Question Evolution! 15 questions evolutionists cannot adequately answer

[kramerfan86]

I think that story was told 3300 years ago, not 1000. Science can guess at the past all it wants too, but the scientific method is based on observation, not guess work. Now if people can band together and agree that something happened in the past without observation, they can call that a theory all they want.

Extrapolation paints a nice canvas, but it does not take photos like a real camera.

We do see things though. The fossils, the DNA evidence in modern animals, and the acts of natural selection on a smaller scale in modern times. There is plenty of observation to justify the theory.

ah, your just afraid that people are going to hear both sides.

No, the point is that one of the sides isnt science for the reasons that have been put down over and over. Even many religious scientists realize this fact and as such separate science from religious belief. Even if you think evolution is a process guided or created by some supernatural being, that is not science. That is why you NEVER see scientific theory make a positive or negative stand on God. Evolution for instance neither argues for OR against God's existence.

 

[Midgard Eagle]

ah, your just afraid that people are going to hear both sides.

Not at all. If a teacher wants to tell his or her kids that evolution is a proven fact, but that there are also people who prefer to believe we were created in part or as a whole through supernatural means, that's perfectly fine with me. That's no different from kids being taught that we used to think the Earth was flat, but that we know better today .

What I object to is kids being taught that evolution is unproven and no better than bronze age mythology.

Science is philosophy with different assumptions.

No more than cartography or mathematics. You're making the common mistake of looking at science the way you look at organized religion.

 

[Whiskey_Lord]

I'd say that science has a far better track record for improving quality of life than religion does. We wouldn't have modern medicine without evolutionary biology.

 

[SS-18 ICBM]

It is funny that the last time I brought up "witnesses" that was thrown out as hearsay and unreliable.

Some witnesses can be unreliable. Just as how some measuring instruments can give false readings. Do you understand how that works?

 

[Ahovking]

Every question religious idiots have asked has been answered. It's just they either don't accept or understand the answers.
In fact, more often than not they don't even understand the questions, nor the subject they ask questions about, and they don't even LISTEN to the answers or the attempt to bring out of their ignorance. Which is why we constantly see the same idiotic bad points coming back despite being answered or destroyed about fifty thousands times a year.

Moderator Action: The word idiot could have been used a bit less in your post.
Please read the forum rules: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=422889

you didn't Answer the question you just did what any threaten person would do.....lash out

 

[mangxema]

Intelligent Design/Creationism has no evidence to even back it up, and it is essentially “God did it”. It’s intellectually dishonest, ignores the piles of evidence, and even the courts know it’s nothing but religion, inserted into science (where it does not belong) as evident in the Kitzmiller vs. Dover ruling and the fact that even a religious judge, such as Judge Jones III saw past the defendant’s’ arguments and lies.

Seriously, there is nothing scientific about Creationism/Intelligent design, there is no actual evidence. Don't compare the two, science has a process of finding out things, in a usually objective manner, religion does not.

Side note: I recently read this book by the main witness for the plaintiffs about this topic, and he basically rips ID to pieces.

 

[classical_hero]

Intelligent Design/Creationism has no evidence to even back it up, and it is essentially “God did it”. It’s intellectually dishonest, ignores the piles of evidence, and even the courts know it’s nothing but religion, inserted into science (where it does not belong) as evident in the Kitzmiller vs. Dover ruling and the fact that even a religious judge, such as Judge Jones III saw past the defendant’s’ arguments and lies.

Seriously, there is nothing scientific about Creationism/Intelligent design, there is no actual evidence. Don't compare the two, science has a process of finding out things, in a usually objective manner, religion does not.

The biggest problem for Evolution is, where did all the information come from? There is no known way that we can have all this info we have by an accident. Take how Dr Venter "created" synthetic life. http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2010/may/20/craig-venter-synthetic-life-form

Craig Venter and his team have built the genome of a bacterium from scratch and incorporated it into a cell to make what they call the world's first synthetic life form

I bolded the important part, which is very much important in the whole discussion is that he technically did not create life but just the "code" for life, to make any sense of the code he had to use already available "hardware" to get the code working. To fully synthesise life he would have also have to create a cell out of nothing, but that feat is impossible because in the DNA is the code for making the hardware. It is a catch 22 situation that is unlikely to be solved. Another problem with this work is that it is not random mutations and it most certainly did not evolve to get to the state it is, I would say it was intelligently designed by Dr Venter and his team of scientists over a decade and at a great cost. I am not saying what he done is nothing important, it is a massive step forward, but in the issue of the creation of life, it is a road block and solves none of the problems of the origin of the first life. Louis Pastuer demonstrated the "Life comes from Life" and that has not been disproved once.

