What does "Intelligent Design" even mean?
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Scientists Find No Genetic Evidence For Evolution
by Bill Sardi
Critics of Darwin's theory of evolution point to flaws in the fossil record (no new species, no missing links) as evidence that the theory is false. But in the 1960s scientists discovered genetic material called DNA and were quick to suggest that the rate of change in DNA is evidence that confirms Darwin's theory of evolution.
While it is convenient for evolutionary biologists to assume that various DNA proteins evolve at a fixed rate, a recent study blows a hole in this theory. The September 25 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, geneticist Francisco Rodriguez-Trelles and colleagues at the University of California, Irvine, indicate the idea of a molecular clock may be hopelessly flawed. "It may be ripe for the pawnshop" say Menno Schilthuizen, writing in Science Now.
Calculating the different mutation rates for three well-known genes for 78 species, researchers found widely different mutation rates even for closely related species. "Molecular clocks are much more erratic than previously thought and practically useless to keep accurate evolutionary time," says Schilthuizen. The authors of the research conclude that the neutral theory of molecular evolution (predictable or constant rates of change) is flawed and that changes in the rate of variation are left to the vagaries of natural selection (randomness). With no evidence to confirm the neutral theory of molecular evolution, scientists say this amounts to a "denial of there being a molecular clock."
Phosphate - - - - Guanine Cytosine Adenine Thymine - - - - Sugar
A DNA Nucleotide Sequence
Positions of the middle four proteins differs
DNA is made up of many subunits or strings of sequenced proteins strung between a sugar and a phosphate molecule (called a nucleotide). Think of a wash line in the back yard. There are two poles (the sugar and phosphate molecules) with four proteins (amino acids – guanine, cytosine, adenine, thymine) hanging on the wash line. There are many of these "wash lines" in one gene and over time some of the proteins hanging on the wash line change their positions. One protein may be substituted for another, which is called a mutation. Different species of life have some of the same genes and therefore the rate of change (number of protein substitutions) can be used to calibrate a DNA clock. Comparative studies of different proteins in various groups of organisms tend to show that the average number of amino-acid substitutions per site per year is typically around 10-9. Calculating backwards, scientists have attempted to use the DNA clock to determine when, let's say, chimpanzees and man diverged from the same genetic tree. There are a lot of assumptions here (even that there is a genetic tree at all) but the scientists believe humans and chimps split off from a common ancestor about 5.5 million years ago.
But the DNA clock is not so reliable. Paleontologists calculate the Cambrian explosion, the sudden appearance of a fossil record that is rich in almost every species of life, occurred about 540 million years ago. But DNA clock estimations come up with a date of 1 billion years ago for the Cambrian explosion. So there is an unexplainable 500-million year gap. Which provides the most accurate dating, the fossils or the genes?
The so-called neutral theory of evolution holds that DNA mutations (protein substitutions) accumulate at an approximately constant rate as long as the DNA retains its original functions. The differences between the sequences of the same DNA segment (or protein) in two species of life would then be proportional to the time the species diverged from a common ancestor. The undeniable problem is, different DNA protein sequences (or even different parts of the same gene) "evolve" or change at markedly different rates. For example, mutation rates in primates are slower than in rodents. This also assumes that all mutations move progressively rather than in reverse.
If what these researchers say is true, that the theory of a molecular clock is hopelessly flawed, scientists have some real reorganization on their hands. There are no less than 30 textbooks written on molecular evolution in the past decade and numerous PhDs awarded in this area of investigation. To date, no convincing evidence for a phylogeny tree has ever been produced. The evolutionary trees shown in biology textbooks are simply theory, not science. Genetics does not confirm its existence either, though it took scientists more than three decades to determine this. Few scientists are expected to abandon the theory of neutral molecular evolution anytime soon.
Sources:
Francisco Rodriguez-Trelles, Rosa Tarrio, Francisco J. Ayala, Proceedings National Academy of Sciences USA, Volume 98, pages 11405-10, September 25, 2001
Schilthuizen, M, Molecular Clock Not Exactly Swiss, Science Now, Sept. 28, 2001.
Dictionary of Biology, Oxford University Press, Market House Books, 2000.
National Human Genome Research Institute
October 2, 2001
Bill Sardi is a journalist residing in Diamond Bar, California. His new book is Big God vs. Big Science (Here & Now Books, 107 pages, illustrated, $7.00) at www.hereandnowbooks.com.
Copyright © 2001 by the Word of Knowledge Agency, San Dimas, California.
by Bill Sardi
Critics of Darwin's theory of evolution point to flaws in the fossil record (no new species, no missing links) as evidence that the theory is false. But in the 1960s scientists discovered genetic material called DNA and were quick to suggest that the rate of change in DNA is evidence that confirms Darwin's theory of evolution.
While it is convenient for evolutionary biologists to assume that various DNA proteins evolve at a fixed rate, a recent study blows a hole in this theory. The September 25 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, geneticist Francisco Rodriguez-Trelles and colleagues at the University of California, Irvine, indicate the idea of a molecular clock may be hopelessly flawed. "It may be ripe for the pawnshop" say Menno Schilthuizen, writing in Science Now.
Calculating the different mutation rates for three well-known genes for 78 species, researchers found widely different mutation rates even for closely related species. "Molecular clocks are much more erratic than previously thought and practically useless to keep accurate evolutionary time," says Schilthuizen. The authors of the research conclude that the neutral theory of molecular evolution (predictable or constant rates of change) is flawed and that changes in the rate of variation are left to the vagaries of natural selection (randomness). With no evidence to confirm the neutral theory of molecular evolution, scientists say this amounts to a "denial of there being a molecular clock."
Phosphate - - - - Guanine Cytosine Adenine Thymine - - - - Sugar
A DNA Nucleotide Sequence
Positions of the middle four proteins differs
DNA is made up of many subunits or strings of sequenced proteins strung between a sugar and a phosphate molecule (called a nucleotide). Think of a wash line in the back yard. There are two poles (the sugar and phosphate molecules) with four proteins (amino acids – guanine, cytosine, adenine, thymine) hanging on the wash line. There are many of these "wash lines" in one gene and over time some of the proteins hanging on the wash line change their positions. One protein may be substituted for another, which is called a mutation. Different species of life have some of the same genes and therefore the rate of change (number of protein substitutions) can be used to calibrate a DNA clock. Comparative studies of different proteins in various groups of organisms tend to show that the average number of amino-acid substitutions per site per year is typically around 10-9. Calculating backwards, scientists have attempted to use the DNA clock to determine when, let's say, chimpanzees and man diverged from the same genetic tree. There are a lot of assumptions here (even that there is a genetic tree at all) but the scientists believe humans and chimps split off from a common ancestor about 5.5 million years ago.
But the DNA clock is not so reliable. Paleontologists calculate the Cambrian explosion, the sudden appearance of a fossil record that is rich in almost every species of life, occurred about 540 million years ago. But DNA clock estimations come up with a date of 1 billion years ago for the Cambrian explosion. So there is an unexplainable 500-million year gap. Which provides the most accurate dating, the fossils or the genes?
The so-called neutral theory of evolution holds that DNA mutations (protein substitutions) accumulate at an approximately constant rate as long as the DNA retains its original functions. The differences between the sequences of the same DNA segment (or protein) in two species of life would then be proportional to the time the species diverged from a common ancestor. The undeniable problem is, different DNA protein sequences (or even different parts of the same gene) "evolve" or change at markedly different rates. For example, mutation rates in primates are slower than in rodents. This also assumes that all mutations move progressively rather than in reverse.
If what these researchers say is true, that the theory of a molecular clock is hopelessly flawed, scientists have some real reorganization on their hands. There are no less than 30 textbooks written on molecular evolution in the past decade and numerous PhDs awarded in this area of investigation. To date, no convincing evidence for a phylogeny tree has ever been produced. The evolutionary trees shown in biology textbooks are simply theory, not science. Genetics does not confirm its existence either, though it took scientists more than three decades to determine this. Few scientists are expected to abandon the theory of neutral molecular evolution anytime soon.
Sources:
Francisco Rodriguez-Trelles, Rosa Tarrio, Francisco J. Ayala, Proceedings National Academy of Sciences USA, Volume 98, pages 11405-10, September 25, 2001
Schilthuizen, M, Molecular Clock Not Exactly Swiss, Science Now, Sept. 28, 2001.
Dictionary of Biology, Oxford University Press, Market House Books, 2000.
National Human Genome Research Institute
October 2, 2001
Bill Sardi is a journalist residing in Diamond Bar, California. His new book is Big God vs. Big Science (Here & Now Books, 107 pages, illustrated, $7.00) at www.hereandnowbooks.com.
Copyright © 2001 by the Word of Knowledge Agency, San Dimas, California.
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The Metaphysics of Evolution
by Fred Reed
I was about fifteen when I began to think about evolution. I was then just discovering the sciences systematically, and took them as what they offered themselves to be, a realm of reason and dispassionate regard for truth. There was a hard-edged clarity to them that I liked. You got real answers. Since evolution depended on such sciences as chemistry, I regarded it as also being a science.
The question of the origin of life interested me. The evolutionary explanations that I encountered in textbooks of biology ran to, "In primeval seas, evaporation concentrated dissolved compounds in a pore in a rock, a skim formed a membrane, and life began its immense journey." I saw no reason to doubt this. If it hadn't been true, scientists would not have said that it was.
Remember, I was fifteen.
In those days I read Scientific American and New Scientist, the latter then still being thoughtfully written in good English. I noticed that not infrequently they offered differing speculation as to the origin of life. The belief in the instrumentality of chemical accident was constant, but the nature of the primeval soup changed to fit varying attempts at explanation.
For a while, life was thought to have come about on clay in shallow water in seas of a particular composition, later in tidal pools with another chemical solution, then in the open ocean in another solution. This continues. Recently, geothermal vents have been offered as the home of the first life. Today (Feb 24, 2005) on the BBC website, I learn that life evolved below the oceanic floor. ("There is evidence that life evolved in the deep sediments," co-author John Parkes, of Cardiff University, UK, told the BBC News website. Link at bottom.)
