I live in Florida and work in healthcare, so I’ve often had “conversations” with creationists when they try to refute evolution.
Sadly . . . it is very rare for me to hear an original argument.
They fall into a few very specific categories:
The watchmaker on the heath (William Paley).
Evolution is only a theory (Universal Gravitation is also a theory, but this doesn’t make it hurt less when you fall and hit your head).
The Universe is “fine-tuned” to permit life (we don’t have any other examples of other universes with different laws, and–also–they need to read up on the Anthropic Principle . . . both weak and strong versions).
It seems unreasonable that life can just fall together by chance (ignores the realities of chemistry, physics, and statistics).
Scientists haven’t created life in the lab (we haven’t established a permanent human settlement on Mars yet, either . . . but we eventually will if we don’t destroy ourselves first).
Life violates the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, as order cannot come from disorder (a pot of boiling water with a lot of dissolved sugar is very disorderly, yet the sugar molecules will crsytalize in a neat, orderly, monoclinic structure if we put a stick in this solution and make rock candy).
A partial eye (bacterial flagella, etc.) doesn’t function, so how does evolution create an eye unless every component occurs simultaneously all at once (ignores the idea that the antecedents of the eye were doing other, vital tasks. A partial bacterial flagella exists in the bacteria that causes plague).
We never see transitional forms in the fossil record (well . . . we have. This is just a falsehood).
If humans evolved from apes, then why do apes still exist? (a half-truth taken out of context. Humans actually are apes).
95% of the people in the world believe that God, or Gods (in one form or another) created the Universe. Isn’t it arrogant and delusional to claim that you know better than the vast majority of humanity? If a psychotic person believes we have been taken over by aliens, then we give him meds and/or lock him up because no one else sees the aliens. How are you different from the mentally ill person who believes in aliens that no one else sees? (I’m not obligated to believe in a flat Earth just because everyone else does).
I’m familiar with all of these arguments . . . except that I keep hoping I’ll hear something original when I read the Christian apologetics books.
I think if they really did believe in the existence of their god, they would be walking on egg shells every day in fear of angering HIM. Instead a majority of them do what they want, when they want. The majority have premarital sex, children out of wedlock, gamble, lie, steal, bear false witness, and then have the nerve to behave hypocritically when they see someone else doing what they’re doing.
Right on the money. Christianity in America makes 74.5 billion per year. One of the most successful enterprises ever.
Besides, a bad or rudimentary eye is much better than no eye at all. Hell, having a patch of light-sensitive cells on the surface of your skin is better than no light-sensitivity. Having light-sensitive cells enables the creature to sense the difference between night and day, if there are any differences in how favourable e.g. feeding conditions are. It also enables it to detect sudden changes in light intensity, for example a big predator lurking above, to provoke a flight-response. A bad eye that can only detect light gradients can enable the creature to reorientate into a favourable position wrt sunlight, or to detect pray or predators above. An eye that can detect contours is even better, and can enable the owner to respond to even more complex situations. And so on.
Indeed, there exist numerous living organisms today, exhibiting all the relevant intermediate stages of eye evolution. Though to be far to Kevin_Levites, he did mention that the requisite apologetics have been repeatedly destroyed.
For example, various flatworms and some jellyfish possess simple photosensitive spots, and are only able to distinguish between light and dark - a feature that is also present in several protists. Other flatwoms exhibit the next stage - photosensitive cells in a cup shaped depression, allowing detection of directional shadows.
Then we have the “pinhole camera” eye, as seen in Nautilus, which facilitate precise directional sensing and even a limited degree of shape determination.
Then we have the completely enclosed eye, with a small forward opening and a transparent fluid contained within the eye, such as that seen in Onchyophorans, which is then followed by the appearance of enclosed eyes with a lens. Finally, separation of the lens from the front of the eye, and the development of a separate cornea and iris, as seen in modern vertebrates.
Then of course, Arthropods followed a different trajectory, with the development of compound eyes.
The fun part being, of course, that all of these different eye stage developments are controlled by the same set of genes, as I covered in this thread. A thread which our latest mythology fanboy clearly doesn’t even know exists.
