Science Disproves Evolution

Oh noes! We disproved ourselves!

Silly fruit flies. Why aren't they elephants? And why aren't elephants fruit flies? Anyone could tell that the latter are a more fit form. Stupid elephants. And fruit flies.

 

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...and in a puff of logic, science vanished.

 

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Are red eyed flies a new species? It is true the information I am sharing has been copied and pasted. I don't know of any other way of sharing the information. Most of the scientists being quoted do not believe in creation and yet what they have discovered conflicts with evolution, which suggests the alternative: creation.

You may be interested to know the names of most of the scientists Brown quotes. They are:


Scott Tremaine, David Stevenson, William R. Ward, Robin M. Canup, Fred Hoyle, Michael J. Drake, Kevin Righter, George W. Wetherill, Richard A. Kerr, Luke Dones, B. Zuckerman, Renu Malhotra, David W. Hughes, M. Mitchell Waldrop, Larry W. Esposito, Shigeru Ida, Jack J. Lissauer, Charles Petit, P. Lamy, L. F. Miranda, Rob Rye, William R. Kuhn, Carl Sagan, Christopher Chyba, Stephen W. Hawking, Don N. Page, Huw Price, Peter Coles, Jayant V. Narlikar, Edward R. Harrison, Govert Schilling, Eric J. Lerner, Francesco Sylos Labini, Marcus Chown, Adam Riess, James Glanz, Mark Sincell, John Travis, Will Saunders, H. C. Arp, Gerard Gilmore, Geoffrey R. Burbidge, Ben Patrusky, Bernard Carr, Robert Irion, Alan H. Guth, Alexander Hellemans, Robert Matthews, M. Hattori, Lennox L. Cowie, Antoinette Songaila, Chandra Wickramasinghe, A. R. King, M. G. Watson, Charles J. Lada, Frank H. Shu, Martin Harwit, Michael Rowan-Robinson, P. J. E. Peebles, Joseph Silk, Margaret J. Geller, John P. Huchra, Larry Azar, J. E. O’Rourke, Peter Forey, J. L. B. Smith, Bryan Sykes, Edward M. Golenberg, Jeremy Cherfas, Scott R. Woodward, Virginia Morell, Hendrick N. Poinar, Rob DeSalle, Raúl J. Cano, Tomas Lindahl, George O. Poinar, Jr., Monica K. Borucki, Joshua Fischman, John Parkes, Russell H. Vreeland, Gerard Muyzer, Robert V. Gentry, Jeffrey S. Wicken, Henry R. Schoolcraft, Thomas H. Benton, Bland J. Finlay, Peter R. Sheldon, Roger Lewin, etc.

The above scientists were quoted from the following peer review science journals:

American journal of science
Astronomical journal
Astrophysics and space science
Astrophysical journal
Bioscience
Geology
Icarus
Journal of Theoretical Biology
Nature
New scientist
Physical review
Physical review d
Physical review letters
Science
Space science reviews
The American Journal of Science and Arts

 

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Pahu

That does not matter. It is still an example of the cherry picking of data. Your creationists go through a whole heap of scientific data, trying to pick out bits and pieces that might make it look bad for evolution, while ignoring the mountains of data that prove evolution is a reality.

For Finagle's sake, we have been observing evolutionary changes actually happening in the wild for over 100 years. Darwin's finches changing beak size in relation to environmental changes. Fish changing colour, and becomeing reproductively isolated. Bacteria developing antibiotic resistance. etc. etc.

Your creationists claim that this is just microadaptation, and not evolution. But evolution by definition is a series of microadaptations spread over millions of years, leading to massive changes in total.

1 + 1 is a small sum. But when you get 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + ...... for millions of years, the final sum is enormous. Many microadaptations = one hell of a macroadaptation.

One of the weird things happening among creationists is the choosing of bright young, and very religious people to go through and get Ph.D.s in biology, just so they can work for creationist organisations and pick imaginary holes in evolution. So here is a challenge for you. Find me a Ph.D. in biology who opposes evolution, who is also an atheist. Only such a person can be said to oppose evolution for rational scientific reasons, and not for irrational religious belief.

 

A New Scientist article proclaims:

“’Lenski’s experiment is also yet another poke in the eye for anti-evolutionists,’ notes Jerry Coyne, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Chicago. ‘The thing I like most is it says you can get these complex traits evolving by a combination of unlikely events,’ he says. ‘That’s just what creationists say can’t happen (1).’"

