I've been doing my homework having been stung by the vehemence of the evolutionary believers - I've got some interesting things that maybe science in the classroom could approach.
Some premises -
1/. evolution is only a theory - its not a fact any more than newtonian physics was a fact.
2/. Clearly species adapt, clearly we can breed animals to select traits etc.. this is not evolution (in fact breeding is intelligent design on a micro level - a fairly provable and testable scientific area of study).
3/. For the sake of clarity I'll remove the God agenda as long as those who will respond against remove their anti-God agenda. This is purely a look at what creationism would expect to see from the evidence.
4/. I'll try to avoid straw men on the understanding that nobody feels that they should expose their brilliance by reinterpreting what I say into what they think I believe (ie point 3.)
OK now for some observations:
Creation postulates that an intelligent force is required to create life and to continue this process to account for the proliferation of species. Creation is not, in this case the ark, Vishnu, 6 x 24 hour periods of creation. Creation must play on the level field that evolution claims - no impossible time limits and huge amounts of material and energy to play with. Creation suggests that species cannot change from one species to another - this rule must hold for at least one species (ie even if one organism is shown to have not adapted from another that would be a proof for creation at least for that species.).
OK what would I expect to see:
1/ Fossil records that contain the same species from beginning to end of the gelogical period in question.
2/ Without suggesting causes for extinction (or that there have been any mass extinctions) there would need to be species appearing in multiple layers seperated by millions of years apart that had not changed. As an additional bonus : finding species alive for which fossil records exist millions of years ago would suggest that as expected - adaptation had not altered the species into a new one.
3/ In the fossil record there should be no clear species that are clearly changing from one form into another.It should be well nigh impossible to find transitional stages in the same fossil layer that show the eradication of species by adaptation into species found in the next geological layer (or even the same one) - assuming two adjacent gelogical time periods of deposition.
4/ Species must appear suddenly without precursor stages and either disappear just as suddenly or continue the same.
5/ It must be impossible to create life by recreating the conditions of this earth and then mixing, adding etc.. but not engineering. IE students in the classroom/lab should be able to put together experiment after experiment using sterile conditions and apply any conditions they think may have existed in the earth and all must fail to initiate life. This experiment must be allowed to scale as allowed by finance etc.. They must still fail. Life must not spontaneously generate. The odds must be stacked in favour of generation in that all basic building blocks of life can be added to the mix as long as they themselves are not alive. Self replicating organic compounds can also be allowed as long as they can be shown to exist/be made in isloation of actual living orgnisms. Time is not to be considered a factor and the more experiments running simultaneously the better.
6/ Mutations should rarely if ever be beneficial. In fact mutation should be increasingly less beneficial the larger it is. Statistics should be compiled to show beneficial mutations against non-beneficial. Fruit flies can provide evidence - with enough experiments there should soon be a species of fruit fly that is not bred but gains a mutation that is beneficial enough within its limited environment to supercede all other fruit flies and so replace those fruit flies as the dominant fly. This fly should probably not be released into the wild:) Should these experiments fail to produce not only beneficial mutations but also the propagation of that genetic alteration must be enough to survive and must not disappear after a few generations.
7/ Mutations should rarely happen in complementary groups suggesting that complementary systems in life are more likely planned than random and suggesting that benficial mutations would probably need complimentary mutations to be really effective.
8/ Irreducible complexity. Some systems should be complex enough to have no viable precursor stage.
9/ It must be possible to engineer the building blocks of life. It must be possible to create species that are mixtures of other species and that are viable and can produce offspring. Genetic engineering must be achievable using intelligent processes.
10/ It must be possible to show how ecosystems can be planned and engineerable. This must be tied to the ability to disperse any life forms across planet boundaries. Creation must have a provable dispersal system.
11/ The addition of genetic information must be almost impossibly difficult to do by natural mechanistic approaches. While genetic mutation can occur creation would expect that mutation process to struggle to add new material.