Indeed, it’s notable that all the mythology fanboys who gatecrash this site to rail against evolution, have manifestly never learned even the elementary aspects of the topic. Instead, they have spooned up whatever lies were peddled on the subject on creationist websites, or drank whatever Kool-Aid was fed to them by their “holy men”, none of whom possess any proper scientific education.
Its a measure of the intellectual indolence that is endemic to mythology fanboyism, that none of the usual suspects ever bother to learn any genuine facts on the topic of evolutionary biology, instead operating as if the repeatedly destroyed canards they bring here with tiresome regularity constitute some ineffable brand of wisdom, instead of being rectally extracted tripe. The idea of reading an actual science textbook on the subject never occurs to them, let alone exerting the diligence require to peruse actual peer reviewed scientific papers.
Instead, they wallow in their smug, complacent wilful ignorance, pretending that people who spent decades engaging in proper scientific research know less than their tithe-fed “pastors”. Which is one of the reasons I adopt the “shock and awe” tactic of carpet bombing their drivel with whatever discoursive ordnance happens to be to hand - and after 14 years of collecting and reading genuine peer reviewed scientific papers, that’s a lot of ordnance.
Along with the eye and flagellum, I find the “mousetrap argument” (of which I’m sure you’re aware) to be particularly irritating.
The Creationist presents the idea that the discreet components of eye (or flagella) were sitting around and doing nothing . . . when these components actully existed because they had other tasks.
There was a biologist who tried to make this point by using a partial mousetrap for a tie clip, but I forget his name.
In the remake of the Cosmos series, Neil deGrasse Tyson runs a sequence where we see a progression from photosensitive spots on a sigle-celled organism to a full-fledged eye.
That biologist was Nick Matzke, who was co-author on several papers on the bacterial flagellum, including papers I’ve already presented here.
Furthermore, the term used for repurposing existing components in a new arrangement for a new task, is known in the evolutionary biology literature as exaptation. The process I described in my exposition on “irredcuible complexity” as the “Müllerian Two Step” is known in the modern literature as bricolage.
First, I’ll give a hat tip to this nicely succicnt post by @Kevin_Levites, which neatly summarises the various canards we see from the usual suspects. However, I think it useful to elaborate upon each section, and provide resources that back up the sections in question. Starting with (emphases mine):
Ah, yes, the duplicity of “design” apologetics, which apart from being covered as Canard #20 in my grand list of creationist canards, is elaborated upon in more detail in this extended exposition on the subject, which I suspect many here will find useful.
Ah, this particularly noxious piece of apologetic mendacity is the centrepiece of Canard #7. A canard I treat with particular scorn and derision.
The pedlars of this nonsense also need to learn that there are two scientific papers destroying this myth. These papers are:
[1] Stars In Other Universes: Stellar Structure With Different Fundamental Constants by Fred C. Adams, Journal of Cosmology & Astroparticle Physics (August 2008) DOI: 10.1088/1475-7516/2008/08/010 [Full paper downloadable from here]
[2] A Universe Without Weak Interactions by Roni Harnik, Graham D. Kribs and Gilad Perez, Physical Review Letters D, 74(3): (1st August 2006) DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevD.74.035006 [Full paper downloadable from here]
The first of these papers establishes that stellar nucleosynthesis and organic chemistry would remain essentially unchanged, even if key physical constants varied by as much as five orders of magnitude. The second paper establishes that the same would be the case, even if we deleted the weak nuclear force wholesale from the universe.
So much for “fine tuning”.
And indeed, I’ve devoted voluminous amounts of posts here to the matter of prebiotic chemistry. This false dichotomy between “chance” and “design” also features as part of Canards #10 and #30 (among others).
And once again, I’ll point everyone to my voluminous expositions on prebiotic chemistry. Along with the fact that said research has now moved on to experiments with synthetic model protocells. But mythology fanboys are always at least 50 years behind the curve, so to speak.
This, of course, forms the subject matter of Canard #28, which includes detailed exposition of several scientific papers on the matter that destroy this piece of ex recto apologetic fabrication.
Again, been there, done that (is anyone really surprised at this? ). Apart from an earlier post in this thread dealing with eye evolution, there’s also this grand exposition on the subject, including detailed exposition on the genes involved. As for the bacterial flagellum, I deal both with Behe’s canards about “irreducible complexity” and the scientific papers covering the bacterial flagellum and its evolution in this detailed exposition.