The frequent shifting of ground bothered me. If we knew how life began, why did we have so many prospective mechanisms, none of which really worked? Evolution began to look like a theory in search of a soup. Forty-five years later, it still does.
Questions Arise
I was probably in college when I found myself asking what seemed to me straightforward questions about the chemical origin of life. In particular:
(1) Life was said to have begun by chemical inadvertence in the early seas. Did we, I wondered, really know of what those early seas consisted? Know, not suspect, hope, theorize, divine, speculate, or really, really wish.
The answer was, and is, "no." We have no dried residue, no remaining pools, and the science of planetogenesis isn't nearly good enough to provide a quantitative analysis.
(2) Had the creation of a living cell been replicated in the laboratory? No, it hadn't, and hasn't. (Note 1)
(3) Did we know what conditions were necessary for a cell to come about? No, we didn't, and don't.
(4) Could it be shown to be mathematically probable that a cell would form, given any soup whatever? No, it couldn't, and can't. (At least not without cooking the assumptions.) (Note 2)
Well, I thought, sophomore chemistry major that I then was: If we don't know what conditions existed, or what conditions are necessary, and can't reproduce the event in the laboratory, and can't show it to be statistically probable – why are we so very sure that it happened? Would you hang a man on such evidence?
My point was not that evolutionists were necessarily wrong. I simply didn't see the evidence. While they couldn't demonstrate that life had begun by chemical accident, I couldn't show that it hadn't. An inability to prove that something is statistically possible is not the same as proving that it is not possible. Not being able to reproduce an event in the laboratory does not establish that it didn't happen in nature. Etc.
I just didn't know how life came about. I still don't. Neither do evolutionists.
What Distinguishes Evolution from Other Science
Early on, I noticed three things about evolution that differentiated it from other sciences (or, I could almost say, from science). First, plausibility was accepted as being equivalent to evidence. (And of course the less you know, the greater the number of things that are plausible, because there are fewer facts to get in the way.) Again and again evolutionists assumed that suggesting how something might have happened was equivalent to establishing how it had happened. Asking them for evidence usually aroused annoyance and sometimes, if persisted in, hostility.
As an example, it seems plausible to evolutionists that life arose by chemical misadventure. By this they mean (I think) that they cannot imagine how else it might have come about. (Neither can I. Does one accept a poor explanation because unable to think of a good one?) This accidental-life theory, being somewhat plausible, is therefore accepted without the usual standards of science, such as reproducibility or rigorous demonstration of mathematical feasibility. Putting it otherwise, evolutionists are too attached to their ideas to be able to question them.
Consequently, discussion often turns to vague and murky assertion. Starlings are said to have evolved to be the color of dirt so that hawks can't see them to eat them. This is plausible. But guacamayos and cockatoos are gaudy enough to be seen from low-earth orbit. Is there a contradiction here? No, say evolutionists. Guacamayos are gaudy so they can find each other to mate. Always there is the pat explanation. But starlings seem to mate with great success, though invisible. If you have heard a guacamayo shriek, you can hardly doubt that another one could easily find it. Enthusiasts of evolution then told me that guacamayos were at the top of their food chain, and didn't have predators. Or else that the predators were colorblind. On and on it goes. But...is any of this established?
Second, evolution seemed more a metaphysics or ideology than a science. The sciences, as I knew them, gave clear answers. Evolution involved intense faith in fuzzy principles. You demonstrated chemistry, but believed evolution. If you have ever debated a Marxist, or a serious liberal or conservative, or a feminist or Christian, you will have noticed that, although they can be exceedingly bright and well informed, they display a maddening imprecision. You never get a straight answer if it is one they do not want to give. Nothing is ever firmly established. Crucial assertions do not to tie to observable reality. Invariably the Marxist (or evolutionist) assumes that a detailed knowledge of economic conditions under the reign of Nicholas II or whatever substitutes for being able to answer simple questions, such as why Marxism has never worked: the Fallacy of Irrelevant Knowledge. And of course almost anything can be made believable by considering only favorable evidence and interpreting hard.
Third, evolutionists are obsessed by Christianity and Creationism, with which they imagine themselves to be in mortal combat. This is peculiar to them. Note that other sciences, such as astronomy and geology, even archaeology, are equally threatened by the notion that the world was created in 4004 BC. Astronomers pay not the slightest attention to creationist ideas. Nobody does – except evolutionists. We are dealing with competing religions – overarching explanations of origin and destiny. Thus the fury of their response to skepticism.
I found it pointless to tell them that I wasn't a Creationist. They refused to believe it. If they had, they would have had to answer questions that they would rather avoid. Like any zealots, they cannot recognize their own zealotry. Thus their constant classification of skeptics as enemies (a word they often use) – of truth, of science, of Darwin, of progress.
This tactical demonization is not unique to evolution. "Creationist" is to evolution what "racist" is to politics: A way of preventing discussion of what you do not want to discuss. Evolution is the political correctness of science.
The Lair of the Beast
I have been on several lists on the Internet that deal with matters such as evolution, have written on the subject, and have discussed evolution with various of its adherents. These men (almost all of them are) have frequently been very bright indeed, often Ivy League professors, some of them with names you would recognize. They are not amateurs of evolution or high-school principals in Kansas eager to prove their modernity. I asked them the questions in the foregoing (about whether we really know what the primeval seas consisted of, etc.) I knew the answers; I wanted to see how serious proponents of evolutionary biology would respond to awkward questions.
It was like giving a bobcat a prostate exam. I got everything but answers. They told me I was a crank, implied over and over that I was a Creationist, said that I was an enemy of science (someone who asks for evidence is an enemy of science). They said that I was trying to pull down modern biology (if you ask questions about an aspect of biology, you want to pull down biology). They told me I didn't know anything (that's why I was asking questions), and that I was a mere journalist (the validity of a question depends on its source rather than its content).
But they didn't answer the questions. They ducked and dodged and evaded. After thirty years in journalism, I know ducking and dodging when I see it. It was like cross-examining hostile witnesses. I tried to force the issue, pointing out that the available answers were "Yes," "No," "I don't know," or "The question is not legitimate," followed by any desired discussion. Still no straight answer. They would neither tell me of what the early oceans consisted, nor admit that they didn't know.
This is the behavior not of scientists, but of advocates, of True Believers. I used to think that science was about asking questions, not about defending things you didn't really know. Religion, I thought, was the other way around. I guess I was wrong.
Practical Questions
A few things worry those who are not doctrinaire evolutionists. (Incidentally, it is worth noting that by no means all involved in the life sciences are doctrinaire. A friend of mine, a (Jewish, atheist) biochemist, says "It doesn't make sense." He may be wrong, but a Creationist he isn't.)
To work, a theory presumably must (a) be internally consistent and (b) map onto reality. You have to have both. Classical mechanics for example is (so far as I know) internally consistent, but is not at all points congruent with reality. Evolution has a great deal of elaborate, Protean, and often fuzzy theory. How closely does it correspond to what we actually see? Do the sweeping principles fit the grubby details?
For example, how did a giraffe get a long neck? One reads as a matter of vague philosophical principle that a proto-giraffe by chance happened to be taller than its herdmates, could eat more altitudinous leaves than its confreres, was therefore better fed, consequently rutted with abandon, and produced more child giraffes of height. This felicitous adaptation therefore spread and we ended up...well, up – with taller giraffes. It sounds reasonable. In evolution that is enough.
But what are the practical details? Do we have an unambiguous record of giraffes with longer and longer necks? (Maybe we do. I'm just asking.) Presumably modern giraffes have more vertebrae then did proto-giraffes. (The alternative is the same number of vertebrae, but longer ones. I have known giraffes. They were flexible rather than hinged.) This, note, requires a structural change as distinct from an increase in size.
Evolution is said to proceed by the accretion of successful point mutations. Does a random point mutation cause the appearance of an extra vertebra? If so, which mutation? (It would have to be a pretty vigorous point mutation.) How can you tell, given that we have no DNA from proto-giraffes? If not one, then how many random point mutations? Which ones? What virtue did these have that they were conserved until all were present? Did this happen once per additional vertebra – the multiply repeated chance appearance of identical mutations? Or did they appear all at once? If so, the heart must have changed simultaneously to get blood way up there.
[After I posted this a reader wrote to say that giraffes do have longer instead of more vertebra. Same questions hold.]
There may be perfectly good, clear, demonstrable answers to a few of these questions. I'm not a paleontological giraffologist. But if evolutionists want people to accept evolution, they need to provide answers – clear, concrete, non-metaphysical answers without gaping logical lacunae. They do not. When passionate believers do not provide answers that would substantiate their assertions, a reasonable presumption is that they do not have them.
The matter of the giraffe is a simple example of a question that inevitably occurs to the independently thoughtful: How do you get evolutionarily from A to B? Can you get from A to B by the mechanisms assumed? Without practical details, evolution looks like an assertion that the better survives the worse; throw in ionizing radiation and such to provide things to do the surviving, and we're off to the races. But...can we get there from here? Do we actually know the intermediate steps and the associated genetic mechanics? If we don't know what the steps were, can we at least show unambiguously a series of steps that would work?
Lots of evolutionary changes just don't look manageable by random mutation. Some orchestrated jump seems necessary. How does an animal evolve color vision, given that doing so would require elaborate changes in eye chemistry, useless without simultaneous elaborate changes in the brain to interpret the incoming impulses, which changes would themselves be useless without the retinal changes?
Or consider caterpillars. A caterpillar has no obvious resemblance to a butterfly. The disparity in engineering is huge. The caterpillar has no legs, properly speaking, certainly no wings, no proboscis. How did a species that did not undergo metamorphosis evolve into one that did? Pupating looks like something you do well or not at all: If you don't turn into something practical at the end, you don't get another chance.
Think about this. The ancestor of a modern caterpillar necessarily was something that could reproduce already. To get to be a butterfly-producing sort of organism, it would have to evolve silk-extruding organs, since they are what you make a cocoon with. OK, maybe it did this to tie leaves together, or maybe the beast resembled a tent-caterpillar. (Again, plausibility over evidence.) Then some mutation caused it to wrap itself experimentally in silk. (What mutation? Are we serious?) It then died, wrapped, because it had no machinery to cause it to undergo the fantastically complex transformation into a butterfly. Death is usually a discouragement to reproduction.
