Evidence for Creationism and Against Evolution

[Rían]

Originally posted by BeardofPants
Rian, please see my post above on Relative Dating methods. I have a couple of rejoinders to your comments above. Firstly, the scientists in question are working in their fields of expertise, and therefore would know the rough time frame within which their research falls within. Secondly, they can use relative dating methods - i.e. subjective dating methods - to ascertain another time-frame before sending off the samples to be dated with radiometric methods. Thirdly, radiometric methods are EXPENSIVE to use. Therefore, it is of absolute necessity to ascertain at least a time-frame within which the specimen in question dates to using other, cheaper methods, before having it confirmed using the more expensive methods. What part of this do you have a problem with exactly?

Hey, why doesn't AIM work with you? I just tried to IM you to talk about this

[Cirdan]

You're still not putting the whole picture together.

Fossils have never been assumed to be any date. They are estimated to cover a rate of dates based on the stratigraphy principles. The only assumption made about fossils is that they may be from the same time span from which the same fossils have been found in of locations, whose geologic ages have been determined stratiographically.

In addition to the priciple of supraposition the are constants based on the physical properties of the rock. Sedimentary rocks accumulate in very specifc ranges of conditions. Metamirphic rocks require very specific pressures (depths) and temperatures and cooling rates to form.

Tectonic activity adds features such as folds and faults so that features like ingneous intrusions that cross these features are younger by logical deduction.

For example, here on the east coast there are some very old, fold metagreywackes (mudstones) that make up the Piedmont Plateau. These are overlain on the west by gently folded Paleozoic sedimentary rocks. These rocks are cross cut by the blue ridge and related intrusive activity that was part of the spreading of the Atlantic Ocean. Additionally there are undeformed sedimetary formations on the eastern flank of the plateau.

Before anyone knew about Plate Tectonics geologists noticed that the exact same formations (sequences fossils etc) existed in Europe, Africa, and North America but limited to regions close to the coast. When Plate Tectonics was first proposed. geologists measured the rate at which the ocean floors spread, mapped the formations that made up the sea floor. The ages correlated very well with the radiometric date. Sea floor spreading has so consistently correlated with the radiometric dates of the core samples taken from intervals from the spreading ridges. Magnetic reversals confirm the consistency and parallel band nature of the sea floor basalts.

Observed deposition rates for different grain sizes, faunal suites, and sedimentary structures in older rocks can be observed in current environments of deposition which allow the measurement of the time frame it takes to accumulate those certain rock types.

For the radiometric dating to be nothing but an assuption then all the other correlating techniques must be wrong as well. Materials would have to defy they physical properties, continents rip apart at speeds that are orders of magnitude greater than observed. Sand would have to suddenly change the stream flow rate at which it deposits or erodes. Melting points of rocks would have to change. Rocks would suddenly have to bear pressures they never have been observed to bear without fracturing. Not to mention that the half lives of isotopes would have to be variable over time (sometimes, and unobservably).

There is no scientific basis to cast aspertions on radiometric dating in general. Rejecting it requires rejecting observable, repeatable, testable principles, known facts and almost all pysical laws.

The idea that an omnipotent god is not bound by any of these things is plausable, but that is just the "magic trick" explanation which does not require the rejection of radiometric dating or evolution for that matter. The only obstacle to achieving theistic evolution is a dogmatic adherence to a literal interpretation of the creation tales in the judeao-christian bible.

Seems to be less messy to see the biblical stories as theological, educational, cultural metaphor than to reject facts that can be easily demonstrated as truth.

[brownjenkins]

nice research paper pants! i give you an A+

also RÃ*an, there is not just one secret society of evolution scientists... fame and fortune is made by coming up with better solutions... if there was a valid theory out there to completely debunk the idea of evolution it would be jumped upon without a second thought

[Rían]

Originally posted by brownjenkins
also RÃ*an, there is not just one secret society of evolution scientists...

