on a very simple mathematical fractal equation of self-similarity as are many natural shapes which use self-similar fractals to form very complex patterns.

The fractal essence of complex natural patterns are abundantly obvious everywhere you look.

Earth’s Most Stunning Natural Fractal Patterns

For those who are not familiar with"natural fractals", do a search on “fractal structures in nature” and click on “images” and be prepared to be astounded.

53

In response to Alter,

This argument that there are no “transitional” fossils that link modern man with our ancient primate ancestors is dated and incorrect. For decades skeptics posited the same idea that a “missing link” as they called it should establish a lineal connection. “Lucy” the name given to a female hominid with clear anatomical connections to modern man was discovered in Africa and clearly shows an unambiguous link. Anthropology has painstakingly amassed an enormous amount of evidence that fully and directly corroborates the inescapable conclusion that we are all evolved from simpler, more primitive forms of life. Your intellectual belief in God is valid and well grounded but not by anything from the bible. Science offers far more compelling evidence for the existence of God than the bible. The bible is poison to the human mind.

54
The bible is poison to the human mind.
Can't argue that.

Although guess it would only be fair to point out that many poisons in small doses won’t kill you. It’s the lethal dose you need to watch out for.

 

Alter, were you a seriously curious student, you’ll find the list of links at this site a fascinating learning opportunity that offers serious answers to your questions:

https://confrontingsciencecontrarians.blogspot.com/2019/12/introduction-pageant-evolution-project.html
55
Your intellectual belief in God is valid and well grounded but not by anything from the bible. Science offers far more compelling evidence for the existence of God than the bible. The bible is poison to the human mind. -- Genus
I really wish I could understand what you're saying here. Or, maybe I do understand it, but it's not the way you want me to. What you've provided in the past is a wave of the hand to multiple hits on searches for "universal consciousness", and a few specific articles on NDEs. That's not science.

I’m trying to read Spinoza again and finding it a little more useful than I once did, but I still think you have the challenge of getting from the “Spinoza God” to anything resembling any of the deities worshiped in the world, ever, or any definition of a “god consciousness” by any new-age guru or westernized Buddhist or even those ex-scientist types who claim to have a proof of some kind.

56

Your question about how life came about reveals atheism as another religion. Unlike believing in the God of the Bible, their creator is primordial soup and came with a bang.

57

Hiep, atheists have 1 thing in common. They don’t believe in God. Perhaps most also accept scientific ideas re: how the universe began. Idk. But I know that “not believing in God” does not require that someone must therefore ALSO believe in the Big Bang, and in Life arising naturally.

But, either way, beliefs supported by science are not dogmatic, as is the case with religious beliefs. In science, an explanation is not written on stone tablets. If new facts are discovered, the explanation can change.

So atheism is truly NOT a religion. It currently is held to have similar governmental protections as a religion under the establishment clause, but that just has to do with current Court Constitutional interpretations on protecting people’s right to NOT have religious beliefs.

58

WRITE4U SAID:

@ Alter2Ego

Do you realize that cancer is a result of mutation in the DNA coding? Are you suggesting that God is responsible for cancer in children? Or would you suggest that cancer is God’s punishment for some “deadly sin”?

Write4U:

I asked you a direct question about the DNA code, which you have thus far dodged, as follows:

QUESTION #1 TO WRITE4U: “Who or what could miniaturize such information and place this enormous number of ‘letters’ in their proper sequence as a genetic instruction manual? Could this have happened by chance?”

And now that you brought up the topic of cancer being the result of DNA mutation, below is a question dealing with that issue:

 

QUESTION #2 TO WRITE4U: Considering the scientific evidence that mutation in DNA causes destructive disease such as cancer, where is your evidence that mutations stopped being destructive long enough to have become one of the driving forces behind Darwin’s Macroevolution?

 

Alter2Ego

 

“That people may know that you, whose name is JEHOVAH, you alone are the Most High over all the earth.” ~ Psalms 83:18

59

LAUSTEN SAID:

Whales didn’t become bears.

Lausten:

That is correct. But Charles Darwin, one of the founding fathers of Macroevolution Myth (to which atheists desperately cling) speculated whales could evolve into bears.

"Origin of whales
In the first edition of “On the Origin of Species” in 1859, Charles Darwin speculated about how natural selection could cause a land mammal to turn into a whale. As a hypothetical example, Darwin used North American black bears, which were known to catch insects by swimming in the water with their mouths open:

“I can see no difficulty in a race of bears being rendered, by natural selection, more aquatic in their structure and habits, with larger and larger mouths, till a creature was produced as monstrous as a whale,” he speculated."

 

Of course Darwin’s contemporaries laughed at him. His disciples of today insist Darwin had the right idea, that instead of whales evolving into bears, instead, whales evolved into cows and hippopotamuses. Of course there is no evidence in the fossils to support this claim either, but that hasn’t stopped desperate people from believing in science fiction.

 

Alter2Ego

 

“That people may know that you, whose name is JEHOVAH, you alone are the Most High over all the earth.” ~ Psalms 83:18

60

GENUS HOMO said:

In response to Alter,

This argument that there are no “transitional” fossils that link modern man with our ancient primate ancestors is dated and incorrect. For decades skeptics posited the same idea that a “missing link” as they called it should establish a lineal connection. “Lucy” the name given to a female hominid with clear anatomical connections to modern man was discovered in Africa and clearly shows an unambiguous link. Anthropology has painstakingly amassed an enormous amount of evidence that fully and directly corroborates the inescapable conclusion that we are all evolved from simpler, more primitive forms of life. Your intellectual belief in God is valid and well grounded but not by anything from the bible. Science offers far more compelling evidence for the existence of God than the bible. The bible is poison to the human mind.

Genus Homo:

I’ve got news for you. “Lucy,” the supposed “female hominid” has long been exposed as a fraud.

Alter2Ego

“That people may know that you, whose name is JEHOVAH, you alone are the Most High over all the earth.” ~ Psalms 83:18