12/ Mobile species that are not isolated should be just as biodiverse as isolated populations.
13/ Reproductivity and reproductive length must have no effect upon the complexity of the species. Complex species could potentially have very long reproductive lengths and very low relative reproductivity. The following must be found false: the shorter the reproductive cycle coupled with higher reproductivity must consistently be shown to be an inverse relationship with the complexity of the species (ie most complex have had the most generations)
14/ Life must be able to adapt back to traits that have been lost. Brown moths from mixed colour species must be able to revert when conditions change. Adaptation should be seen to work backwards. Genetic traits must be recessive and dominant to allow limited adaptation and the reoccurence of previous traits.
15/ Incremental changes would rarely if ever be seen to produce any distinct major changes to an organism. The addition of large scale beneficial elements to a lifeform would be so unusual as to be astounding. The appearance of new organs in complex species - organs that actively work and solve some problem so confering an advantage must be almost never seen - if ever (time is irrelevant since the number of complex species effectively running individual experiments is so enormous.) It must be seen that all additional elements are merely mutations of existing information (ie extra body parts such as additional appendages must already exist - just in a different place) - no new information must be observed entering the gentic code to produce a large scale change.
Remember the above are not attacks on evolution these are merely things as a rank amateur creationist I would expect to see. I would also expect to be able to scientifically test these hypotheses.
Ahhh bedtime. Congrats to Liverpool!
Creationism - is purely a myth that is untestable - maybe not!
by Qcmbr 43 Replies latest watchtower bible
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Qcmbr
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stevenyc
Qcmbr
You complete B'stard. I have deliberatly ignored all info regarding the game. I was just off to my local to watch the repeat.
Ahhh
steve
Ps. I guess this was inevitable.
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Terry
1/. evolution is only a theory - its not a fact any more than newtonian physics was a fact.
What exactly does "only a theory" mean?
How is Newtonian Physics NOT a fact?
What are you talking about?
Words have meanings. If we ignore their meanings we aren't communicating.
Google definition of FACT: When an observation is confirmed repeatedly and by many independent and competent observers, it can become a fact.
Google definition of THEORY:A comprehensive explanation of a given set of data that has been repeatedly confirmed by observation and experimentation and has gained general acceptance within the scientific community but has not yet been decisively proven.
You have observations. You have data. You have experiments. You have confirmations. You make predictions. Observations confirm predictions, etc. Science is an ongoing process of getting more and more data. Religion starts out with a stark statement and cannot vary because the AUTHORITY of God stands behind it. That is why when the facts contradict the scriptures you need Apologies by religious people. They have to stretch and twist and distort and reframe everything to save their foundational authoritarian basis of belief.
Why waste your time with this? It is medieval. Angels dancing on the heads of pins.
t.
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tetrapod.sapien
qcmbr, a worthy post, and interesting, no doubt. thanks for the work you put into it.
qcmbr observation: "Creation must play on the level field that evolution claims"
this is the whole point. creation cannot play on a level field with evolution because of it's implicit assertions, but also because it doesn't even come close with it's explanatory power. this is why creation does not hack it as a scientific hypothesis. it leaves more questions than it answers. before the hypothesis can even be approached, any scientists involved have to know if it is even worth their time. does it actually stack up against the prevailing theory? a successful theory of creation would have to address all the data better than the theory of evolution, make better predictions for future data, etc etc. simply being testable does not make it worthy of the classroom.
i don't know if you know this, but the large majority of life scientists don't even enter into the evolution vs. creation debate because they think it is a non-issue, long gone, not worthy of energy. like terry says: medieval. don't get me wrong, they are not some dogmatic old-boy club. it would be a huge boon to any scientist's career to turn the ToE on it's head. but they all agree, that you have to embrace the existing data and evidence first, in order to do that. it all has to work with your new hypothesis. and then a good cross section of the bio & paleo community has to start agreeing with your interpretation of data.