Is there MORE than one?

fame and fortune is made by coming up with better solutions... if there was a valid theory out there to completely debunk the idea of evolution it would be jumped upon without a second thought

I rather doubt it, but that's another story ...

BTW, I don't think evolutionists killed JFK!

and I have some bits to post on dating in answer to the recent posts, but just haven't dug up the energy yet to get to it - I've been enjoying the Tolkien threads. It's hard to be the minority poster here, and I need to be in the right mood to tackle it.

[Insidious Rex]

Well heres another thing to worry about for you unfortunately. But its defenitely an interesting development for those who haven’t already heard. Basically the skinny is that a group of scientists have discovered a gene in humans that inhibits the growth of certain jaw muscles that would otherwise restrict the capacity of the skull to expand thereby limiting the brain capacity of the individual. But with this mutant gene “we� (our ancient ancestors) were free to evolve the much more complex brain that has proven so successful for us. One should note that the mutation is first noted approx. 2.5 million years ago a time that also matches up with a sudden blossoming of tool making and higher thinking displays by ancient man. Massive coincidence? Or do they have something here. Heres the full article but I think the most important thing to keep in mind here is NOT that this is either absolute fact or dead wrong but that genetic finds are beggining to show a regular pattern of coordination with fossil evidence. Two pieces to this ancient puzzle seem to be coming together more and more with each new discovery. Its also interesting to note that this shows us that man is not a product of “evolutionary perfection� at all but in fact what made him successful was actually a DEFECT from what would have been normal for ancient apes. Which brings us back to that whole “genetic burden� thing. But anyway, see the next thread:

[Insidious Rex]

Chin Up: Ape-Human Split Was a Jaw-Breaker
New Study Reignites Debate Over How Modern Humans Evolved
By Rick Weiss - Washington Post
Wednesday, March 24, 2004; 7:07 PM

The evolutionary split between early humans and ancestral apes may have begun with a tiny mutation in a gene for jaw muscles -- a lucky break that allowed the skull to grow and make room for the enormous brain that would eventually become the hallmark of Homo sapiens.

That's the controversial conclusion of researchers from the University of Pennsylvania, whose discovery of the mutation, announced today, has reignited the long- smoldering debate over how modern humans evolved.

The Penn team's work suggests that early primate skulls -- much like the skulls of modern gorillas and chimpanzees -- were literally muscle-bound by powerful jaw muscles and cramped by the big bony spurs that anchored them. Only when a quirk of nature produced mutants with radically smaller jaw muscles was the skull free to expand from one generation to the next.

The rest, as the team says, is human history.

"The going joke around the lab is that this is the 'rft' mutation -- the 'room-for-thought' mutation," said Hansell H. Stedman, who led the new work, to be published in today's issue of the journal Nature.

The Penn hypothesis quickly prompted an extraordinary range of expert commentary, from ecstatic to downright scornful.

"I love this paper. It's perfect," said University of Michigan paleoanthropologist Milford H. Wolpoff.

"Let's see," quipped the more skeptical Tim D. White of the University of California, Berkeley, by e-mail: "We got big brains because little muscles . . . didn't hold the cranial bones tightly together. I may stop chewing tonite[sic]."

But supporters and critics of the Penn proposal agreed that it is an important scientific first to have found a genetic mutation that apparently occurred just when significant physical changes were occurring in pre-humans, as documented by a number of fossil finds.

"I have to imagine there's going to be a good number of genetic discoveries like this," said Sean Carroll, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator and evolutionary geneticist at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. "Even if this mutation doesn't end up accounting for as many things as are now being tossed up there on the blackboard," he said, the work heralds a new era in which genetic studies will help scientists fill gaps in the story of human evolution.

That era has been made possible, Carroll and others said, because of the recent deciphering of the human genome and the near completion of the chimpanzee genome project, which will allow detailed genetic comparisons of humans and their nearest living relatives.

The path to the latest discovery began when Stedman went searching for genes that might be implicated in human muscle diseases. While scanning the database of the entire human genome, he happened upon a previously unrecognized muscle gene.