The many comments posted on the New Scientist website shows just how excited the atheists are about this report. They are positively gloating.

The context

In 1988, Richard Lenski, Michigan State University, East Lansing, founded 12 cultures of E. coli and grew them in a laboratory, generation after generation, for twenty years (he deserves some marks for persistence!). The culture medium had a little glucose but lots more citrate, so once the microbes consumed the glucose, they would continue to grow only if they could evolve some way of using citrate. Lenski expected to see evolution in action. This was an appropriate expectation for one who believes in evolution, because bacteria reproduce quickly and can have huge populations, as in this case. They can also sustain higher mutation rates than organisms with much larger genomes, like vertebrates such as us (2). All of this adds up, according to neo-Darwinism, to the almost certainty of seeing lots of evolution happen in real time (instead of imagining it all happening in the unobservable past). With the short generation times, in 20 years this has amounted to some 44,000 generations, equivalent to some million years of generations of a human population (but the evolutionary opportunities for humans would be far, far less, due to the small population numbers limiting the number of mutational possibilities; and the much larger genome, which cannot sustain a similar mutation rate without error catastrophe; i.e. extinction; and sexual reproduction means that there is 50% chance of failing to pass on a beneficial mutation ).

As noted elsewhere (see ‘Giving up on reality’), Lenski seemed to have given up on ‘evolution in the lab’ and resorted to computer modelling of ‘evolution’ with a program called Avida (see evaluation by Dr Royal Truman, Part 1 and Part 2, which are technical papers). Indeed, Lenski had good reason to abandon hope. He had calculated (1) that all possible simple mutations must have occurred several times over but without any addition of even a simple adaptive trait.

Lenski and co-workers now claim that they have finally observed his hoped for evolution in the lab.

The science: what did they find?

In a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, Lenski and co-workers describe how one of 12 culture lines of their bacteria has developed the capacity for metabolizing citrate as an energy source under aerobic conditions (3).

This happened by the 31,500th generation. Using frozen samples of bacteria from previous generations they showed that something happened at about the 20,000th generation that paved the way for only this culture line to be able to change to citrate metabolism. They surmised, quite reasonably, that this could have been a mutation that paved the way for a further mutation that enabled citrate utilization.

This is close to what Michael Behe calls ‘The Edge of Evolution’—the limit of what ‘evolution’ (non-intelligent natural processes) can do. For example, an adaptive change needing one mutation might occur every so often just by chance. This is why the malaria parasite can adapt to most antimalarial drugs; but chloroquine resistance took much longer to develop because two specific mutations needed to occur together in the one gene. Even this tiny change is beyond the reach of organisms like humans with much longer generation times (4). With bacteria, there might be a chance for even three coordinated mutations, but it’s doubtful that Lenski’s E. coli have achieved any more than two mutations, so have not even reached Behe’s edge, let alone progressed on the path to elephants or crocodiles.

Now the popularist treatments of this research (e.g. in New Scientist) give the impression that the E. coli developed the ability to metabolize citrate, whereas it supposedly could not do so before. However, this is clearly not the case, because the citric acid, tricarboxcylic acid (TCA), or Krebs, cycle (all names for the same thing) generates and utilizes citrate in its normal oxidative metabolism of glucose and other carbohydrates (5).

Furthermore, E. coli is normally capable of utilizing citrate as an energy source under anaerobic conditions, with a whole suite of genes involved in its fermentation. This includes a citrate transporter gene that codes for a transporter protein embedded in the cell wall that takes citrate into the cell (6). This suite of genes (operon) is normally only activated under anaerobic conditions.

So what happened? It is not yet clear from the published information, but a likely scenario is that mutations jammed the regulation of this operon so that the bacteria produce citrate transporter regardless of the oxidative state of the bacterium’s environment (that is, it is permanently switched on). This can be likened to having a light that switches on when the sun goes down—a sensor detects the lack of light and turns the light on. A fault in the sensor could result in the light being on all the time. That is the sort of change we are talking about.

Another possibility is that an existing transporter gene, such as the one that normally takes up tartrate (3), which does not normally transport citrate, mutated such that it lost specificity and could then transport citrate into the cell. Such a loss of specificity is also an expected outcome of random mutations. A loss of specificity equals a loss of information, but evolution is supposed to account for the creation of new information; information that specifies the enzymes and cofactors in new biochemical pathways, how to make feathers and bone, nerves, or the components and assembly of complex motors such as ATP synthase, for example.

