Re: virus: Making a monkey of Darwin (or Spot the Fallacy)

Todd M Kuipers esq (tkuipers@merak.com)
Mon, 31 Jul 1995 17:18:21 -0600


>I was outraged to find this piece in yesterday's edition of
>The Calgary Herald. My first impulse was to fire off a letter
>to the editor, refuting it point by point. But even if they
>printed it few people would read the rebuttal. Such is the
>disadvantage of retromedia like newspapers.
>
>At least taking it apart in this forum will be a good exercise
>of our critical thinking. What do you think the author's intent
>is?

Too prove again that news papers like the Herald pander to the
semi-intelligent Oprahized masses.

>Psssst! Don't tell. The most explosive secret of the worldwide
>intellectual establishment is the rapid crumbling of Darwinian
>evolution theory.

Bad opener... but not bad if he could reasonably prove anything.

>At the 1966 Wistar Institute Symposium, Sir Peter Medawar expressed
>this widespread skepticism on behalf of an imposing assembly
>of scientists. The fantastical idea that all life began from non-life,
>then evolved by gradual random mutation and natural selection from a
>single-celled common ancestor into complex higher life forms, has
>fallen on hard times.

whoa... 1966 an excellent barometer for 1995 opinions. Haven't we figured
out a lot of things since then? Seems to me that over 30 years, opinions of
anykind sway and shift.

>Molecular biologist Michael Denton spoke for many scientists
>in his lucid Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, when he wrote that
>"ultimately, the Darwinian theory of evolution is . . . the great
>cosmogenic myth of the 20th century." A pseudo-scientific Genesis
>story that presents God as a blind process instead of a wilful
>creator. Well, the reputational fur -- uh, feathers -- are flying.

oooh nice pun, this is another reason I always by two to three copies of my
local paper. Statiscally how many scientists is he speaking for? Is this
the 4 out 5 scientists recommend creationism between meals?

>And yet the broader public is largely unaware of this bitter
>dispute. Museums and textbooks continue to display standard models
>of, for example, the famous "horse sequence" (tiny weird horse
>transforms into normal big horse over millennia). But Dr. Niles
>Eldredge, a curator of the American Museum of Natural History, said:
>"It (the horse sequence) has been presented as the literal truth in
>textbook after textbook " and complained that this is "speculative,"
>and "lamentable." Meaning, possibly a lie.

A lie is an intentional untruth; for it to be a lie someone would have had
to willfully and knowingly propagate it.

>The public also believes all critics of evolution theory are
>religious nuts, when in fact the main thrust of criticism comes from a
>variety of fields within science itself, mostly from agnostics
>doubting Darwin as much as God.

...t'would be as easy to believe in God and evolution

>Their main bone of contention is that if Darwin's theory of
>random mutation and natural selection were true, then just as there is
>plenty of fossil evidence for all the known species, there ought to be
>lots of it for the millions of "transitional forms" of plants and
>animals that gradually evolved into their final forms.

Rapid mutation of flora and fauna has been shown to occur when circumstances
arise.

>But no sirree. Once a loon or a bat or a lobster, well that's it.
>You're stuck. For 500 million years, from first lobster fossil to the
>living model dropped in your boiling kettle- there's no change. The
>overwhelming impression to be gotten from a study of the fossil record
>is not evolution, but stasis. No one has ever found a maybe, or partly
>loon or bat or horse. You know-something on the way to becoming those
>species from whatever it was before.

It could be that the lobster you're eating has never had a need to shift
itself radically from its ecological niche. Might be comfortable where it
is. Stress on system causes adaptation not constant envr. such has could
have likely existed in one place or another over millions of years.

>Some argue that even the basic idea of gradual evolution is
>self-defeating because if species depend on optimal adaptation for
>survival, then anything on the way to becoming optimal couldn't
>survive to adapt, could it?

This assumes that an organism is violently thrust into an environment it
cannot live in. Climate generally changes very slowly...