The so-called MYH16 gene builds major components of two jaw muscles -- the masseter and the temporalis -- that are prominent in every non-human primate species alive today. The gene had gone unnoticed because in humans, the Penn team found, it is completely disabled by a tiny mutation -- accounting for the much reduced size of those muscles.

By tallying the mutations that have occurred in the human version of the gene, and knowing the rate at which such mutations accumulate, the Penn team calculated that the gene was first disabled about 2.4 million years ago -- just before the skulls of early humans began their stunning increase in size and launching the meteoric ascendance of the human species.

"We're suggesting that possibly this mutation initiated an evolutionary cascade," Penn team member Nancy Minugh-Purvis said. Free from the big temporalis and masseter muscles, which wrapped around the head and held the otherwise expandable skull bones together, early humans could accommodate other genetic changes that increased brain size, she suggested. And the big bony anchors for those muscles, now obsolete, disappeared over time, she said, also allowing for an increase in brain case capacity.

"I'm very positive and excited about this work," said Peter Currie, chief of developmental biology at the Victor Chang Cardiac Research Institute in Sydney, Australia. "You can't have a bigger brain if there's nowhere to put it."

Life would not have been easy for the first primates affected by the mutation, as they scrambled for survival with weaker jaws than their rivals. But contemporaneous events in human evolution may have helped these first mutants get by. It was, after all, just about 2.5 million years ago that pre-humans began to use stone tools -- an innovation that allowed food to be ground and chopped, reducing reliance on big jaw muscles for grinding and tearing.

Some scientists also suspect that social and behavioral advances around that time may have allowed the creatures to communicate in ways more sophisticated than the threat of lethal bites, one of the more important functions of the masseter muscle.

Like so much in paleoanthropology, those scenarios are speculative. And several experts said that for now, at least, they're unconvinced by the Penn data.

"This idea that until you had small chewing muscles you couldn't have big brains, I just don't buy it," said Daniel Lieberman, a Harvard biological anthropologist. He added that he could not say that the theory was wrong, but that he wanted more evidence.

C. Owen Lovejoy, an anthropologist at Kent State University, has doubts too. Human complexity probably emerged not so much from major genetic changes such as the loss of MYH16, he said, but from more subtle changes affecting the activity levels of genes that humans and other primates still share.

But Maynard Olson, director of the University of Washington's genome center, said the Penn work backed up his sense that "at a molecular level, humans are going to emerge largely as degenerate apes": that is, humans became human not so much because of mutations that brought radical improvements but because of genetic losses, failures and glitches -- such as the loss of MYH16 -- that also brought advantages.

Study leader Stedman said it doesn't really matter who believes what at this point. What's important, he said, is that genetics is starting to complement the study of fossils.

"We're not trying to dogmatically state anything," he said. "But we want to raise consciousness about a very plausible connection between all the pieces of the story."

[brownjenkins]

interesting read IR... thanks for posting

[Cirdan]

Yes, very interesting, IR. However, the genetic differences between hominids and other primates are logically significant in differentiation/speciation. The significance and implications, as well as the sequence of events are debatable, as shown by the various points of view in the article regarding this particular finding and hypothesis. Researchers often over emphasize the importance of their findings. For instance, a recent news article announcing evidence for "seas" on Mars turned out to be evidence of a two inch deep puddle. I'm sure that there are a significant number of genetic variations that are equally neccessary for the speciation to have been complete.

Creationists should note the contention and rancor within the scientific community over the interpretation of such findings. They don't use up all their contempt on creationism. This article should allay Rian's doubts regarding BJ's statement about competing evolutionary hypotheses and the motivation to debunk the theories of fellow scientists.

[Insidious Rex]

Originally posted by Cirdan
Creationists should note the contention and rancor within the scientific community over the interpretation of such findings. They don't use up all their contempt on creationism. This article should allay Rian's doubts regarding BJ's statement about competing evolutionary hypotheses and the motivation to debunk the theories of fellow scientists.

yeah I thought it would be helpful to actually post a new study that many scientisist see differently for this very reason. Its normal for scientists to disagree about details without it meaning the WHOLE SYSTEM is dead wrong.