Tell me how the beast can gradually acquire, by accident, the capacity gradually to undergo all the formidably elaborate changes from worm to butterfly, so that each intermediate form is a practical organism that survives. If evolutionists cannot answer such questions, the theory fails.
Here the evolutionist will say, "Fred, caterpillars are soft, squashy things and don't leave good fossils, so it's unreasonable to expect us to find proof." I see the problem. But it is unreasonable to expect me to accept something on the grounds that it can't be proved. Yes, it is possible that an explanation exists and that we just haven't found it. But you can say that of anything whatever. Is it good science to assume that evidence will be forthcoming because we sure would like it to be? I'll gladly give you evidence Wednesday for a theory today?
Note that I am not asking evolutionists to give detailed mechanics for the evolution of everything that lives. If they gave convincing evidence for a few of the hard cases – proof of principle, so to speak – I would be inclined to believe that equally good evidence existed for the others. But they haven't.
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In Conclusion
To evolutionists I say, "I am perfectly willing to believe what you can actually establish. Reproducibly create life in a test tube, and I will accept that it can be done. Do it under conditions that reasonably may have existed long ago, and I will accept as likely the proposition that such conditions existed and gave rise to life. I bear no animus against the theory, and champion no competing creed. But don't expect me to accept fluid speculation, sloppy logic, and secular theology."
I once told my daughters, "Whatever you most ardently believe, remember that there is another side. Try, however hard it may be, to put yourself in the shoes of those whose views you most dislike. Force yourself to make a reasoned argument for their position. Do that, think long and hard, and conclude as you will. You can do no better, and you may be surprised."
Notes
(1) An example, for anyone interested, of the sort of unlogic to which I was exposed by evolutionists: Some simple viruses are strings of nucleotides in a particular order. In 2002 Eckhard Wimmer, at the University of New York at Stony Brook, downloaded the sequence for polio from the Internet, bought the necessary nucleotides from a biological supply house, strung them together, and got a functioning virus that caused polio in mice. It was a slick piece of work.
When I ask evolutionists whether the chance creation of life has been demonstrated in the laboratory, I get email offering Wimmer's work as evidence that it has been done. But (even stipulating that viruses are alive) what Wimmer did was to put OTS nucleotides together according to a known pattern in a well-equipped laboratory. This is intelligent design, or at least intelligent plagiarism. It is not chance anything. At least some of the men who offered Wimmer's work as what it wasn't are far too intelligent not to see the illogic – except when they are defending the faith.
(2) Many Evolutionists respond to skepticism about life's starting by chance by appealing to the vastness of time. "Fred, there were billions and billions of gallons of ocean, for billions of years, or billions of generations of spiders or bugs or little funny things with too many legs, so the odds are in all that time...." Give something long enough and it has to happen, they say. Maybe. But probabilities don't always work the way they look like they ought.
Someone is said to have said that a monkey banging at random on a typewriter would eventually type all the books in the British Museum. (Some of the books suggest that this may have happened, but never mind.) Well, yes. The monkey would. But it could be a wait. The size of the wait is worth pondering.
Let's consider the chance that the chimp would type a particular book. To make the arithmetic easy, let's take a bestseller with 200,000 words. By a common newspaper estimate of five letters per word on average, that's a million letters. What's the chance the monkey will get the book in a given string of a million characters?
For simplicity, assume a keyboard of 100 keys. The monkey has a 1/100 chance of getting the first letter, times 1/100 of getting the second letter, and so on. His chance of getting the book is therefore one in 1 in 100 exp 1,000,000, or 1 in 10 exp 2,000,000. (I don't offhand know log 3 but, thirty being greater than ten, a 30-character keyboard would give well in excess of 10 exp 1,000,000.)
Now, let's be fair to the Bandar Log. Instead of one monkey, let's use 10 exp 100 monkeys. Given that the number of subatomic particles in the universe is supposed to be 10 exp 87 (or something), that seems to be a fair dose of monkeys. (I picture a cowering electron surrounded by 10 exp 13 monkeys.) Let's say they type 10 exp 10 characters per second per each, for 10 exp 100 seconds which, considering that the age of the universe (I read somewhere) is 10 exp 18 seconds, seems more than fair.
Do the arithmetic. For practical purposes, those monkeys have no more chance of getting the book than the single monkey had, which, for practical purposes, was none.
Now, I don't suggest that the foregoing calculation has any direct application to the chance formation of life. (I will get seriously stupid email from people who ignore the foregoing sentence.) But neither do I know that the chance appearance of a cell does not involve paralyzing improbabilities. Without unambiguous numbers arising from unarguable assumptions, invoking time as a substitute for knowledge can be hazardous.
Life Evolves In Deep Sediments
Privileged Genes
Punctuated Equilibrium
Evolutionary Psychology
Craig Venter Questions Genetic Determinism
March 9, 2005
Fred Reed is author of Nekkid in Austin: Drop Your Inner Child Down a Well.
Copyright © 2005 Fred Reed
http://www.lewrockwell.com/reed/reed59.html
by Fred Reed
I was about fifteen when I began to think about evolution. I was then just discovering the sciences systematically, and took them as what they offered themselves to be, a realm of reason and dispassionate regard for truth. There was a hard-edged clarity to them that I liked. You got real answers. Since evolution depended on such sciences as chemistry, I regarded it as also being a science.
The question of the origin of life interested me. The evolutionary explanations that I encountered in textbooks of biology ran to, "In primeval seas, evaporation concentrated dissolved compounds in a pore in a rock, a skim formed a membrane, and life began its immense journey." I saw no reason to doubt this. If it hadn't been true, scientists would not have said that it was.
Remember, I was fifteen.
In those days I read Scientific American and New Scientist, the latter then still being thoughtfully written in good English. I noticed that not infrequently they offered differing speculation as to the origin of life. The belief in the instrumentality of chemical accident was constant, but the nature of the primeval soup changed to fit varying attempts at explanation.
For a while, life was thought to have come about on clay in shallow water in seas of a particular composition, later in tidal pools with another chemical solution, then in the open ocean in another solution. This continues. Recently, geothermal vents have been offered as the home of the first life. Today (Feb 24, 2005) on the BBC website, I learn that life evolved below the oceanic floor. ("There is evidence that life evolved in the deep sediments," co-author John Parkes, of Cardiff University, UK, told the BBC News website. Link at bottom.)
The frequent shifting of ground bothered me. If we knew how life began, why did we have so many prospective mechanisms, none of which really worked? Evolution began to look like a theory in search of a soup. Forty-five years later, it still does.
Questions Arise
I was probably in college when I found myself asking what seemed to me straightforward questions about the chemical origin of life. In particular:
(1) Life was said to have begun by chemical inadvertence in the early seas. Did we, I wondered, really know of what those early seas consisted? Know, not suspect, hope, theorize, divine, speculate, or really, really wish.
The answer was, and is, "no." We have no dried residue, no remaining pools, and the science of planetogenesis isn't nearly good enough to provide a quantitative analysis.
(2) Had the creation of a living cell been replicated in the laboratory? No, it hadn't, and hasn't. (Note 1)
(3) Did we know what conditions were necessary for a cell to come about? No, we didn't, and don't.
(4) Could it be shown to be mathematically probable that a cell would form, given any soup whatever? No, it couldn't, and can't. (At least not without cooking the assumptions.) (Note 2)
Well, I thought, sophomore chemistry major that I then was: If we don't know what conditions existed, or what conditions are necessary, and can't reproduce the event in the laboratory, and can't show it to be statistically probable – why are we so very sure that it happened? Would you hang a man on such evidence?
My point was not that evolutionists were necessarily wrong. I simply didn't see the evidence. While they couldn't demonstrate that life had begun by chemical accident, I couldn't show that it hadn't. An inability to prove that something is statistically possible is not the same as proving that it is not possible. Not being able to reproduce an event in the laboratory does not establish that it didn't happen in nature. Etc.
I just didn't know how life came about. I still don't. Neither do evolutionists.
What Distinguishes Evolution from Other Science
Early on, I noticed three things about evolution that differentiated it from other sciences (or, I could almost say, from science). First, plausibility was accepted as being equivalent to evidence. (And of course the less you know, the greater the number of things that are plausible, because there are fewer facts to get in the way.) Again and again evolutionists assumed that suggesting how something might have happened was equivalent to establishing how it had happened. Asking them for evidence usually aroused annoyance and sometimes, if persisted in, hostility.
As an example, it seems plausible to evolutionists that life arose by chemical misadventure. By this they mean (I think) that they cannot imagine how else it might have come about. (Neither can I. Does one accept a poor explanation because unable to think of a good one?) This accidental-life theory, being somewhat plausible, is therefore accepted without the usual standards of science, such as reproducibility or rigorous demonstration of mathematical feasibility. Putting it otherwise, evolutionists are too attached to their ideas to be able to question them.
Consequently, discussion often turns to vague and murky assertion. Starlings are said to have evolved to be the color of dirt so that hawks can't see them to eat them. This is plausible. But guacamayos and cockatoos are gaudy enough to be seen from low-earth orbit. Is there a contradiction here? No, say evolutionists. Guacamayos are gaudy so they can find each other to mate. Always there is the pat explanation. But starlings seem to mate with great success, though invisible. If you have heard a guacamayo shriek, you can hardly doubt that another one could easily find it. Enthusiasts of evolution then told me that guacamayos were at the top of their food chain, and didn't have predators. Or else that the predators were colorblind. On and on it goes. But...is any of this established?