>And then, there's the problem of simultaneity. The evolution of
>interactive parts of organisms (the iris, the cornea, the eyelid flap,
>say) would all have to change at once. How could a blind process
>orchestrate such harmony?

why? these items could easily develop in stages. first a cornea to see, a
iris later to adapt to light changes, and an eyelid later to keep the bloddy
things clean.

>There is no good answer. That's why Darwin himself said that "the
>human eye, to this day, gives me a cold shudder," and, "the sight of a
>feather in a peacock's tail . . . makes me sick."

What context was this taken from?

>Perhaps the most disturbing fact for evolutionists is that more than
>three-quarters of Earth's crust is lifeless. No fossils. Then, in the
>so-called Cambrian explosion," life suddenly appears, demonstrating
>most of the same species we know today, with the same huge gaps
>between them, and no evidence of any transitional forms whatsoever
>Even modern agnostic scientists routinely refer to this as "abrupt
>appearance," or "creation."

Is there really a possibility that the you will find all the original non
complex virii and bateria that existed before cell structure evolved?

>Fish appeared abruptly in complex for (Ommanney: "a veritable
>explosion;") same with reptiles, and birds (Ager: "we find not gradual
>evolution, but . . . sudden explosion,") and the primates, said
>Johansen, spring out of nowhere, as it were. They; here today. They
>have no yesterday."

What is a radical appearance? a couple of million years? The explosive
shifts in diversity could be caused by explosive shifts in the environment
the organisms live in.

>It's the same for man. Geneticist Richard Lewontin, former president
>of the Society for the Study of Evolution, and professor of zoology at
>Harvard, said that "there is a vast weight of empirical evidence about
>the universe which says that unless you invoke supernatural causes,
>the birds-life in general-could not have arisen from muck by any
>natural processes" (though he prefers a natural answer).

What we have thought of as supernatural has changed radically over the
centuries. On the flip side he says that there is impirical evidence
opposing this idea as well...

>About man evolving from apes, he said in his 1982 book Human
>Diversity: "All th fossils which have been dug up and are claimed to
>be ancestors-we haven't the faintest idea whether they are ancestors."

Who said they necessarily we're ancestors? Is my cousin my children's ancestor?

>Probability crunchers information theorists ar molecular biologists
>als weigh in against evolution theory.
>Computers programmed to mimic Darwinian evolution just jam up.

maybe they is not complecks enuf yet... you're modelling life not traffic
patterns.

>The likelihood of ran dom creation of only ones single protein (of
>some 200,000 human protein is one in one billion.

Wow and we've only had a few billion years to get this one together, and I
didn't think that we were creating humankind in the beginning.

>So Nobel laureate Francis Crick, discover of DNA, said the whole field
>has "too much speculation running after too few facts" . . . and has
>suggested life came to Earth by "panspermia" seeding from outer
>space. According to famous astronomer and mathematics professor Fred
>Hoyle, the information content of a single enzyme is unimaginably
>vast. "Evolutionary processes would require several times the time
>since creation of the universe. The chance that higher life forms
>might have emerged in this way is comparable with the chance that a
>tornado sweeping through a junkyard might assemble a Boeing 747 from
>the materials therein."

Sounds like infinite monkeys..., and weirder things probably have happened.

>By now, Darwin's theory sounds like monkey business.

another one of those leading edge puns... I've gotta get a hold of pun
source...

-------------------------------------------------------------------
Todd M. Kuipers | Merak Projects Ltd.
New Media Propagandist | http://www.merak.com
tkuipers@merak.com | Developer of Oil & Gas Software
(403) 294 4336 | Calgary, Houston, Australia
http://www.merak.com/~tkuipers | Treekiller (403) 294 4301
-------------------------------------------------------------------
ytivarg luftif ni sgge gniyal egarag eht ni strovac god aishcuf eht
-------------------------------------------------------------------