However, mutations are good at destroying things, not creating them. Sometimes destroying things can be helpful (adaptive) (7), but that does not account for the creation of the staggering amount of information in the DNA of all living things. Behe (in The Edge of Evolution) likened the role of mutations in antibiotic resistance and pathogen resistance, for example, to trench warfare, whereby mutations destroy some of the functionality of the target or host to overcome susceptibility. It’s like putting chewing gum in a mechanical watch; it’s not the way the watch could have been created.

Much ado about nothing (again)

Behe is quite right; there is nothing here that is beyond ‘the edge of evolution’, which means it has no relevance to the origin of enzymes and catalytic pathways that evolution is supposed to explain (8).

 

When we set out to explain why and how something happens, we must use the evidence, facts and experience available to us if we are to arrive at a logical conclusion. Using available evidence, experience, facts, observation and experimentation, we know that the universe had a beginning and that before that beginning there was no universe and therefore there was nothing. We know this because of the Law of Causality (for every cause there is an effect and for every effect there is a cause). Based on this law, we can use the following logic:

1. The universe exists.
2. The universe had a beginning.
3. Before the beginning of the universe, there was no universe.
4. Since there was no universe, there was nothing.
5. Since the universe does exist, it came from nothing.
6. Nothing comes from nothing by any natural cause.
7. Therefore the cause of the universe is supernatural.
8. Life exists.
9. Life always comes from pre-existing life of the same kind (the Law of Biogenesis).
10. Life cannot come from nonliving matter by any natural cause.
11. Since life does exist, the cause of life is supernatural.

Many people with a naturalistic worldview assume everything can be explained by natural causes. From the beginning, they reject the possibility of a supernatural cause. Because of this they are left with no scientifically valid answers to the question of how the universe could come from nothing, which is impossible by any natural cause of which we are aware. Many answers have been proposed that go beyond the realm of known evidence, experience, facts, observation and experimentation and therefore enter the realm of fiction.

The same logic applies to life. Using available evidence, experience, facts, observation and experimentation, we know that life only comes from pre-existing life of the same kind.

“Spontaneous generation (the emergence of life from nonliving matter) has never been observed. All observations have shown that life comes only from life. This has been observed so consistently it is called the Law of Biogenesis. Evolution conflicts with this scientific law by claiming that life came from nonliving matter through natural processes” (From In the Beginning by Walt Brown, Ph.D. page 5).

Life never comes from non-living matter by any natural cause of which we are aware.

Now that we have seen proof that God exists, using logic based on known evidence, experience, facts, observation and experimentation, we need to see if He has revealed Himself to us. In the Holy Bible there are hundreds of prophecies given by God who is speaking in the first person. In both Bible and secular history we find that those prophecies have been accurately fulfilled. No other writing on earth comes close to doing this! Only God can accurately reveal the future, ergo, He is the author of the Holy Bible. Within the pages of the Holy Bible He reveals His nature, our nature, His relationship to us, our need for salvation and His plan of salvation for us.

The reason the universe and life cannot come from nothing by any natural cause, but can come from a supernatural cause is because God is the self-existent creator of everything and everyone. He is not subject to His creation. He created it and sustains it. It is a mistake to judge God by human standards and human perspectives. God reveals that He is omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent.

If you are interested in more detailed proof, read, “Evidence that Demands a Verdict” by Josh McDowell.

[From “Reincarnation in the Bible?”]

 

It's interesting that you use the word "design" in your wheel analogy.

 

This garbage keeps coming up again and again.

 

Pahu

This is kind of tiresome.
All of this has been discussed on this forum interminably, under many different threads. Results are always the same. People like myself correct the misinterpretations of science put forward by people like you. The end result is that the irrational religicos remain unconvinced, because they are not truly open to scientific data and scientific reasoning. People like myself remain unconvinced by the rather pathetic arguments that try to contradict good science.

For example : your Law of Biogenesis applies only to complex life. Sure, you cannot pile up a load of sterile compost and have it turn into a flock of birds. However, not only can inorganic processes produce organic molecules, including many very complex ones, but it has already been shown empirically. Simple pre-life has already been shown to be produced from the kinds of factors prevalent in the pre-biotic Earth. We do not know exactly how the path to life was followed. Not yet, anyway. But the general thrust of that process is now well on the way to being understood.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenesis

 

12. And since nothing has ever been shown to be super-natural then none of this exists. :bugeye:

How much time did you spend on this piece of mental masturbation?