Second, evolution seemed more a metaphysics or ideology than a science. The sciences, as I knew them, gave clear answers. Evolution involved intense faith in fuzzy principles. You demonstrated chemistry, but believed evolution. If you have ever debated a Marxist, or a serious liberal or conservative, or a feminist or Christian, you will have noticed that, although they can be exceedingly bright and well informed, they display a maddening imprecision. You never get a straight answer if it is one they do not want to give. Nothing is ever firmly established. Crucial assertions do not to tie to observable reality. Invariably the Marxist (or evolutionist) assumes that a detailed knowledge of economic conditions under the reign of Nicholas II or whatever substitutes for being able to answer simple questions, such as why Marxism has never worked: the Fallacy of Irrelevant Knowledge. And of course almost anything can be made believable by considering only favorable evidence and interpreting hard.
Third, evolutionists are obsessed by Christianity and Creationism, with which they imagine themselves to be in mortal combat. This is peculiar to them. Note that other sciences, such as astronomy and geology, even archaeology, are equally threatened by the notion that the world was created in 4004 BC. Astronomers pay not the slightest attention to creationist ideas. Nobody does – except evolutionists. We are dealing with competing religions – overarching explanations of origin and destiny. Thus the fury of their response to skepticism.
I found it pointless to tell them that I wasn't a Creationist. They refused to believe it. If they had, they would have had to answer questions that they would rather avoid. Like any zealots, they cannot recognize their own zealotry. Thus their constant classification of skeptics as enemies (a word they often use) – of truth, of science, of Darwin, of progress.
This tactical demonization is not unique to evolution. "Creationist" is to evolution what "racist" is to politics: A way of preventing discussion of what you do not want to discuss. Evolution is the political correctness of science.
The Lair of the Beast
I have been on several lists on the Internet that deal with matters such as evolution, have written on the subject, and have discussed evolution with various of its adherents. These men (almost all of them are) have frequently been very bright indeed, often Ivy League professors, some of them with names you would recognize. They are not amateurs of evolution or high-school principals in Kansas eager to prove their modernity. I asked them the questions in the foregoing (about whether we really know what the primeval seas consisted of, etc.) I knew the answers; I wanted to see how serious proponents of evolutionary biology would respond to awkward questions.
It was like giving a bobcat a prostate exam. I got everything but answers. They told me I was a crank, implied over and over that I was a Creationist, said that I was an enemy of science (someone who asks for evidence is an enemy of science). They said that I was trying to pull down modern biology (if you ask questions about an aspect of biology, you want to pull down biology). They told me I didn't know anything (that's why I was asking questions), and that I was a mere journalist (the validity of a question depends on its source rather than its content).
But they didn't answer the questions. They ducked and dodged and evaded. After thirty years in journalism, I know ducking and dodging when I see it. It was like cross-examining hostile witnesses. I tried to force the issue, pointing out that the available answers were "Yes," "No," "I don't know," or "The question is not legitimate," followed by any desired discussion. Still no straight answer. They would neither tell me of what the early oceans consisted, nor admit that they didn't know.
This is the behavior not of scientists, but of advocates, of True Believers. I used to think that science was about asking questions, not about defending things you didn't really know. Religion, I thought, was the other way around. I guess I was wrong.
Practical Questions
A few things worry those who are not doctrinaire evolutionists. (Incidentally, it is worth noting that by no means all involved in the life sciences are doctrinaire. A friend of mine, a (Jewish, atheist) biochemist, says "It doesn't make sense." He may be wrong, but a Creationist he isn't.)
To work, a theory presumably must (a) be internally consistent and (b) map onto reality. You have to have both. Classical mechanics for example is (so far as I know) internally consistent, but is not at all points congruent with reality. Evolution has a great deal of elaborate, Protean, and often fuzzy theory. How closely does it correspond to what we actually see? Do the sweeping principles fit the grubby details?
For example, how did a giraffe get a long neck? One reads as a matter of vague philosophical principle that a proto-giraffe by chance happened to be taller than its herdmates, could eat more altitudinous leaves than its confreres, was therefore better fed, consequently rutted with abandon, and produced more child giraffes of height. This felicitous adaptation therefore spread and we ended up...well, up – with taller giraffes. It sounds reasonable. In evolution that is enough.
But what are the practical details? Do we have an unambiguous record of giraffes with longer and longer necks? (Maybe we do. I'm just asking.) Presumably modern giraffes have more vertebrae then did proto-giraffes. (The alternative is the same number of vertebrae, but longer ones. I have known giraffes. They were flexible rather than hinged.) This, note, requires a structural change as distinct from an increase in size.
Evolution is said to proceed by the accretion of successful point mutations. Does a random point mutation cause the appearance of an extra vertebra? If so, which mutation? (It would have to be a pretty vigorous point mutation.) How can you tell, given that we have no DNA from proto-giraffes? If not one, then how many random point mutations? Which ones? What virtue did these have that they were conserved until all were present? Did this happen once per additional vertebra – the multiply repeated chance appearance of identical mutations? Or did they appear all at once? If so, the heart must have changed simultaneously to get blood way up there.
[After I posted this a reader wrote to say that giraffes do have longer instead of more vertebra. Same questions hold.]
There may be perfectly good, clear, demonstrable answers to a few of these questions. I'm not a paleontological giraffologist. But if evolutionists want people to accept evolution, they need to provide answers – clear, concrete, non-metaphysical answers without gaping logical lacunae. They do not. When passionate believers do not provide answers that would substantiate their assertions, a reasonable presumption is that they do not have them.
The matter of the giraffe is a simple example of a question that inevitably occurs to the independently thoughtful: How do you get evolutionarily from A to B? Can you get from A to B by the mechanisms assumed? Without practical details, evolution looks like an assertion that the better survives the worse; throw in ionizing radiation and such to provide things to do the surviving, and we're off to the races. But...can we get there from here? Do we actually know the intermediate steps and the associated genetic mechanics? If we don't know what the steps were, can we at least show unambiguously a series of steps that would work?
Lots of evolutionary changes just don't look manageable by random mutation. Some orchestrated jump seems necessary. How does an animal evolve color vision, given that doing so would require elaborate changes in eye chemistry, useless without simultaneous elaborate changes in the brain to interpret the incoming impulses, which changes would themselves be useless without the retinal changes?
Or consider caterpillars. A caterpillar has no obvious resemblance to a butterfly. The disparity in engineering is huge. The caterpillar has no legs, properly speaking, certainly no wings, no proboscis. How did a species that did not undergo metamorphosis evolve into one that did? Pupating looks like something you do well or not at all: If you don't turn into something practical at the end, you don't get another chance.
Think about this. The ancestor of a modern caterpillar necessarily was something that could reproduce already. To get to be a butterfly-producing sort of organism, it would have to evolve silk-extruding organs, since they are what you make a cocoon with. OK, maybe it did this to tie leaves together, or maybe the beast resembled a tent-caterpillar. (Again, plausibility over evidence.) Then some mutation caused it to wrap itself experimentally in silk. (What mutation? Are we serious?) It then died, wrapped, because it had no machinery to cause it to undergo the fantastically complex transformation into a butterfly. Death is usually a discouragement to reproduction.
Tell me how the beast can gradually acquire, by accident, the capacity gradually to undergo all the formidably elaborate changes from worm to butterfly, so that each intermediate form is a practical organism that survives. If evolutionists cannot answer such questions, the theory fails.
Here the evolutionist will say, "Fred, caterpillars are soft, squashy things and don't leave good fossils, so it's unreasonable to expect us to find proof." I see the problem. But it is unreasonable to expect me to accept something on the grounds that it can't be proved. Yes, it is possible that an explanation exists and that we just haven't found it. But you can say that of anything whatever. Is it good science to assume that evidence will be forthcoming because we sure would like it to be? I'll gladly give you evidence Wednesday for a theory today?
Note that I am not asking evolutionists to give detailed mechanics for the evolution of everything that lives. If they gave convincing evidence for a few of the hard cases – proof of principle, so to speak – I would be inclined to believe that equally good evidence existed for the others. But they haven't.
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In Conclusion
To evolutionists I say, "I am perfectly willing to believe what you can actually establish. Reproducibly create life in a test tube, and I will accept that it can be done. Do it under conditions that reasonably may have existed long ago, and I will accept as likely the proposition that such conditions existed and gave rise to life. I bear no animus against the theory, and champion no competing creed. But don't expect me to accept fluid speculation, sloppy logic, and secular theology."
I once told my daughters, "Whatever you most ardently believe, remember that there is another side. Try, however hard it may be, to put yourself in the shoes of those whose views you most dislike. Force yourself to make a reasoned argument for their position. Do that, think long and hard, and conclude as you will. You can do no better, and you may be surprised."
Notes
(1) An example, for anyone interested, of the sort of unlogic to which I was exposed by evolutionists: Some simple viruses are strings of nucleotides in a particular order. In 2002 Eckhard Wimmer, at the University of New York at Stony Brook, downloaded the sequence for polio from the Internet, bought the necessary nucleotides from a biological supply house, strung them together, and got a functioning virus that caused polio in mice. It was a slick piece of work.
When I ask evolutionists whether the chance creation of life has been demonstrated in the laboratory, I get email offering Wimmer's work as evidence that it has been done. But (even stipulating that viruses are alive) what Wimmer did was to put OTS nucleotides together according to a known pattern in a well-equipped laboratory. This is intelligent design, or at least intelligent plagiarism. It is not chance anything. At least some of the men who offered Wimmer's work as what it wasn't are far too intelligent not to see the illogic – except when they are defending the faith.
(2) Many Evolutionists respond to skepticism about life's starting by chance by appealing to the vastness of time. "Fred, there were billions and billions of gallons of ocean, for billions of years, or billions of generations of spiders or bugs or little funny things with too many legs, so the odds are in all that time...." Give something long enough and it has to happen, they say. Maybe. But probabilities don't always work the way they look like they ought.
Someone is said to have said that a monkey banging at random on a typewriter would eventually type all the books in the British Museum. (Some of the books suggest that this may have happened, but never mind.) Well, yes. The monkey would. But it could be a wait. The size of the wait is worth pondering.
Let's consider the chance that the chimp would type a particular book. To make the arithmetic easy, let's take a bestseller with 200,000 words. By a common newspaper estimate of five letters per word on average, that's a million letters. What's the chance the monkey will get the book in a given string of a million characters?