About the Dover Ruling, if we are going to use the courts to decide what is science is, then we should be stuck in the 1920's after the scope's trial used the latest scientific evidence that Man had evolved from ape, such as the use of "A Civic Biology" that taught that Blacks were inferior to Whites and lenty of other material that is now no longer in use and rightly so in scientific research today.

 

[PeteAtoms]

The biggest problem for Evolution is, where did all the information come from? There is no known way that we can have all this info we have by an accident. Take how Dr Venter "created" synthetic life. http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2010/may/20/craig-venter-synthetic-life-form
I bolded the important part, which is very much important in the whole discussion is that he technically did not create life but just the "code" for life, to make any sense of the code he had to use already available "hardware" to get the code working. To fully synthesise life he would have also have to create a cell out of nothing, but that feat is impossible because in the DNA is the code for making the hardware. It is a catch 22 situation that is unlikely to be solved. Another problem with this work is that it is not random mutations and it most certainly did not evolve to get to the state it is, I would say it was intelligently designed by Dr Venter and his team of scientists over a decade and at a great cost. I am not saying what he done is nothing important, it is a massive step forward, but in the issue of the creation of life, it is a road block and solves none of the problems of the origin of the first life. Louis Pastuer demonstrated the "Life comes from Life" and that has not been disproved once.

As soon as science comes up with a theory concerning the origin of life, we can start a thread about that, but this is a thread about evolution. And most evolutionists (a.k.a. scientists) will tell you that a good theory hasn't been found yet.

Good news though, they aren't going to abandoned the tried and true scientific method just because it has yet to be discovered. And there are no decent alternatives that one can fall back on. Sunday School is not an objective source of information.

So, in your mind, complexity = designed ? There's no way you can come to that conclusion objectively.

 

[Antilogic]

Side note: I recently read this book by the main witness for the plaintiffs about this topic, and he basically rips ID to pieces.

Kenneth Miller is a genius. He has a great lecture on Youtube that is worth a view: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JVRsWAjvQSg.

The biggest problem for Evolution is, where did all the information come from? There is no known way that we can have all this info we have by an accident. Take how Dr Venter "created" synthetic life. http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2010/may/20/craig-venter-synthetic-life-form
I bolded the important part, which is very much important in the whole discussion is that he technically did not create life but just the "code" for life, to make any sense of the code he had to use already available "hardware" to get the code working. To fully synthesise life he would have also have to create a cell out of nothing, but that feat is impossible because in the DNA is the code for making the hardware. It is a catch 22 situation that is unlikely to be solved. Another problem with this work is that it is not random mutations and it most certainly did not evolve to get to the state it is, I would say it was intelligently designed by Dr Venter and his team of scientists over a decade and at a great cost. I am not saying what he done is nothing important, it is a massive step forward, but in the issue of the creation of life, it is a road block and solves none of the problems of the origin of the first life. Louis Pastuer demonstrated the "Life comes from Life" and that has not been disproved once.

About the Dover Ruling, if we are going to use the courts to decide what is science is, then we should be stuck in the 1920's after the scope's trial used the latest scientific evidence that Man had evolved from ape, such as the use of "A Civic Biology" that taught that Blacks were inferior to Whites and lenty of other material that is now no longer in use and rightly so in scientific research today.

As already mentioned, the validity of the theory of evolution is independent of how biogenesis occurred. However, on this subject, you may be interested in reading some of the papers on "soap bubble metabolism" (look on the journal aggregation websites like Web of Science). Lipid bilayer bubbles spontaneously form under a wide range of conditions, and to some extent self-regulate their internal environments by inhibiting the transfer of larger organics through the membrane while allowing water and smaller organics through. There's a hypothesis that if NA got trapped inside these bubbles and replicated itself, you would have all the elements of life (self-regulation of environment, replication, etc.).