[GrayMouser]

Originally posted by RÃ*an
Hey, this just reminded me - I read something that was v. encourating while I was at the museum. Some of the PhD's from ICR were "allowed" to present a paper at an American Geological Society meeting (I can't find my notes right offhand, sorry) on some type of carbon element in diamonds. Given the evolutionary timeframes, this element (sorry, I can't recall the name) should NOT have been present in diamonds; however, with some techniques that are now available, the ICR scientists found that there WERE indeed amounts of this element. They presented the paper to their peers, and there was a comment that the findings were unusual and pointed to some possible problems in this area, and that was that.

And THAT is how it SHOULD be. Don't you guys agree? A scientist that has a valid degree from a recognized university should be able to present a scientific experiment to his/her peers for analysis.

Yet it was amazing that they even got in the door, because evolution scientists hold the reins in so many fields

Let scientific results stand or fall on their own merits, no matter if they go against popular BELIEFS or not. Don't you guys think that's the way it should be? It's NOT, all too often, sadly. And this stifles the growth of knowledge

Absolutely- that's how once controversial ideas like heliocentrism,
germ theory, atomic theory, quantum theory, plate tectonics and evolution came to be accepted- by scientists coming up with discrepancies and unexplained data that couldn't fit into the ruling paradigm.

If that's what scientific creationists spent their time doing, I don't think anyone woud possibly object.

Note that the scientists involved in the controversies above did NOT spend their time lobbying politicians to demand that their ideas be placed in elementary and secondary school textbooks, organising 'debates' for general audiences, printing comic books ridiculing their opponents or building museums to push their own ideas to the public.

They were serious scientists and fought their battles on the scientific level. The reason that creationists don't (with rare exceptions as you noted above) is that they can't- they have nothing to bring to the process- and that includes the IDers, who were supposed to be developing an institute for actually doing research, but have instead chosen to devote their efforts to public advocacy ( I was going to say 'propoganda', but let's keep it nice )

[GrayMouser]

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Originally posted by brownjenkins
also RÃ*an, there is not just one secret society of evolution scientists...
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Is there MORE than one?


quote:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
fame and fortune is made by coming up with better solutions... if there was a valid theory out there to completely debunk the idea of evolution it would be jumped upon without a second thought
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I rather doubt it, but that's another story ...

Not without a second thought- scientists, being human, have their own vested interests- but eventually, yeah.

My favorite argument on this:

1) Tycho Brahe, Christian Huyghens, Louis Agassiz.

2) Galileo, Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin

Group 1- all extremely eminent scientists of their time, all with great innovations to their credit, but each defenders of an established truth that was eventually rejected- geocentrism, relationism, and fixity of species respectively.

Group 2- revolutionaries who overturned the established order.

Is there any doubt which group any aspiring young scientist would want to be in?

[Rían]

Originally posted by GrayMouser
Absolutely- that's how once controversial ideas like heliocentrism,
germ theory, atomic theory, quantum theory, plate tectonics and evolution came to be accepted- by scientists coming up with discrepancies and unexplained data that couldn't fit into the ruling paradigm.

If that's what scientific creationists spent their time doing, I don't think anyone woud possibly object.

and I hope this can happen more often.

Note that the scientists involved in the controversies above did NOT spend their time lobbying politicians to demand that their ideas be placed in elementary and secondary school textbooks, organising 'debates' for general audiences, printing comic books ridiculing their opponents or building museums to push their own ideas to the public.