For simplicity, assume a keyboard of 100 keys. The monkey has a 1/100 chance of getting the first letter, times 1/100 of getting the second letter, and so on. His chance of getting the book is therefore one in 1 in 100 exp 1,000,000, or 1 in 10 exp 2,000,000. (I don't offhand know log 3 but, thirty being greater than ten, a 30-character keyboard would give well in excess of 10 exp 1,000,000.)
Now, let's be fair to the Bandar Log. Instead of one monkey, let's use 10 exp 100 monkeys. Given that the number of subatomic particles in the universe is supposed to be 10 exp 87 (or something), that seems to be a fair dose of monkeys. (I picture a cowering electron surrounded by 10 exp 13 monkeys.) Let's say they type 10 exp 10 characters per second per each, for 10 exp 100 seconds which, considering that the age of the universe (I read somewhere) is 10 exp 18 seconds, seems more than fair.
Do the arithmetic. For practical purposes, those monkeys have no more chance of getting the book than the single monkey had, which, for practical purposes, was none.
Now, I don't suggest that the foregoing calculation has any direct application to the chance formation of life. (I will get seriously stupid email from people who ignore the foregoing sentence.) But neither do I know that the chance appearance of a cell does not involve paralyzing improbabilities. Without unambiguous numbers arising from unarguable assumptions, invoking time as a substitute for knowledge can be hazardous.
Life Evolves In Deep Sediments
Privileged Genes
Punctuated Equilibrium
Evolutionary Psychology
Craig Venter Questions Genetic Determinism
March 9, 2005
Fred Reed is author of Nekkid in Austin: Drop Your Inner Child Down a Well.
Copyright © 2005 Fred Reed
http://www.lewrockwell.com/reed/reed59.html
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Did the Fossil Skull Found in Africa Deserve Worldwide Headlines? Yes, But For Different Reasons Than Those Widely Reported. This Skull Undermines the Popular Theory of Darwinian Evolution
Fossil Finds in Africa:
More Monkey Business
by Bill Sardi
There is a lot of envious competition in the field of paleontology these days. There have been so many recent breakthrough fossil finds that it boggles the mind. Tim Friend, reporter for USA Today, called this the "discovery of yet another human ancestor."
Teams of bone diggers have been pulling out old fossils from their collections and conjuring up how to gain notoriety. They have now dug up yet another incredulous fossil, a skull from Chad in central Africa, that is causing quite a stir in scientific circles. In fact, it has been designated a whole new pre-human species, Sahelanthropos tchadensis.
Did This Fossil Warrant The Headlines?
There is so much uncertainty and speculation that surrounds this fossil that it is difficult to draw any conclusions, yet the news headlines herald this discovery as "one of the most sensational fossil finds in living memory," says Time Magazine. "This is one of the most important fossil discoveries in the past 100 years," according to Daniel Lieberman, biological anthropologist from Harvard University.
Fossil Fills Time Gap, So They Say
What would cause researchers to come to this conclusion? According to researchers, it is remarkably old, about 6 to 7 million years, so they say, and that makes it fill a 5 million year gap in time that has remained empty till now. The oldest ape fossils are dated back 7 to 8 million years and the oldest hominids (mammals that walk upright on two feet) are about 2 million years.
"It most certainly dates from very near that crucial moment in prehistory when hominids began to tread an evolutionary path that diverged from that of chimps, our closest living relatives," says Time Magazine. The fact the skull has ape and human characteristics makes it a missing link, an evolutionary mixed-breed. One researcher calls this fossil "the closest thing we have to a common ancestor." Lead paleontologist Michel Brunet says: "Sahelanthropus is the oldest and most primitive known member of the hominid clade, close to the divergence of hominids and chimpanzees."
There is a great deal of criticism aimed at Brunet and his colleagues for calling their fossil a new hominid species. The skull and brain are no bigger than a chimp's. "Features like a short face with a massive brow ridge, a mouth and jaw that protrude less than in most apes, and relatively small canine teeth make it clear that this creature was not a chimpanzee," says Time Magazine. In fact, "A lot more modern looking than anyone would have expected at so early an evolutionary stage," says Time. Some researchers believe this new fossil has more modern features than Lucy (Australopithecus afarensis) which is dated between 3.6 and 2.9 million years.
Just A Female Gorilla?
But Sahelanthropus may in fact be nothing more than a chimp. "If the new skull is from a female rather than a male, the canines are 'less striking' and more in line with those of living and extinct apes," says Carol Ward of the University of Missouri, Columbia. Citing a similar fossil skull that was discovered in the 1960s and mistakenly accepted for two decades as that of a hominid before everyone agreed it was that of a gorilla, Brigitte Senut of the Natural History Museum in Paris says the recently found skull from Chad is nothing more than that of a female gorilla. "I don't think we can say it's a human relative, or even whether it's male or female," says Chris Stringer of the Human Origins Group at the Natural History Museum in London.
No Conclusive Proof It Walked Upright
Furthermore, the researchers only have a skull with few other bones from its relatives. The research team has only found two lower-jaw fragments and three isolated teeth they believe are from the same species. So they don't have much to work with to prove its sex and whether it walked upright. Ann Gibbons of Science Now says "This debate could be settled if Brunet finds skeletal bones that show that Sahelanthropus was bipedal – and hence a hominid." Time Magazine hesitatingly says Sahelanthropos "may have walked upright." Without proof of being bipedal, how does this fossil rate such headlines?
Specious Dating Methods Used
Science writers for the news media don't explain the assumptions many of these discoveries are based upon. A glaring problem is that of dating ancient fossils. If you buy into the evolutionary uniformitarian dating scheme (the fossil record ranges from the most simple forms of life in the deepest earth layers to the most complex life in the youngest surface rock beds), then you will have no trouble accepting what these researchers have to say. For decades now paleontologists have continually used circular reasoning to date fossils, an error repeated with the Sahelanthropus find. According to Michel Brunet and colleagues who found the ape-like/human-like skull in the sands of Chad, this fossil is 6 to 7 million years of age. It was dated by comparing the age of 42 species of surrounding animal and plant fossils (elephants, crocodiles, lizards) that have been dated in other geographical locations in this same ancient time period. The researchers repeatedly use the rock layers to date the fossils and index fossils to date the rocks.
Paleontologists usually attempt to corroborate their fossil ages with radiometric dating, calculations of decay rates of radioactive materials such as argon and potassium, which they attempted in this case. But again, these estimates are based upon assumptions of constant rates of decay. The flaws of radiocarbon dating are rarely pointed out to the lay reader. Unfortunately, Sahelanthropos was found in desert sand, not in between layers of volcanic ash which can be used to perform radiometric dating. So the researchers relied upon radiometric dating of similar animals found in other locations. Imagine a prosecutor in a court of law, before a jury, presenting extraneous evidence that was found far away from the scene of a crime. The case would be thrown out of court. Science reporters are slow to criticize anthropologists knowing their livelihood depends upon blockbuster news stories like Sahelanthropos.
Evolutionary Tree Flawed
The more remarkable back-door admission that has been squeezed out of evolutionists with the discovery of Sahelanthropos is that the current ape-to-man evolutionary tree displayed in biology textbooks is grossly in error. Time Magazine says "It could entirely demolish the idea of a tree, but rather that of a bush...with many species fighting for survival." "A hominid of this age should certainly not have the face of a hominid less than one-third of its geological age," says Bernard Wood of George Washington University.
"We've got it all wrong. There is no way you can shoehorn this discovery into any scenario that exists today," says Ian Tattersal, curator of anthropology American Museum Natural History, New York. But don't bet on any of those drawings of evolutionary trees pictured in textbooks being withdrawn anytime soon. Biology books have passed on evolutionary myths for decades, including pictures of mistaken missing links like Piltdown man (a fraud), Nebraska man (fossil consisted only of a tooth), and the Neanderthals (now considered a fully modern human who fabricated clothing, musical instruments and star maps and even mourned their dead).
Says Chris Stringer of the Human Origins Group at the Natural History Museum in London: "This discovery makes us realize how limited a view we have of human evolution. Questions in the world of paleontology are always complex and because evidence is usually incomplete, and there is little agreement about what key features characterize a distinct human ancestor." With statements like that, again one wonders why a picture of this fossil skull has been aired by every major news outlet on the planet.
Missing Link Finally Found?
While Sahelanthropos may be found to be a monkey, its combination ape and human characteristics pose it as a possible evolutionary intermediate, a fact that has Darwinian evolutionists salivating. "Even if it is a big monkey, it's even more interesting as a missing link," says Yves Coppens of the College of France. Yet the time frame in which a common ape-like ancestor evolved into Homo sapiens is being shortened. The current evolutionary scheme believes this occurred 5 to 7 million years ago. Sahelanthropos is dated close to that period. The oldest ape fossils from Asia are about 7 to 8 million years old.
Rapid Or Slow Evolution?
Evolutionary change, facilitated by genetic mutations, is supposed to take millions of years. Now evolutionists have to explain faster changes than the previously estimated rate of Darwinian evolution. Overlooking the fact that genetic mutations only give rise to negative traits and defects, neo-Darwinists speculate that "punctuated equilibrium" may have taken place, a rapid jump or genetic alteration that produces a new species spontaneously. Punctuated equilibrium has never been observed.
Similar To Modern Humans?
In its story on Sahelanthropos, National Geographic indicates humans share 98 percent of their DNA with chimpanzees, but a recently completed human genome map startlingly discovered a very small human genome pool, not enough genes to explain the wide differences in characteristics between humans and lower forms of life.
Not Many Bones
It has been said that the total number of fossil bones used to substantiate evolutionary theories can be placed in a small box. Now the entire evolutionary scheme is about to be re-drawn based upon one skull. It hardly seems like enough evidence to alter ideas of man's origins.
Says Michel Brunet, the discoverer of Sahelanthropos, "It will never be possible to know precisely where or when the first hominid species originated."
Sources:
"A New Hominid From The Upper Miocene of Chad, Central Africa," Nature, Volume 418, pages 145-51, 2002.
"Chad Dunes Yield First Member of Human Family," Science Now, July 10, 2002.