Again, as noted above, this canard is a flat out lie. Even though my knowledge of the tetrapod lineage is incomplete, i’m aware of numerous organisms that clearly form a well-defined lineage exhibiting the relevant anatomical transitions, from Eusthenopteron to Panderichthys and Ventastega, through Tiktaalik to Acanthostega and Ichthyostega. Which, if you examine them, exhibit another feature that I’ve only recently realised - namely, that the morphological changes constitute topological transformations of shape that are well within the remit of mechanisms such as Turing morphogenesis - a topic I cover in some detail with respect to Papilio dardanus wing patterns in this detailed exposition. Then of course there’s my exposition on the genes involved in major morphological changes in domesticated Goldfish, and I suspect that those genes will turn out to be either homologues of, or related to, HOX genes, which have been known to be implicated in the bauplans of living organisms for decades.
Indeed, I’m reminded here that no less a person than Linnaeus, the father of modern biological taxonomy, regarded humans and chimpanzees to be sufficiently closely related, on the basis of comparative anatomy, to warrant their placement in the same taxonomic Genus.
Linnaeus even wrote a letter discussing this topic to fellow taxonomist Johann Georg Gmelin, the original (and transcription thereof) being available here. It’s apposite to reproduce the relevant section - first, the original Latin:
This translates to:
Note that Linnaeus wrote this SIXTY TWO YEARS BEFORE DARWIN WAS BORN.
Of course, we also have a wealth of modern data, both from palaeontology and molecular phylogeny, which establishes overewhelmingly that, as you’ve stated above, humans are apes. I’m also reminded of the data from direct genome comparisons, including the data involving endogenous retroviral insertions, which are practially the smoking gun for this.
Finally …
To which my retort would be, of course, that it’s monumentally arrogant to believe that these people know better than the world’s cosmological physicists, just because they treat uncritically as fact, the vacuous assertions of pre-scientific mythologies. See among other resources, my exposition on Steinhardt & Turok’s braneworld cosmology, which includes within it a testable prediction, unlike the assertions of mythologies.
And, on this note …
Fat chance. The ex recto apologetic fabrications you’ve highlighted have been doing the rounds for decades (and in the caase of Paley’s gibberish, the best part of 200 years). Idiot mythology fanboys still think that the garbage in question constitutes some sort of ineffable “wisdom” with which they’re going the hand-wave away 350 years of scientific progress, instead of being collapsed intellectual soufflés of a particularly sloppy constitution.
Common ancestry was proven when we discovered humans and chimps share identically damaged genes caused by ancient viruses that accidentally embedded a portion of their genome into a common ancestor and became a hereditary fossil in all future offspring. We share even older damaged genes with older primate cousins - nested in a hierarchy showing the actual order of divergence.
Your points here are new to me, so I appreciate this post.
When we talk about damaged genes from ancient viruses, is this similar to the idea that certain viruses (like the papilloma viruses or Hepatitis B) cause cancer by damaging DNA? I assume (from your post) that a virus can damage DNA in a similar way, and this damage can be passed down to the offspring?
Or is it like the idea that sickle cell anemia is more prevalent today because genetically they were more resistant to the diseases of the day? Sickle cell is a detrimental genetic disorder normally but from what I had read it offered the benefit to the host of limiting virus or bacterial infections spread through the blood stream at the time. Which in turn is the theory of why sickle cell is still so common today. At least that’s what I had heard, someone correct me if I’m wildly wrong here.
Sickle cell specifically protects against malaria.
The degree of protection depends upon how badly the patient expresses sickle cell disease.
I have been wondering if sickle cell protects against babesiosis, as the two diseases are similar in many ways . . . but I haven’t been able to get an answer for this.
From memory doesn’t it make a person more resistant to malaria? I’ll check on that:
Yeah it seems so…“Sickle cell trait (AS) confers partial protection against lethal Plasmodium falciparum malaria. Multiple mechanisms for this have been proposed, with a recent focus on aberrant cytoadherence of parasite-infected red blood cells (RBCs).” So it would make sense for this to have evolved in people who lived in countries where malaria was common.
). Apart from an earlier post in this thread dealing with eye evolution, there’s also 