 

Why do you believe that?

As long as Darwin’s finches remain isolated on their respective islands, they will remain distinct breeds. But when the barriers are removed, the finches will eventually revert to the wild, aboriginal stock.

Here is an excerpt from an article responding to a TV series on evolution that deals with bacteria.

There are too many errors in “Evolution” to itemize here, but let’s examine what the producers clearly believe to be their strongest example: the development in bacteria of antibiotic resistance. If one wants to demonstrate evolution in action, as the producers claim, bacteria are certainly the best candidates. Some of these microbes reproduce several times an hour, producing thousands and thousands of generations within a single year. “Evolution” thus takes us into a tuberculosis-infested Russian jail, and sure enough, the little pests quickly develop resistance to each new drug the doctors introduce. Case closed.

Well, not quite.

All the producers have demonstrated is the quite unexceptional occurrence of what is called micro-evolution, the small changes within species that we see all around us. The most obvious example—one Darwin himself used—is dog breeding. The thousands of different types of dogs extant today were all created, probably from some common wild ancestor, by selective breeding.

The question is, can these relatively small changes within basic species types be extrapolated to macro-evolution—big changes in body types, such as the evolution of birds from reptiles, say, or humans from apes. The fact is, nothing of the sort has ever been observed. Darwinists counter that when dealing with large animals—even fruit flies —there simply isn’t enough time. The breeding cycles are too long. Fair enough. But what about bacteria?

With selective breeding, one should be able to produce new species within a reasonable time. Yet—and this the producers don’t tell us—it has never been done. As British bacteriologist Alan H. Linton recently remarked, despite multitudes of experiments exposing bacteria to caustic acid baths and intense radiation in order to accelerate mutations, in the “150 years of the science of bacteriology, there is no evidence that one species of bacteria has changed into another.”

The producers of “Evolution” unwittingly give the game away when they remark that the bacteria clearly identifiable as the same as modern TB have been found on a 6,000-year-old Egyptian mummy. Like the Galapagos finch beaks, what we seem to be seeing here is not macro-evolutionary change, but the extraordinary stability of species.

The producers repeat much the same error in a long segment on the HIV virus, which ends with doctors taking their patients off the anti-viral drugs (which appear to do more harm than good) and—voila!—the HIV returns to its original “wild-type.” Once again, we have stasis, not evolution.

On other issues, “Evolution” mostly commits sins of omission (that is, omission of any evidence contrary to the simple story of Darwin’s mechanism and “change over time” which they hammer away at endlessly). The program glosses over problems with the fossil record and sidesteps the challenge of the “Cambrian Explosion,” in which, in direct contradiction to Darwinian theory, all the major animal groups (phyla) of modern animals appeared in a geologic instant, with no plausible precursors. Searching for a more contemporary spin, the program misstates the universality of DNA as evidence of descent from a common ancestor, when important exceptions that undermine this hypothesis have been known for over 20 years. And on and on.

Where is the evidence showing the gradual evolution of one species into another?

Why do you believe that?

Why do you believe that? Even though there are numerous biologists who do not believe in evolution, I don't know of any who are atheists. Probably after they examine the hypothesis and see the conflict with biology, most of them reject it along with their disbelief in God.

 

Hello Pahu, this is highly questionable. I hope you won't be offended if I say it is simply wrong.

a) We know that the current form of the universe appeared to have a beginning.
b) We do not know what existed before the Big Bang, but there are several hypotheses that certainly don't require nothing.

I would be interested to know what experience you are talking about that leads you to believe the above. I can see that you could misinterpret the evidence, or the relevance of the facts. I can see that experimentation gives us insight into such things as the fundamental forces and thus helps us understand the early history of the universe. But I really can't see what experience you can be meaning.

 

Abiogenesis is the theory that under the proper conditions life can arise spontaneously from non-living molecules. One of the most widely cited studies used to support this conclusion is the famous Miller–Urey experiment. Surveys of textbooks find that the Miller–Urey study is the major (or only) research cited to prove abiogenesis. Although widely heralded for decades by the popular press as ‘proving’ that life originated on the early earth entirely under natural conditions, we now realize the experiment actually provided compelling evidence for the opposite conclusion. It is now recognized that this set of experiments has done more to show that abiogenesis on Earth is not possible than to indicate how it could be possible. This paper reviews some of the many problems with this research, which attempted to demonstrate a feasible method of abiogenesis on the early earth.