But these WERE scientists from ICR, and ICR does these things. And if you, as a scientist, think your ideas are right and supportable by scientific evidence, and that evolutionism is being misrepresented in a big way in schools (I just talked to a mom who teaches in the public schools on the Thursday field trip, and she says she's looked in the textbooks and evolution is NOT presented as a theory), then why shouldn't you organize debates to get your information out? And why shouldn't you build a museum (with private funds) to have a place for people to go to that are interested in these issues? There are sure plenty of PUBLIC funds that go to support museums that proclaim some of the wilder, unproven claims of evolutionism as truth

They were serious scientists and fought their battles on the scientific level. The reason that creationists don't (with rare exceptions as you noted above) is that they can't- they have nothing to bring to the process- and that includes the IDers, who were supposed to be developing an institute for actually doing research, but have instead chosen to devote their efforts to public advocacy ( I was going to say 'propoganda', but let's keep it nice )

I hope the creationists can start doing more of this - it's hard to fund research, tho, with only private contributions. One can't buy tremendously expensive equipment without money. The geology thing was a great start, tho.

[Lizra]

In my opinion......There's an obvious reason creation isn't in text books. It's not honest science, it's an old myth....and it's "scientists" are simply doing damage control, with their religious faith leading the way. *God rules my world* scientists are trying to push their religious faith by raising a fake ruckus.....and then trying to label their "story" science. They stick a few pieces of actual modern science into the pretty story, but the bottom line always goes back to the bible....a very old book of stories, full of politically influenced, human interpretations. I believe this thread and the other evolution threads back my opinion up. No "creation evidence" has come forth that has been convincing in any cohesive way. To me, the creation science thing is merely very religious people crying "foul" because modern science doesn't match their bibles. While scientific theories will certainly become more refined as we learn more, I give the Garden of Eden and *god made the world in a week* miniscule odds.

[Lief Erikson]

Originally posted by Lizra
the bottom line always goes back to the bible....a very old book of stories, full of politically influenced, human interpretations.

I doubt that many historians would accept the "politically influenced" statement. One reason the Bible is highly valued is because it is not politically influenced, like so many other ancient historical documents. The Bible deals very, very frankly with the sins of its heroes. Most historical documents would have made David into a peragon of almost (or beyond almost) incredible virtue, yet the Bible included the story with Bathsheba. That definitely would not be included in many documents. The telling of the failing of Solomon also might have been more rendered in his favor. Huge numbers of the kings of Israel and I believe Judah too were shown to be guilty of numerous sins and accordingly punished.

These things set the Bible apart from the majority of other historical documents. The main thing that tends to disappoint a lot of historians is the fact that it constistently describes miracles and the intervention of God.

[BeardofPants]

Leif, you have to argue that it *is* political. Consider this: how many books were under consideration for the bible ... and how many made it in? How many are written by women? Exclusions speaks just as importantly as what went into the bible. And then you have to consider revisionism - is that not political?


Excuse if none of this makes sense - I'm very sick at the moment. I have a cold and a couple of essays to write... bad combo.

[BeardofPants]

Originally posted by RÃ*an
Hey, why doesn't AIM work with you? I just tried to IM you to talk about this

Soz, Rian, just noticed this. I don't generally tend to go onto AIM because they will find me. 8-[

[Cirdan]

Originally posted by BeardofPants
Leif, you have to argue that it *is* political.....

Also the Phillistines and the Egyptians don't come off too well. I'm sure they had their side of the story. That is politics. The tome "history is written by the victor" could be restated as "history is written by those who made a point of writing it down" in the case of the bible.

The major events were generally accurate enough from correlating evidence. It would be pointlesss in times when literacy was rare to "rewrite history", but certainly a subjective "spin" on history was the rule rather than the exception in all historical documents until recent times when literacy and the printing press raised the standards. Froissart's Chronicles are a good example of a historical document with a provincial spin. Useful as a guide to events of the times but not to be taken completely at face value.

[GrayMouser]

Good new blog on the evolution/creation front:

http://pandasthumb.org/

And with a name like that you know which side they're on

[Cirdan]

Ummmm.... Riiiight

[Nurvingiel]

So... you REAL debate thread for RELIGION people were saying something about Creationism?