Life is very complex! There's no way that it could form by accident. (otherwise known as the "airplane formed by a tornado in a junkyard" argument)
Most humans cannot comprehend the significance of a period of time measured in millions or billions of years. They have no idea what the Law of Averages can do to all of the "random" events that take place during that time.
Abiogenesis is untestable.
Abiogenesis is not a critical component of the theory of evolution. If a "cosmic watchmaker" dumped the raw materials down here a few billion years ago, he included with them a program--the "watch"--that they followed in order to end up where we are today. That program is evolution. This is the reason that the leaders of all the major religions find no conflict between the science of evolution and the faith in divine creation.
Their god created a universe that is sufficiently orderly and logical that we can make our way in it without having to stop every ten minutes and ask for divine inspiration in dealing with this or that anomalous natural phenomenon, and being gobbled up by it while waiting for said divine inspiration. The universe runs rather elegantly on a set of natural laws and evolution is one of the many corollaries of those laws. Somewhere there may be a universe built on Lobachevskian geometry where there is no gravity, no entropy and no lightspeed limitation, and that god had to design a different set of natural laws for his creatures. (Hey, I read fantasy and sci-fi too, I just don't try to pass it off as religion.)
I agree that abiogenesis as a distinct theory is difficult to disprove. It awaits the corroboration of finding evidence of non-DNA based life having arisen on earth and either hiding in some deeply buried cracks or being out-competed to extinction. Or of finding that same evidence on another planet. As such it's a work in progress and has not achieved the status of evolution itself, relativity, heliocentrism or gravity.
Still, disprovability is only one element of the scientific method. Another is that extraordinary assertions require extraordinary substantiation. Which assertion is more extraordinary: abiogenesis, or the existence of creatures external to a universe that reveals itself to be more orderly with every generation of scientist, which violate all the rules of that universe? The theory of abiogenesis can safely be used as a working hypothesis while we await the exploration of our solar system and then the next one. The "theory" of supernatural creation requires extraordinary substantiation before we have any obligation to treat it with respect.
Macroevolution has never been seen / variations can only occur within set limits.
We have massive evidence of macroevolution both in DNA and in the fossil record. To say that an observation must be made using only the senses and technology available to a Mesolithic human is to insult both science and engineering. It also gives support to my own screed that the goal of Abrahamic religion is indeed to drag us all back into the stone age, in this case literally.
Irreducible Complexity - if you remove one part of a complex system, it stops working. How can such a system evolve bit by bit?
We keep discovering the functionality of "incomplete systems." Birds bred in captivity to be flightless give us a window into the lives of the "birds" whose feathers were not sufficiently developed to provide enough lift for flight. We were thinking "inside the box" and not considering
negative lift. Domestic chickens use their feathers to flap in the "wrong" direction, creating negative lift with which they can climb up walls that are not just vertical but negative in slope. This is a feature that is available incrementally for predator evasion and does not require feathers to spring up fully developed.
The eye, flagella, wings, etc are too complex/not useful in the supposed "stages" of their own evolution.
Lower animals have much simpler light sensing organs that still help them navigate. Primitive wings are very useful for fanning oneself in hot weather and as they become less primitive airfoils they
incrementally increase the distance an animal can jump, giving it an advantage over arboreal predators.
Belief in evolution destroys any basis for a moral foundation in life.
Au contraire. This speaks to an issue on which I have expounded at great length on this website. Instinctive behavior is only "moral" in a very narrow context. In our species that context is the Mesolithic hunter-gatherer. We are hard-wired with synapses to care
instinctively only about our pack-mates, a band of a few dozen people whom we have been with since birth, and to distrust anyone outside that extended family as competitors for the scarce resource of our hunting and gathering territory.
Evolution gave us the resource to ascend beyond this. It gave us a uniquely large forebrain with so many synapses that it can successfully compete with the more primitive synapses in our generic vertebrate midbrain. Our cognitive ability is so great that it can literally
override instinctive behavior with learned and reasoned behavior. This is why we were able to test the idea that building a permanent settlement where several once-rival packs could live together, practicing agriculture, division of labor and economy of scale, would make all packs more prosperous than wandering through the forest at the mercy of nature's bounty. This is why we were able to test the idea that combining several settlements into a single city, even though it meant having to live in harmony and cooperation with
complete strangers, would increase our health, safety and comfort even further.
This overriding of natural instinct
is morality! And we only have it because of evolution.
Mitochondrial DNA proves that there was an 'Eve'
Even if it does--and previous posts demolish that hypothesis--the theory of evolution says it is quite possible that one pair of individuals carrying a set of mutated genes may be the only ones to survive a crisis and live to reproduce. Lucy may have been a member of a large clan of early hominoids who were wiped out by disease or disaster. She may have been the sole survivor because she alone had the one gene that made her able to resist the disease or outrun the disaster. Or it could have been plain dumb luck: Review my earlier remark about the workings of the Law of Averages in million-year time intervals.
If evolution occurred, where are all the middle-of-the-road animals? The croco-pigeons?
Sophomoric questions like this simply reveal the questioner's ignorance and prove what we suspected all along: that his education in biology is not advanced enough to understand the topic he claims to be prepared to debate and he's making a fool of himself in the attempt. Almost
all birds are "croco-pigeons"! Turn one over and look carefully at his feet: they are covered with scales. (Don't grab a penguin, their feet have feathers because they need them.) While you're down there stick your proctoscope into his butt. They have cloacas like reptiles, a single tract that serves for urination, defecation and copulation. We have fossils of "missing links" that are even more reptilian and less avian, "birds" with teeth and tail vertebrae.
There is a limited/non-existant fossil record for human evolution. OR the hominoid fossil record is crap.
This falls into the category of extraordinary assertions and therefore requires extraordinary substantiation before we have any obligation to divert energy to take it seriously. Just exactly what is it about the hominoid fossil record, which has been verified, studied, catalogued and peer reviewed by several generations of scientists from many nations and religions, that fails the peer review of this particular critic who has already revealed himself to lack the qualifications to be called an
amateur biologist? (My only professional involvement with biology is as a dog and parrot breeder and even I know about the vestigial scales on birds' feet, the negative lift provided by feathers too small for flying, and the missing link fossils with teeth. This person hasn't even picked that stuff up in the popular press yet he claims to know more than the professionals.)
If humans came from apes, why are apes still around?
For starters, we
are apes, just watch a professional gymnast at work. Religionists hate to admit that.
The mutations that are the engine of evolution only hit one individual at a time. His offspring will carry those genes and the offspring of his siblings will not. So two bloodlines are established which may recombine with interbreeding or may separate because of environmental factors or because of that pesky million-year-law-of-averages coincidence. Chimpanzees are a successful species in their ecological niche so there was no reason they would die off just because we came along and found a niche of our own.
Darwin recanted on his deathbed.
Even if this were true, it doesn't mean that his theory was wrong. The systems in people's bodies start to fail as they approach death. Duh, that's sort of what death is all about. Cognitive abilities often diminish in the elderly. My mother identified my wife as my ex-wife, someone she hadn't seen in thirty years. Does that mean that my wife is really someone else?