Contemporary research has failed to provide a viable explanation as to how abiogenesis could have occurred on Earth. The abiogenesis problem is now so serious that most evolutionists today tend to shun the entire field because they are ‘uneasy about stating in public that the origin of life is a mystery, even though behind closed doors they freely admit that they are baffled’ because ‘it opens the door to religious fundamentalists and their god-of-the-gaps pseudo-explanations’ and they worry that a ‘frank admission of ignorance will undermine funding’.1

Abiogenesis was once commonly called ‘chemical evolution’,2 but evolutionists today try to distance evolutionary theory from the origin of life. This is one reason that most evolutionary propagandists now call it ‘abiogenesis’. Chemical evolution is actually part of the ‘General Theory of Evolution’, defined by the evolutionist Kerkut as ‘the theory that all the living forms in the world have arisen from a single source which itself came from an inorganic form’.3

Another reason exists to exaggerate abiogenesis claims—it is an area that is critical to proving evolutionary naturalism.4 If abiogenesis is impossible, or extremely unlikely, then so is naturalism.5–8

Darwin recognized how critical the abiogenesis problem was for his theory. He even conceded that all existing terrestrial life must have descended from some primitive life-form that was originally called into life ‘by the Creator’.9 But to admit, as Darwin did, the possibility of one or a few creations is to open the door to the possibility of many others! If God made one type of life, He also could have made many thousands of different types. Darwin evidently regretted this concession later and also speculated that life could have originated in some ‘warm little pond’ on the ancient earth.

 

Do you know of anything in the universe that did not begin? Did it exist before it began? That is the experience I am referring to.The universe cannot be infinitely old or all useable energy would have been lost already (entropy). This has not occurred. Therefore, the universe is not infinitely old. Therefore, the universe had a beginning and since the universe is everything that exists, could it exist before it existed? Something cannot bring itself into existence, can it? Therefore, something brought it into existence. What brought the universe into existence? It would have to be greater than the universe and be a sufficient cause to it.

 

Complex Molecules and Organs 1


Many molecules necessary for life, such as DNA, RNA, and proteins, are so incredibly complex that claims they evolved are absurd. Furthermore, those claims lack experimental support (a).

a. “There has never been a meeting, or a book, or a paper on details of the evolution of complex biochemical systems.” Michael J. Behe, Darwin’s Black Box (New York: The Free Press, 1996), p. 179.

“Molecular evolution is not based on scientific authority. There is no publication in the scientific literature—in prestigious journals, specialty journals, or book—that describes how molecular evolution of any real, complex, biochemical system either did occur or even might have occurred. There are assertions that such evolution occurred, but absolutely none are supported by pertinent experiments or calculations. Since no one knows molecular evolution by direct experience, and since there is no authority on which to base claims of knowledge, it can truly be said that—like the contention that the Eagles will win the Super Bowl this year—the assertion of Darwinian molecular evolution is merely bluster.” Behe, pp. 186–187.

[From “In the Beginning” by Walt Brown]

 

Right, I see. :yawn:

So this thread is just a tiresome excuse to reguripost a list of all the usual wilfully ignorant creationist blather, misconceptions and outright deceptions that have been dealt with ad nauseum here and in innumerable places on the interweb, yes?

I move for redirecting to Pseudoscience at a minimum. Locking and Cesspooling would be more appropriate.

 

Abiogenesis has been the object of a large amount of scientific work, and has been published in hundreds, if not thousands of scientific papers. Not just the original Miller experiment.

Anyway, just a quick recap. We know from experimental evidence, that energy discharge in a gas mixture equivalent to what existed in the old prebiotic Earth will result in large amounts of a wide mixture of organic compounds, including amino acids, lipids, purines and pyrimidines etc. These are formed with lightning, heat from meteor impact (common 4 billion years ago), and ultra violet light. An accumulation of organic molecules in ponds, lakes or the ocean is then inevitable.

What happens next?
This is described in : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6QYDdgP9eg

Not that I expect Pahu to watch the youtube. Creationists are too scared they will learn something.

 

The universe could have existed from our reference point before the big bang. That would mean that the universe is infinitely old. The energy of our universe is balanced by gravitational potential energy, which means that it looks as it should if it came from nothing with zero total energy. Things can bring themselves into existence on a quantum level. Causes can be much, much smaller then their effects (a nuclear bomb for example).

 

Complexity is not an adequate reason why something could not evolve. It could obviously have evolved from simpler components.

 

You didn't write that, please cite your source for this.