Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Evolution

His math-based argument is grounded on a false premise, i.e., the apparently sudden appearance of a gigantic zoology of completely new species in a geologically short period of time. This isn't, in fact, what evolutionists propose about the Cambrian Explosion. They propose that this enormous number of species suddenly (in terms of geologic time scales) appeared in the fossil record, not that they popped into existence in a geologically short period of time. What actually occurred was that all those species categories suddenly (from a geological time scale perspective) took on characteristics that made fossilization possible, i.e., hard (mineralized) body parts as an adaptive response to the first appearance of predators possessed of jaws.

If the premise is defective, which theirs clearly is, all conclusions based on it are presumed faulty, no matter how rigorous the math.

Misleading, if not outright false. Micro-mutations occurring by natural selection are massively supported by evidence and no one but the most doctrinaire young earth creationist thinks otherwise, but that's not where the fight is. The debate is whether the same process that can cause a small change in finch beak size (for example or variation among dog size, shape or color) has the power to create life from inorganic matter or to change a dog into a horse. On that question the evidence shows overwhelmingly that natural selection is not up to the task. In the first place, natural selection is non-starter until you have at least a simple life form. But origin of life researchers don't have a clue how that life form could possibly have emerged from inorganic matter. All they've got is hand-waving speculation. Literally, they've made virtually no progress on this issue since Darwin's time. Furthermore, the odds that natural selection (assuming away the origin of life problem) can generate the massive amounts of information needed to generate even one simple protein are overwhelmingly tiny. So tiny in fact that it is essentially impossible. Here's a summary of how physicist Gerard Schroder illustrates the odds:

"In an experiment conducted by the British National Council of Arts a computer was placed in a cage with six monkeys. After one month of hammering away at it (as well as using it as a bathroom!) the monkey’s produced 50 typed pages---but not a single word. Schroeder noted that this was the case even though the shortest word in the English language is one letter (A or I). A is a word only if there is a space on either side of it. If we take it that the keyboard has 30 characters (the 26 letters and other symbols), then the likelihood of getting a one letter word is 30 x 30 x 30, which is 27,000. The likelihood of getting a one letter word is one chance out of 27,000. Schroeder then applied the probabilities to the sonnet analogy. What’s the chance of getting a Shakespearean sonnet?” he asked? He continued: All the sonnets are the same length. They’re by definition fourteen lines long. I picked the one I knew the opening for, “Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer’s Day?” I counted the number of letters; there are 488 letters in that sonnet. What’s the likelihood of hammering away and getting 488 letters in the exact sequence as in “Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer’s Day”? What you end up with is 26 multiplied by itself 488 times----or 26 to the 488th power. Or, in other words, in base 10, 10 to the 690th. [Now] the number of particles in the universe---not grains of sand, I’m talking about protons, electrons and neutrons---is 10 to the 80th. Ten to the 80th is 1 with 80 zeros after it. There are not enough particles in the universe to write down the trials; you’d be off by a factor of 10 to the 600th. If you took the entire universe and converted it to computer chips---forget monkeys---each one weighing a millionth of a gram and had each computer chip able to spin out 488 trials at, say, a million times a second; if you turn the entire universe into these microcomputer chips and these chips were spinning a million times a second [producing] random letters, the number of trials you would get since the beginning of time would be 10 to the 90th trials. It would be off again by a factor of 10 to the 600th. You will never get a sonnet by chance. The universe would have to be 10 to the 600th times larger. Yet the world just things monkeys can do it every time.”

And the information required in DNA to sequence a single simple protein is vastly more than the information contained in a simple Shakespearean sonnet.

To use the car analogy a bit more. Someone who did not believe that cars were made by an intelligent being would see the fact that all cars are now fuel injected instead of having carburetors as evidence of evolution in their fuel systems. And truly fuel injection is better. But how did it get that way naturally? The evolutionist would say it evolved. The next question would be. How? And if it did so, where are the transitional forms? And more importantly, how would the transitional forms work?

Would the car have a cylinder with a fuel injector and one that received it the old way? Would it have a cylinder that was partially fuel injected and carbureted? Would the positions of the valves and the spark plugs be changed as well as would be necessary? And so on and so forth. Very quickly one would be bogged down in a morass as that one understands that with a car and its fuel system there are several different systems that are required to work in conjunction with others in certain ways and that if you haphazardly mix these systems as one might in a natural process, then the car doesn’t run. And if it doesn’t run, then it is dead and it does not live to pass it’s genes to the next generation so that future cars can evolve. And if one considered all the intricate parts that had to work in conjunction just so to make that fuel injected car work, one would realize that even in nearly an infinite amount of time, a modern pickup could never evolve by natural means.

There exists no such fight, except in the fevered imaginations of science deniers. Science is unified in accepting what's quite evidently a fact, i.e., that all species are related, and descend from common ancestors. The degree of genetic and morphological dissimilarity is evidence merely of how early in time their common ancestor lived.

You don’t even understand the argument. Tarquin states it pretty well.

First your statement utterly begs the question of "how" and is completely non-responsive to my post on probabilities. Similarity in morphology or genetics does not necessarily imply common ancestry and, as we know, the fossil record is massively discordant with Neo-Darwinism. Secondly, science is not "united" on the question (the list of highly regarded intellectuals and scientists who think Neo-Darwinism cannot possibly explain the origin or development of life on this planet is long and impressive) , but even if it were, that fact would be irrelevant because scientific truth his not decided by committee, but by evidence. As Einstein famously remarked when Hitler trotted out his finest physicists to denounced Einstein's theories as false, "it only takes one to prove me wrong." The very fact that you have to employ the logical fallacy of "appeal to consensus" shows that you can't respond on the merits. You remind me of apologists for global warming who insist on the same logical fallacy (scientific consensus). In anv event, so called "science" (consensus opinion) has been spectacularly wrong in the past, as it is wrong right now on global warming, wouldn't you agree?

Ask, how can there be a creation, without a Creator?

I don't need to reinvent the wheel here at the Fire every time someone comes along and asserts that evolution didn't happen. Believe what you like.

This is no creation. Its a accident.

What kind of accident?

Some "Accident"

;-{>8

We're just letting you know your tire is flat. ;-{>8

Like the earth, I suppose. I assume you are one of those, too.

God said. "Let there be evolution."

Thank me later.

Could be. Why not?

Ouch.

You are such a meanie. A true believer, but, never the less a real meanie. BWahahahaha. ;-{>8