Willful Ignorance of Evolution?

[Guest]

When it came to Hoyle and his tornado in the junkyard argument creationists are so fond of, there is no doubt he was being daft.

I don't know...

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/abioprob/abioprob.html

[_EAllusion]

Dawkins very much believes that genes are "selfish." What he is specifically talking about is that selection operates on the gene level; therefore, things are adapted to the success strategies of genes.

[_EAllusion]

. EA said your original gripe was actually a "fair" statement for the "confused" people to make, but then immediately backpeddled as he realized it pretty much ruined your agenda.

All I did was explain my response in more detail because you did not apparently get it. I thought I was being nice. This is offensively dense.

[_beastie]

Since I consider the odds that Dart will directly answer my questions about his self-education to be minute, I took it upon myself to find the sources for his quotes. I’m sure everyone will be surprised to find out that dart is educating himself about evolution at the feet of religionists who are fighting evolution as a threat to their own beliefs.

“Evolution as a Threat to the Christian Home”
by Bert Thompson, PhD

http://www.pdfdownload.org/pdf2html/pdf ... p%3A%2F%2F
www.apologeticspress.org%2Frr%2Freprint ... images=yes

Quotes contained therein:

We have direct evidence of small-scale changes in controlled laboratory experiments of the past hundred years (on bacteria, on almost every measurable property of the fruit fly Drosophila), or observed in nature (color changes in moth wings, development of metal tolerance in plants growing near industrial waste heaps) or produced during a few thousand years of human breeding and agriculture (1987, p. 65).

A mutation doesn't produce major new raw material. You don't make new species by mutating the species.... That's a common idea people have; that evolution is due to random mutations. A mutation is not the cause of evolutionary change (as quoted in Sunderland, 1984, p. 106).

On the one hand, Dr. Gould wants us to believe that bacteria and fruit flies have experienced "small-scale changes" via genetic mutations, and thus serve as excellent examples of the "fact" of evolution. Yet on the other hand, he tells us that mutations ("small-scale changes") do not cause evolution. Which is it?

From ApologeticPress

http://www.apologeticspress.org/modules ... temid=2076

...I believe that the theory of Evolution as presented by orthodox evolutionists is in many ways a satisfying explanation of some of the evidence. At the same time I think that the attempt to explain all living forms in terms of evolution from a unique source...is premature and not satisfactorily supported by present-day evidence. ...the supporting evidence remains to be discovered.... We can, if we like, believe that such an evolutionary system has taken place, but I for one do not think that “it has been proven beyond all reasonable doubt.” ...It is very depressing to find that many subjects are being encased in scientific dogmatism (1960, pp. vii, viii, emp. added).

From ApologeticPress
http://www.apologeticspress.org/articles/1985

Twenty years ago Mayr, in his Animal Species and Evolution, seemed to have shown that if evolution is a jigsaw puzzle, then at least all the edge pieces were in place. But today we are less confident and the whole subject is in the most exciting ferment. Evolution is both troubled from without by the nagging insistence of antiscientists [his term for creationists—BT] and nagged from within by the troubling complexities of genetic and developmental mechanisms and new questions about the central mystery—speciation itself (1982, p. 529).

and

The chance that higher forms have emerged in this way is comparable with the chance that a tornado sweeping through a junk-yard might assemble a Boeing 747 from the materials therein (1981b, 294:105).

and

At all events, anyone with even a nodding acquaintance with the Rubik cube will concede the near-impossibility of a solution being obtained by a blind person moving the cubic faces at random. Now imagine 1050 blind persons each with a scrambled Rubik cube, and try to conceive of the chance of them all simultaneously arriving at the solved form. You then have the chance of arriving by random shuffling at just one of the many biopolymers on which life depends. The notion that not only biopolymers but the operating programme of a living cell could be arrived at by chance in a primordial organic soup here on the Earth is evidently nonsense of a high order (1981a, 92:527, emp. in orig.).

and

I don’t know how long it is going to be before astronomers generally recognize that the combinatorial arrangement of not even one among the many thousands of biopolymers on which life depends could have been arrived at by natural processes here on the Earth. Astronomers will have a little difficulty in understanding this because they will be assured by biologists that it is not so, the biologists having been assured in their turn by others that it is not so. The “others” are a group of persons who believe, quite openly, in mathematical miracles. They advocate the belief that tucked away in nature, outside of normal physics, there is a law which performs miracles (provided the miracles are in the aid of biology). This curious situation sits oddly on a profession that for long has been dedicated to coming up with logical explanations of biblical miracles.... It is quite otherwise, however, with the modern miracle workers, who are always to be found living in the twilight fringes of thermodynamics (1981a, 92:526, parenthetical comment in orig.).

So one thing is clear. Dart has, indeed, read apologetic websites devoted to debunking evolution.

But when dart does actually make a reference to a nonreligionist scientist who supports evolution, his phrases become vague:

I appreciate Tarski's input on evolution but he would be more convincing on evolution if he were not also trying to sell me on Dennett's ideas on consiousness, who I have read and feel quite certain he is wrong.

I have read Dennett. Ok, what have you read by Dennett? An actual book written by Dennett, or have you “read Dennett” by reading references made to him on apologetic websites?

And I never got an answer to this equally vague phrase:

Nope. Looking at his book right now. Want me to cite something from a specific page? What I was quoting was an article published back in 1999. It might even be on the web somewhere. I'll see if I can find it.

“Looking at his book right now”. Ok. Have you actually read his book?