I bolded part of your post which I think exposes a fallacy--technically, any experiment a scientist sets up is man-made, but that should not prevent us from drawing conclusions that can be applied to nature. For example, just because I can make a fire in a lab doesn't mean fire can't naturally occur as the result of a lightning strike in the forest, and I can understand how a fire might behave in a forest by studying how different factors affect it in my experiment. This experiment was a controlled system to test an individual step in biogenesis. While it does not prove biogenesis occurred according to a specific method consisting of many steps, it shows one of the possible steps is viable. You should not discount it simply because all the answers didn't fall out of one experiment--they never do.

That also doesn't mean it won't be solved. It will just take time, insight, good experimental design, and tons of underpaid graduate students.

 

[GoodSarmatian]

The biggest problem for Evolution is, where did all the information come from? There is no known way that we can have all this info we have by an accident.

That's a very legitimate point.
I mean if the world was 4 billion years old this would probably be enough time for information to accumulate, but since it was only created 6000 years ago evolution is obviously impossible.

 

[Whiskey_Lord]

Foolish rationalist. Clearly, since we do not know the origin of life, it means that god must have done it.

 

[Arakhor]

Here's a question that I cannot adequately answer - why must every mention of evolution suddenly involve abiogenesis?

 

[Whiskey_Lord]

Because it's the last refuge for the pathetic charade of creationism/ID?

 

[Berzerker]

I'd like to know why life took so long to start. Thats a bit more than a 1/2 billion years before life appears. And we have evidence of surface water, even oceans going back at least 4.3 bya, so the theory the surface was molten all that time is bogus. But then something happened ~4 bya, the Moon got slammed by debris - from us, thats why the Moon is lopsided. Plate tectonics begins building landmasses and life shows up...

And if the "Earth" or whatever it was at the time got hit by something big, where's the evidence of this collision? What was the Earth's orbit before the collision? Genesis describes a dark water covered world before "Light" begins the process of creation. But what is this "Light"? God calls it "Day" and the darkness is called "Night" - and God separates the two. That sounds to me like a spinning planet in close(r) proximity to a star.

But how does God define "Earth"? According to Genesis a dark water covered world was here and "the Earth" was without form and void - rather strange description, the Earth was here, but not in its form as Earth. So what does God call "Earth"? The dry land that appears later in Genesis, the waters were here first before God even arrived on the scene. Earth is the dry land, thats why it was without form and void - it was under the waters. Native American myths describe a similar creation, a diver animal brings mud up from below to form the land. And our science says the same thing, but plate tectonics built the landmasses.

The creation myths describe panspermia, I suspect our solar system was invaded ~4 bya by remnants from a nearby supernova, perhaps even the same one(s) that triggered the collapse and formation of our solar nebula.

 

[Leoreth]

Ignoring all these rather forced attempts to reconcile Genesis with our current knowlegde, we don't know why it took so long for life to emerge, because we don't really know how it emerged.

Without knowing the causes, we can't say which causes weren't present over that period. My knowledge on how the first life synchs up with the geological formation of Earth is rather blurry, but I've heard it suggested often that roughly at that time the "right" biochemical composition of Earth's atmosphere was present for the first time, as well as a manageable amount of cosmic radiation.

But again, that's more of a question concerning abiogenesis, not evolution.

 

[CELTICEMPIRE]

About the Dover Ruling, if we are going to use the courts to decide what is science is, then we should be stuck in the 1920's after the scope's trial used the latest scientific evidence that Man had evolved from ape, such as the use of "A Civic Biology" that taught that Blacks were inferior to Whites and lenty of other material that is now no longer in use and rightly so in scientific research today.

oh, yeah, I forgot about that, the racists of the 20s thought that science had proved their point.

 

[Leoreth]

"A Civic Biology" is the equivalent to Creationism here. Abusing science to reach a conclusion that was already set in stone beforehand.

 

[useless]

You do realise that the Bible has also been used to justify some pretty horrible stuff? You know, Slavery, Homophobia, Rape and Racism?

Seriously this is getting off topic, and it's a tangent.

 

[bathsheba666]

Seriously this is getting off topic, and it's a tangent.

That is the basic creationist strategy, in a nutshell.

 

[Ajidica]

Here's a question that I cannot adequately answer - why must every mention of evolution suddenly involve abiogenesis?

Because abiogenesis isn't a very common term for most people Creationists hope to create a false validity by linking evolution to something we know very little about and that most people believe God did influence.