"Father Of Us All," Time.com, Volume 160, No. 4, July 22, 2002
"Fossil Find Confounds Human Family Tree," USA Today, July 11, 2002.
"Seven Million-year-old Skull 'Just A Female Gorilla'," SMH.com.au
"Skull Fossil From Chad Forces Rethinking Of Human Origins," National Geographic News, July 10, 2002
July 20, 2002
Bill Sardi [send him mail] is a health journalist who dabbles from time to time into current events. He is the author of the book The Iron Time Bomb. His website is www.askbillsardi.com.
Copyright © 2002 Bill Sardi Word of Knowledge Agency, San Dimas, California. Not for commercial reproduction without permission of the author.
http://www.lewrockwell.com/sardi/sardi15.html
Fossil Finds in Africa:
More Monkey Business
by Bill Sardi
There is a lot of envious competition in the field of paleontology these days. There have been so many recent breakthrough fossil finds that it boggles the mind. Tim Friend, reporter for USA Today, called this the "discovery of yet another human ancestor."
Teams of bone diggers have been pulling out old fossils from their collections and conjuring up how to gain notoriety. They have now dug up yet another incredulous fossil, a skull from Chad in central Africa, that is causing quite a stir in scientific circles. In fact, it has been designated a whole new pre-human species, Sahelanthropos tchadensis.
Did This Fossil Warrant The Headlines?
There is so much uncertainty and speculation that surrounds this fossil that it is difficult to draw any conclusions, yet the news headlines herald this discovery as "one of the most sensational fossil finds in living memory," says Time Magazine. "This is one of the most important fossil discoveries in the past 100 years," according to Daniel Lieberman, biological anthropologist from Harvard University.
Fossil Fills Time Gap, So They Say
What would cause researchers to come to this conclusion? According to researchers, it is remarkably old, about 6 to 7 million years, so they say, and that makes it fill a 5 million year gap in time that has remained empty till now. The oldest ape fossils are dated back 7 to 8 million years and the oldest hominids (mammals that walk upright on two feet) are about 2 million years.
"It most certainly dates from very near that crucial moment in prehistory when hominids began to tread an evolutionary path that diverged from that of chimps, our closest living relatives," says Time Magazine. The fact the skull has ape and human characteristics makes it a missing link, an evolutionary mixed-breed. One researcher calls this fossil "the closest thing we have to a common ancestor." Lead paleontologist Michel Brunet says: "Sahelanthropus is the oldest and most primitive known member of the hominid clade, close to the divergence of hominids and chimpanzees."
There is a great deal of criticism aimed at Brunet and his colleagues for calling their fossil a new hominid species. The skull and brain are no bigger than a chimp's. "Features like a short face with a massive brow ridge, a mouth and jaw that protrude less than in most apes, and relatively small canine teeth make it clear that this creature was not a chimpanzee," says Time Magazine. In fact, "A lot more modern looking than anyone would have expected at so early an evolutionary stage," says Time. Some researchers believe this new fossil has more modern features than Lucy (Australopithecus afarensis) which is dated between 3.6 and 2.9 million years.
Just A Female Gorilla?
But Sahelanthropus may in fact be nothing more than a chimp. "If the new skull is from a female rather than a male, the canines are 'less striking' and more in line with those of living and extinct apes," says Carol Ward of the University of Missouri, Columbia. Citing a similar fossil skull that was discovered in the 1960s and mistakenly accepted for two decades as that of a hominid before everyone agreed it was that of a gorilla, Brigitte Senut of the Natural History Museum in Paris says the recently found skull from Chad is nothing more than that of a female gorilla. "I don't think we can say it's a human relative, or even whether it's male or female," says Chris Stringer of the Human Origins Group at the Natural History Museum in London.
No Conclusive Proof It Walked Upright
Furthermore, the researchers only have a skull with few other bones from its relatives. The research team has only found two lower-jaw fragments and three isolated teeth they believe are from the same species. So they don't have much to work with to prove its sex and whether it walked upright. Ann Gibbons of Science Now says "This debate could be settled if Brunet finds skeletal bones that show that Sahelanthropus was bipedal – and hence a hominid." Time Magazine hesitatingly says Sahelanthropos "may have walked upright." Without proof of being bipedal, how does this fossil rate such headlines?
Specious Dating Methods Used
Science writers for the news media don't explain the assumptions many of these discoveries are based upon. A glaring problem is that of dating ancient fossils. If you buy into the evolutionary uniformitarian dating scheme (the fossil record ranges from the most simple forms of life in the deepest earth layers to the most complex life in the youngest surface rock beds), then you will have no trouble accepting what these researchers have to say. For decades now paleontologists have continually used circular reasoning to date fossils, an error repeated with the Sahelanthropus find. According to Michel Brunet and colleagues who found the ape-like/human-like skull in the sands of Chad, this fossil is 6 to 7 million years of age. It was dated by comparing the age of 42 species of surrounding animal and plant fossils (elephants, crocodiles, lizards) that have been dated in other geographical locations in this same ancient time period. The researchers repeatedly use the rock layers to date the fossils and index fossils to date the rocks.
Paleontologists usually attempt to corroborate their fossil ages with radiometric dating, calculations of decay rates of radioactive materials such as argon and potassium, which they attempted in this case. But again, these estimates are based upon assumptions of constant rates of decay. The flaws of radiocarbon dating are rarely pointed out to the lay reader. Unfortunately, Sahelanthropos was found in desert sand, not in between layers of volcanic ash which can be used to perform radiometric dating. So the researchers relied upon radiometric dating of similar animals found in other locations. Imagine a prosecutor in a court of law, before a jury, presenting extraneous evidence that was found far away from the scene of a crime. The case would be thrown out of court. Science reporters are slow to criticize anthropologists knowing their livelihood depends upon blockbuster news stories like Sahelanthropos.
Evolutionary Tree Flawed
The more remarkable back-door admission that has been squeezed out of evolutionists with the discovery of Sahelanthropos is that the current ape-to-man evolutionary tree displayed in biology textbooks is grossly in error. Time Magazine says "It could entirely demolish the idea of a tree, but rather that of a bush...with many species fighting for survival." "A hominid of this age should certainly not have the face of a hominid less than one-third of its geological age," says Bernard Wood of George Washington University.
"We've got it all wrong. There is no way you can shoehorn this discovery into any scenario that exists today," says Ian Tattersal, curator of anthropology American Museum Natural History, New York. But don't bet on any of those drawings of evolutionary trees pictured in textbooks being withdrawn anytime soon. Biology books have passed on evolutionary myths for decades, including pictures of mistaken missing links like Piltdown man (a fraud), Nebraska man (fossil consisted only of a tooth), and the Neanderthals (now considered a fully modern human who fabricated clothing, musical instruments and star maps and even mourned their dead).
Says Chris Stringer of the Human Origins Group at the Natural History Museum in London: "This discovery makes us realize how limited a view we have of human evolution. Questions in the world of paleontology are always complex and because evidence is usually incomplete, and there is little agreement about what key features characterize a distinct human ancestor." With statements like that, again one wonders why a picture of this fossil skull has been aired by every major news outlet on the planet.
Missing Link Finally Found?
While Sahelanthropos may be found to be a monkey, its combination ape and human characteristics pose it as a possible evolutionary intermediate, a fact that has Darwinian evolutionists salivating. "Even if it is a big monkey, it's even more interesting as a missing link," says Yves Coppens of the College of France. Yet the time frame in which a common ape-like ancestor evolved into Homo sapiens is being shortened. The current evolutionary scheme believes this occurred 5 to 7 million years ago. Sahelanthropos is dated close to that period. The oldest ape fossils from Asia are about 7 to 8 million years old.
Rapid Or Slow Evolution?
Evolutionary change, facilitated by genetic mutations, is supposed to take millions of years. Now evolutionists have to explain faster changes than the previously estimated rate of Darwinian evolution. Overlooking the fact that genetic mutations only give rise to negative traits and defects, neo-Darwinists speculate that "punctuated equilibrium" may have taken place, a rapid jump or genetic alteration that produces a new species spontaneously. Punctuated equilibrium has never been observed.
Similar To Modern Humans?
In its story on Sahelanthropos, National Geographic indicates humans share 98 percent of their DNA with chimpanzees, but a recently completed human genome map startlingly discovered a very small human genome pool, not enough genes to explain the wide differences in characteristics between humans and lower forms of life.
Not Many Bones
It has been said that the total number of fossil bones used to substantiate evolutionary theories can be placed in a small box. Now the entire evolutionary scheme is about to be re-drawn based upon one skull. It hardly seems like enough evidence to alter ideas of man's origins.
Says Michel Brunet, the discoverer of Sahelanthropos, "It will never be possible to know precisely where or when the first hominid species originated."
Sources:
"A New Hominid From The Upper Miocene of Chad, Central Africa," Nature, Volume 418, pages 145-51, 2002.
"Chad Dunes Yield First Member of Human Family," Science Now, July 10, 2002.
"Father Of Us All," Time.com, Volume 160, No. 4, July 22, 2002
"Fossil Find Confounds Human Family Tree," USA Today, July 11, 2002.
"Seven Million-year-old Skull 'Just A Female Gorilla'," SMH.com.au
"Skull Fossil From Chad Forces Rethinking Of Human Origins," National Geographic News, July 10, 2002
July 20, 2002
Bill Sardi [send him mail] is a health journalist who dabbles from time to time into current events. He is the author of the book The Iron Time Bomb. His website is www.askbillsardi.com.
Copyright © 2002 Bill Sardi Word of Knowledge Agency, San Dimas, California. Not for commercial reproduction without permission of the author.
http://www.lewrockwell.com/sardi/sardi15.html
Truth Warrior
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Thinking in Darwinian Lockstep
by Fred Reed
Oh help. The religious orthodoxy that impedes discussion of biological evolution continues with its accustomed dreadful tenacity. I’m going to hide in Tierra del Fuego.
One difference between faith and science is that science allows with reasonable grace the questioning of theory. A physicist who doubts, say, the theory of general relativity will be expected to show good cause for his doubt. He won’t be dismissed in chorus as delusional and an enemy of truth.