Dart,

How would you react if an LDS TBM started “just asking questions” about criticisms of Book of Abraham claims, and in those “just questions” made clearly erroneous and ill-informed statements (like ‘apes haven’t changed’), ridiculous generalizations (nobody has even attempted to explain this), quoted extensively from LDS apologia, and would not answer direct questions about the sources of his/her information, how would you react? Any of us who have read your posts know exactly what you’d do. So why are you asking for different treatment?


by the way, I will make a book recommendation to you: Chet Raymo's Skeptics and True Believers. You could not ask for a book that is more respectful of religion, and still explicit in its explanation of evolution.

[_EAllusion]

Incidentally, there is some serious quotemining going on there. I've been trying to save my time by avoiding the tangents, but maybe going through them will put Kevin in his place, so to speak. Some of them aren't even well-masked. When a person says, "It is extremely improbable that proteins and nucleic acids, both of which are structurally complex, arose spontaneously in the same place at the same time. Yet it also seems impossible to have one without the other. And so, at first glance, one might have to conclude that life could never, in fact, have originated by chemical means," is obvious he's setting himself up.

[_beastie]

Incidentally, there is some serious quotemining going on there. I've been trying to save my time by avoiding the tangents, but maybe going through them will put Kevin in his place, so to speak. Some of them aren't even well-masked. When a person says, "It is extremely improbable that proteins and nucleic acids, both of which are structurally complex, arose spontaneously in the same place at the same time. Yet it also seems impossible to have one without the other. And so, at first glance, one might have to conclude that life could never, in fact, have originated by chemical means," is obvious he's setting himself up.

Heh.

Wonder how many sites like this one are out there in the "internets"?

http://www.aboundingjoy.com/scientists.htm

Abounding Joy!

(The purpose of this page is to present quotations from scientists that illustrate their recognition that the darwinian theory of evolution is bad science.)

[_Trevor]

Since I consider the odds that Dart will directly answer my questions about his self-education to be minute, I took it upon myself to find the sources for his quotes. I’m sure everyone will be surprised to find out that dart is educating himself about evolution at the feet of religionists who are fighting evolution as a threat to their own beliefs.

Ah man, don't tell me I was right about that. I had wanted to be wrong about it. Really.

[_EAllusion]

Incidentally, there is some serious quotemining going on there. I've been trying to save my time by avoiding the tangents, but maybe going through them will put Kevin in his place, so to speak. Some of them aren't even well-masked. When a person says, "It is extremely improbable that proteins and nucleic acids, both of which are structurally complex, arose spontaneously in the same place at the same time. Yet it also seems impossible to have one without the other. And so, at first glance, one might have to conclude that life could never, in fact, have originated by chemical means," is obvious he's setting himself up.

Heh.

Wonder how many sites like this one are out there in the "internets"?

http://www.aboundingjoy.com/scientists.htm

Abounding Joy!

(The purpose of this page is to present quotations from scientists that illustrate their recognition that the darwinian theory of evolution is bad science.)

Quotemining is something creationists are notorious for. Talkorigins has a "quotemine project" because of how widespread it is.

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/quotes/ ... oject.html

[Guest]

Here is the full context of the first quote I mentioned:

http://64.233.167.104/search?q=cache:o2 ... 0Earth.pdf

It's a defense of the RNA-world hypothesis of abiogenesis.

Literally the entire paper goes about explaining why his "at first glance" problem really isn't a problem. To portray the proper context, you basically have to quote the full paper. It's 12 pages long. The reason he set up the problem this way is to make a compelling introduction to the RNA-world hypothesis. There are a class of RNA molecules that both catalyze reactions and contain heritable information. They perform both tradtional nucleic acid roles and protien roles. They are called "Ribozymes." He was setting himself up to talk about them.

Quoting the immediate context:

Anyone trying to solve this puzzle immediately encounters a
paradox. Nowadays nucleic acids are synthesized only with the help
of proteins, and proteins are synthesized only if their corresponding
nucleotide sequence is present. It is extremely improbable that
proteins and nucleic acids, both of which are structurally complex,
arose spontaneously in the same place at the same time. Yet it also
seems impossible to have one without the other. And so, at first
glance, one might have to conclude that life could never, in fact,
have originated by chemical means.
In the late 1960s Carl R. Woese of the University of Illinois, Francis
Crick, then at the Medical Research Council in England, and I
(working at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in San Diego)
independently suggested a way out of this difficulty. We proposed
that RNA might well have come first and established what is now
called the RNA world - a world in which RNA catalyzed all the
reactions necessary for a precursor of life's last common ancestor
to survive and replicate. We also posited that RNA could
subsequently have developed the ability to link amino acids
together into proteins. This scenario could have occurred, we
noted, if prebiotic RNA had two properties not evident today: a
capacity to replicate without the help of proteins and an ability to
catalyze every step of protein synthesis.
There were a few reasons why we favored RNA over DNA as the
originator of the genetic system, even though DNA is now the main
repository of hereditary information. One consideration was that the
ribonucleotides in RNA are more readily synthesized than are the
deoxyribonucleotides in DNA. Moreover, it was easy to envision
ways that DNA could evolve from RNA and then, being more stable,
take over RNA's role as the guardian of heredity. We suspected that
RNA came before proteins in part because we had difficulty
composing any scenario in which proteins could replicate in the
absence of nucleic acids.
During the past 10 years, a fair amount of evidence has lent
credence to the idea that the hypothetical RNA world did exist and
lead to the advent of life based on DNA, RNA and protein.

So either Kevin is an idiot of disturbing proportions, or he never read this paper and just cut and pasted some obviously dishonest quotemine from an antievolution source.

[_Trevor]

So either Kevin is an idiot of disturbing proportions, or he never read this paper and just cut and pasted some obviously dishonest quotemine from an antievolution source.

I am sympathetic to what you are saying here, and imagine that you think the latter is the case, but I also wanted to point out your use of the logical fallacy of "false dilemma."