By contrast, he who doubts the divinity of Christ, the prophethood of Mohammed, or the sanctity of natural selection will be savaged. It is the classic emotional reaction of the True Believer to whom dissent is not just wrong but intolerable. Which is unfortunate. If the faithful of evolution spent as much time examining their theory as they do defending it, they might prove to be right, or partly right, or discover all manner of interesting things heretofore unsuspected.
Among the articles of faith: Life evolved from the primeval soup (sheer conjecture; the existence of the soup is inferred from the theory); evolution occurred, as distinct from change; accounting for all characteristics of life (mere assertion); natural selection being the driving force (unestablished). Many of these points are logically separable. Since evolution serves the purposes of a religion, namely to explain human origin and destiny, they are invariably bundled.
A few questions:
It is asserted, though not demonstrated, that point mutations caused by, say, cosmic rays sometimes give an animal a slight advantage over others of its species, and that these advantages accumulate over countless generations and lead to major changes. Demonstrable fact, or plausible conjecture? I note that metaphysical plausibility often substitutes for evidence in matters evolutionary. The approach ignores hard questions, such as whether tiny advantages, if engendered at all, rise above the noise level, or what that level might be.
At any rate, the idea is that slight selective pressure (operational definition, please? Units?) over enough time produces major changes. The idea is appealingly plausible. But, for example:
(1) A fair number of people are deathly allergic to bee stings, going into anaphylactic shock and dying. In any but a protected urban setting, children are virtually certain to be stung many times before reaching puberty. Assured death before reproduction would seem a robust variety of selective pressure.
Yet the allergic haven’t been eliminated from the population. Why is it that miniscule, unobserved mutations over vast stretches of time can produce major changes, while an extraordinarily powerful, observable selective pressure doesn’t? The same reasoning applies to a long list of genetic diseases that kill children before they reach adulthood. (Yes, I too can imagine plausible explanations. Plausibility isn’t evidence.)
(2) Homosexuality in males works strongly against reproduction. Why have the genetic traits predisposing to homosexuality not been eliminated long ago?
(3) Pain serves to warn an animal that it is being injured, or to make it favor, say, a wounded leg so that it can heal. Fair enough. But then why did we evolve the nerves that produce the agony of kidney stones – about which an animal can do absolutely nothing?
(4) There are at least two ways in which a species might change over time. One is the (postulated) accumulation over very long periods of mutations. Maybe.
The other is the concentration of existing traits by selective breeding, which is nothing but deliberate natural selection. The latter is demonstrable, and can happen within a few generations. If a breed of dog has weak hips, for example, the defect can be rectified by interbreeding those with better hips until good hips become the norm. About this there is no doubt. If natural selection occurs as advertised, this is where we would expect to see it.
Now, the genes exist for the brains of a Gauss or Newton, the phenomenal vision of Ted Williams, the physical prowess of Cassius Clay. Presumably (a tricky word) in a pre-civilized world, strong and intelligent people with superbly acute (for humans) senses would be more likely to survive and spread their genes, leading to a race of supermen. Is this what we observe?
Here we come to an interesting question: Do the superior pass along their genes more reliably than the inferior? In primitive tribal societies do we observe that the brighter have more children than the not so bright?
Do the most fit men breed with the most fit women, or with the most sexually attractive? As a matter of daily experience, a man will go every time for the sleek, pretty, and coquettish over the big, strong, bright, and ugly. I mention this to evolutionists and they make intellectual pretzels trying to prove that the attractive and the fit are one and the same. Well, they aren’t.
(5) If intelligence promotes survival, why did it appear so late? If it doesn’t promote survival, why did it appear at all?
(6) People have a wretched sense of smell and mediocre hearing. Why? The pat explanation is that people evolved in open territory, where sight is more important than the other senses. People walked erect, keeping their eyes well above the ground so that they could see farther. As noses became smaller, there was less room for the olfactory apparatus.
Is much of this not palpable nonsense? Horses have eyes at about the same altitude as people, yet have acute senses of smell. Anywhere but in perfectly open territory, a sense of smell is obviously important in detecting predators, as it is at night, when many things hunt. Excessively small nasal apparatus? Cats and rats have little room for olfactory equipment yet have acute senses of smell. Do sensitive ears take up more space than sorry ones?
(7) Without weapons, humans would appear to be easy prey for almost anything. A persistent forty-pound dog would be a challenge for a single man. A pack of hyenas would have no trouble killing him. Any big cat would need about ten seconds.
The author failing to detect a large predator because of poor senses. (Laos, 2003)
People are weak. I once had a semi-domesticated monkey of perhaps thirty pounds jump on me in Bali because it wanted a banana I was eating. I was a husky 180 and lifted weights. I tried to push the thing off of me, and instantly realized I couldn’t. The little beast was ferociously strong. I gave it the banana.
A man cannot outrun a toy poodle, cannot climb well (and anyway there aren’t trees in open territory), cannot swim naturally, has teeth useless as weapons, no claws, and poor musculature. (Why the latter? Strength isn’t of value in survival?) He can neither smell nor hear an approaching big cat (say) and, unless armed, couldn’t do anything about it anyway. Hiding isn’t a choice: People are noisy, their children uncontrollably so. When unwashed, humans reek. Our young are extraordinarily helpless for long years.
Were we already packing heat when we swung down from the trees?
(8) So much of evolution contradicts other parts. Sparrows evolved drab and brown so that predators won’t see them. Cockatoos and guacamayas are gaudy as casinos in Las Vegas so they can find each other and mate. But…but….
The answers to these questions either lapse into a convoluted search for plausibility or else boil down to the idea that since guacamayas are as they are, their coloration must have adaptive value. That is, it is the duty of the evidence to fit the theory, rather than of the theory to fit the evidence.
This is science?
March 3, 2004
Fred Reed [send him mail] is author of Nekkid in Austin: Drop Your Inner Child Down a Well.
Copyright © 2004 Fred Reed
http://www.lewrockwell.com/reed/reed27.html
by Fred Reed
Oh help. The religious orthodoxy that impedes discussion of biological evolution continues with its accustomed dreadful tenacity. I’m going to hide in Tierra del Fuego.
One difference between faith and science is that science allows with reasonable grace the questioning of theory. A physicist who doubts, say, the theory of general relativity will be expected to show good cause for his doubt. He won’t be dismissed in chorus as delusional and an enemy of truth.
By contrast, he who doubts the divinity of Christ, the prophethood of Mohammed, or the sanctity of natural selection will be savaged. It is the classic emotional reaction of the True Believer to whom dissent is not just wrong but intolerable. Which is unfortunate. If the faithful of evolution spent as much time examining their theory as they do defending it, they might prove to be right, or partly right, or discover all manner of interesting things heretofore unsuspected.
Among the articles of faith: Life evolved from the primeval soup (sheer conjecture; the existence of the soup is inferred from the theory); evolution occurred, as distinct from change; accounting for all characteristics of life (mere assertion); natural selection being the driving force (unestablished). Many of these points are logically separable. Since evolution serves the purposes of a religion, namely to explain human origin and destiny, they are invariably bundled.
A few questions:
It is asserted, though not demonstrated, that point mutations caused by, say, cosmic rays sometimes give an animal a slight advantage over others of its species, and that these advantages accumulate over countless generations and lead to major changes. Demonstrable fact, or plausible conjecture? I note that metaphysical plausibility often substitutes for evidence in matters evolutionary. The approach ignores hard questions, such as whether tiny advantages, if engendered at all, rise above the noise level, or what that level might be.
At any rate, the idea is that slight selective pressure (operational definition, please? Units?) over enough time produces major changes. The idea is appealingly plausible. But, for example:
(1) A fair number of people are deathly allergic to bee stings, going into anaphylactic shock and dying. In any but a protected urban setting, children are virtually certain to be stung many times before reaching puberty. Assured death before reproduction would seem a robust variety of selective pressure.
Yet the allergic haven’t been eliminated from the population. Why is it that miniscule, unobserved mutations over vast stretches of time can produce major changes, while an extraordinarily powerful, observable selective pressure doesn’t? The same reasoning applies to a long list of genetic diseases that kill children before they reach adulthood. (Yes, I too can imagine plausible explanations. Plausibility isn’t evidence.)
(2) Homosexuality in males works strongly against reproduction. Why have the genetic traits predisposing to homosexuality not been eliminated long ago?
(3) Pain serves to warn an animal that it is being injured, or to make it favor, say, a wounded leg so that it can heal. Fair enough. But then why did we evolve the nerves that produce the agony of kidney stones – about which an animal can do absolutely nothing?
(4) There are at least two ways in which a species might change over time. One is the (postulated) accumulation over very long periods of mutations. Maybe.
The other is the concentration of existing traits by selective breeding, which is nothing but deliberate natural selection. The latter is demonstrable, and can happen within a few generations. If a breed of dog has weak hips, for example, the defect can be rectified by interbreeding those with better hips until good hips become the norm. About this there is no doubt. If natural selection occurs as advertised, this is where we would expect to see it.
Now, the genes exist for the brains of a Gauss or Newton, the phenomenal vision of Ted Williams, the physical prowess of Cassius Clay. Presumably (a tricky word) in a pre-civilized world, strong and intelligent people with superbly acute (for humans) senses would be more likely to survive and spread their genes, leading to a race of supermen. Is this what we observe?
Here we come to an interesting question: Do the superior pass along their genes more reliably than the inferior? In primitive tribal societies do we observe that the brighter have more children than the not so bright?
Do the most fit men breed with the most fit women, or with the most sexually attractive? As a matter of daily experience, a man will go every time for the sleek, pretty, and coquettish over the big, strong, bright, and ugly. I mention this to evolutionists and they make intellectual pretzels trying to prove that the attractive and the fit are one and the same. Well, they aren’t.
(5) If intelligence promotes survival, why did it appear so late? If it doesn’t promote survival, why did it appear at all?
(6) People have a wretched sense of smell and mediocre hearing. Why? The pat explanation is that people evolved in open territory, where sight is more important than the other senses. People walked erect, keeping their eyes well above the ground so that they could see farther. As noses became smaller, there was less room for the olfactory apparatus.
Is much of this not palpable nonsense? Horses have eyes at about the same altitude as people, yet have acute senses of smell. Anywhere but in perfectly open territory, a sense of smell is obviously important in detecting predators, as it is at night, when many things hunt. Excessively small nasal apparatus? Cats and rats have little room for olfactory equipment yet have acute senses of smell. Do sensitive ears take up more space than sorry ones?
(7) Without weapons, humans would appear to be easy prey for almost anything. A persistent forty-pound dog would be a challenge for a single man. A pack of hyenas would have no trouble killing him. Any big cat would need about ten seconds.
The author failing to detect a large predator because of poor senses. (Laos, 2003)
People are weak. I once had a semi-domesticated monkey of perhaps thirty pounds jump on me in Bali because it wanted a banana I was eating. I was a husky 180 and lifted weights. I tried to push the thing off of me, and instantly realized I couldn’t. The little beast was ferociously strong. I gave it the banana.
A man cannot outrun a toy poodle, cannot climb well (and anyway there aren’t trees in open territory), cannot swim naturally, has teeth useless as weapons, no claws, and poor musculature. (Why the latter? Strength isn’t of value in survival?) He can neither smell nor hear an approaching big cat (say) and, unless armed, couldn’t do anything about it anyway. Hiding isn’t a choice: People are noisy, their children uncontrollably so. When unwashed, humans reek. Our young are extraordinarily helpless for long years.
Were we already packing heat when we swung down from the trees?
(8) So much of evolution contradicts other parts. Sparrows evolved drab and brown so that predators won’t see them. Cockatoos and guacamayas are gaudy as casinos in Las Vegas so they can find each other and mate. But…but….
The answers to these questions either lapse into a convoluted search for plausibility or else boil down to the idea that since guacamayas are as they are, their coloration must have adaptive value. That is, it is the duty of the evidence to fit the theory, rather than of the theory to fit the evidence.
This is science?
March 3, 2004
Fred Reed [send him mail] is author of Nekkid in Austin: Drop Your Inner Child Down a Well.
Copyright © 2004 Fred Reed
http://www.lewrockwell.com/reed/reed27.html
Last edited:
Truth Warrior
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An "Evolution [ transformism ] is a fairytale for adults. -- Jean Rostand" bump. 
LibertyOfOne
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What a load of garbage. One guy thinks DNA is made of proteins, yet the other thinks that bee allergies have a dominate genetic cause. ROFL
I here by nominate Fred Reed and Bill Sardi as 2008's most scientific illiterate creationists of the year.
I here by nominate Fred Reed and Bill Sardi as 2008's most scientific illiterate creationists of the year.
Theocrat
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Nice Try, But the Emperor STILL Has No Clothes
Your analogy is a poor one because it doesn't relate to the horizontal and vertical patterns of change which distinguish microevolution from macroevolution. We're not discussing time or duration of change but direction and origin of change. A better analogy would be saying it's possible to walk 10 feet on land (micro), but it's impossible to walk 10 feet on air or water (macro).
All we've ever observed in science is dogs producing dogs, cats producing cats, elephants producing elephants, and so on. There might be variations within the different kinds, but they are still dogs, cats, elephants, etc. That is microevolution, and it's scientific. We've never observed a monkey becoming a human, a crocodile becoming an ostrich, a whale becoming a rhinoceros, or anything like that. That's macroevolution, and it's a fairy tale, not science.
Your analogy is a poor one because it doesn't relate to the horizontal and vertical patterns of change which distinguish microevolution from macroevolution. We're not discussing time or duration of change but direction and origin of change. A better analogy would be saying it's possible to walk 10 feet on land (micro), but it's impossible to walk 10 feet on air or water (macro).
All we've ever observed in science is dogs producing dogs, cats producing cats, elephants producing elephants, and so on. There might be variations within the different kinds, but they are still dogs, cats, elephants, etc. That is microevolution, and it's scientific. We've never observed a monkey becoming a human, a crocodile becoming an ostrich, a whale becoming a rhinoceros, or anything like that. That's macroevolution, and it's a fairy tale, not science.
Theocrat
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Just As I Thought
You didn't accept the evidence, after all. Darwin's tits just taste too good, don't they?
(Emphasis mine)
You didn't accept the evidence, after all. Darwin's tits just taste too good, don't they?
DrAmy31415
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Such language from a theologian? I am offended.
You seem to also be woefully ignorant of male anatomy. While males have "breasts" (thank you), it would be painfully problematic to nurse at a male mammals teats. Keep in mind also, that males of this species tend to be more aggressive than females and you might just get socked in the jaw.
For shame,
DrAmy
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It's good to see that you too have very strong reading for comprehension skills and scientific objectivity principles. ROFL indeed.
Where did you find the "creationists" hiding in there, if you please?
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driller80545
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Will finally knowing the answer to how life was created change my life in any way? Do I need to know this? Are birth and death really any different? Silly question? Choose your illusion, any illusion will do.
Theocrat
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LibertyOfOne
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It's clear you have no clue as to the errors in your posting. I won't waste my time going point by point, but if you bothered to read over the first part the man claims DNA is made up of proteins. He also calls nucleobases amino acids. He also uses amino acids interchangeably with the word protein. If you can't see those as folies than you don't even have the basic understand behind the science that man is using to prove a "point". He does not understand it, nor do you. So I suggest you pick up a science book and learn something for a change that way you won't post mindless garbage next time.
Here compare for yourself.
What bill said:
"DNA is made up of many subunits or strings of sequenced proteins strung between a sugar and a phosphate molecule (called a nucleotide). Think of a wash line in the back yard. There are two poles (the sugar and phosphate molecules) with four proteins (amino acids – guanine, cytosine, adenine, thymine) hanging on the wash line. There are many of these "wash lines" in one gene and over time some of the proteins hanging on the wash line change their positions. One protein may be substituted for another, which is called a mutation. Different species of life have some of the same genes and therefore the rate of change (number of protein substitutions) can be used to calibrate a DNA clock. Comparative studies of different proteins in various groups of organisms tend to show that the average number of amino-acid substitutions per site per year is typically around 10-9."
Wikipedia:
"Chemically, DNA is a long polymer of simple units called nucleotides, with a backbone made of sugars and phosphate groups joined by ester bonds. Attached to each sugar is one of four types of molecules called bases. It is the sequence of these four bases along the backbone that encodes information. This information is read using the genetic code, which specifies the sequence of the amino acids within proteins. The code is read by copying stretches of DNA into the related nucleic acid RNA, in a process called transcription."
Truth Warrior
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DNA-RNA-Protein
Introduction
DNA carries the genetic information of a cell and consists of thousands of genes. Each gene serves as a recipe on how to build a protein molecule. Proteins perform important tasks for the cell functions or serve as building blocks. The flow of information from the genes determines the protein composition and thereby the functions of the cell.
The DNA is situated in the nucleus, organized into chromosomes. Every cell must contain the genetic information and the DNA is therefore duplicated before a cell divides (replication). When proteins are needed, the corresponding genes are transcribed into RNA (transcription). The RNA is first processed so that non-coding parts are removed (processing) and is then transported out of the nucleus (transport). Outside the nucleus, the proteins are built based upon the code in the RNA (translation).
http://nobelprize.org/educational_games/medicine/dna/index.html
Now about that false, bogus totally erroneous and irrelevant "creationist" charge? ROFL
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LibertyOfOne
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You just proved my point.
DNA holds the code for proteins. It's not made up of proteins. Bill said the bases that make up DNA are proteins.
Last edited:
Mitt Romneys sideburns
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Yes. The scientific knowledge gained by such endeavors will advance science and technology.
The real question is, why are you people so afraid of the advancement of human knowledge and technology?
If it were up to the theologists, we would still be throwing rocks at each other in caves.
Theocrat
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LibertyofDumb
So how did DNA evolve? After you explain that, I want you to tell me how this evolved. I dare you.
So how did DNA evolve? After you explain that, I want you to tell me how this evolved. I dare you.
LibertyOfOne
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So how did DNA evolve? After you explain that, I want you to tell me how this evolved. I dare you.
Nice try. Just because I can't explain that is not proof of a god. Nor is any absence of evidence. That would be an argument from ignorance.
Truth Warrior
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From thread page # 33:
"Third, evolutionists are obsessed by Christianity and Creationism, with which they imagine themselves to be in mortal combat. This is peculiar to them. Note that other sciences, such as astronomy and geology, even archaeology, are equally threatened by the notion that the world was created in 4004 BC. Astronomers pay not the slightest attention to creationist ideas. Nobody does – except evolutionists. We are dealing with competing religions – overarching explanations of origin and destiny. Thus the fury of their response to skepticism.
I found it pointless to tell them that I wasn't a Creationist. They refused to believe it. If they had, they would have had to answer questions that they would rather avoid. Like any zealots, they cannot recognize their own zealotry. Thus their constant classification of skeptics as enemies (a word they often use) – of truth, of science, of Darwin, of progress.
This tactical demonization is not unique to evolution. "Creationist" is to evolution what "racist" is to politics: A way of preventing discussion of what you do not want to discuss. Evolution is the political correctness of science."
"Third, evolutionists are obsessed by Christianity and Creationism, with which they imagine themselves to be in mortal combat. This is peculiar to them. Note that other sciences, such as astronomy and geology, even archaeology, are equally threatened by the notion that the world was created in 4004 BC. Astronomers pay not the slightest attention to creationist ideas. Nobody does – except evolutionists. We are dealing with competing religions – overarching explanations of origin and destiny. Thus the fury of their response to skepticism.
I found it pointless to tell them that I wasn't a Creationist. They refused to believe it. If they had, they would have had to answer questions that they would rather avoid. Like any zealots, they cannot recognize their own zealotry. Thus their constant classification of skeptics as enemies (a word they often use) – of truth, of science, of Darwin, of progress.
This tactical demonization is not unique to evolution. "Creationist" is to evolution what "racist" is to politics: A way of preventing discussion of what you do not want to discuss. Evolution is the political correctness of science."