pretty much all of the predictions you make, fly in the face of existing evidence and data.
you impress me. you are obviously a very smart guy. why are you so intent on doing this? -
EvilForce
Tetra...he's doing this cause we shellac'd his butt on this previous thread:
http://www.jehovahs-witness.com/15/91198/3.ashx
Abbadon, do you want to line up to refute this or do you want me to? This is usually your kind of point by point argument but I'll jump in and hold my own if need be :) -
Qcmbr
I was referring to Newtonian physics as a situation wherby it seemed a very good explanation of the observed facts but it didn't stop people looking for more answers and that finally came up with a better theory and I suspect that will be superceded in the future as we see closer and deeper into the atomic world. Evolution is currently a very broad church in that it has so many new ideas and approaches it is certainly a theory in transition (scientists haven't closed the book and gone to bed - there are still loads of ideas being tested and added to the canon) and it does a very good job of explaining observed data but as Tetro. said if creation could explain the observed facts better than evolution then evo would head the same way as newtonian physics - a very useful set of rules but not actually what is happening. Creation is also an evolving set of ideas (ah that sentence is just cool)as new thinking approaches the subject. Just as a final point - Terry sometimes you don't have to overanalyse the words just give peple the benefit of the doubt as I'm sure you do when talking face to face.
EF yes I did get my butt tanned hence a return to the books. Interestingly despite all the excellent work I'm still reading the observed facts different. Ah well there's always one.
I am trying to avoid attacking evo or any other theory just to list some things that I would expect to see and that could be tested scientifically if we looked at creation (not just ID because I actually wanted to look at the point of life actually becoming well alive!)
Creation does make some assumptions (the biggie is the precense of that intelligence but since we are intelligent and we will become godlike if technology keeps progressing it seems a bit presumptious that in the billions of years this universe has had that some planet didn't have life more advanced technologically than ours ergo 'I think therefore they are'..) If you saw stonehenge for the first time you would be able to suggest that an intelligence created it without seeing those first builders - I see stonehenges in all life. Maybe one day we'll find the barcode and made in alpha centurai tags on dna when we get good enough microscopes :) Assumptions that are big, bold and sometimes unprovable using current tech are the basis of many theorectical sciences and its the cleverness of the experiments that suggest the truth of assumption. If we didn't believe in life elsewhere what are we doing spending money on ET programs? I think creation is a valid assumption - all we have to look for is the facts that would show the indelible toolmarks of intelligence on life (the chisel marks on stonehenge.)
One request however (Tertapod thanks for avoiding this) please remember that I'm a person and derogatory comments about me and my intellect do not enhance your arguements - the main reason I abandoned previous threads is because of people drawing me into more than just friendly banter. I don't want to fall into the trap below (benford's law) and I don't feel qualified to discuss evolution on every scientific point. This thread is to see what would creation evidences be not is evolution correct.
Benford's Law: Passion is inversely proportional to the amount of real information available. (Gregory Benford) -
tetrapod.sapien
good morning,
just thought i would mention that newtonian physics were not obsoleted by einstein. rather, newtonian physics explains the universe at one level, and einstein simply showed that at another level, newtonian physics don't work as well anymore, but a different type of physics was required if we wanted something greater than an approximation.
anyways, comparing newtonian physics to evolution, or trying to show that all scientific theories eventually go the way of the dinosaurs is a fallacy of sorts, called the Popperian Truth Heckler, after Karl Popper who said that there is no absolute truth. but this is not true of all scientific theories. at this point i refer you to essay 1.2 in A Devils Chaplain by Richard Dawkins, called "What is True?". he touches nicely on this topic. speaking of newton and einstein, "If this is the only piece of scientific history you know, you might indeed conclude that all apparent truths are mere approximations, fated to be superceded." an example: DNA is forever a double helix. it is not awaiting a further and greater truth to come along. and it is also true "that if you and a chimpanzee (or an octpus and a kangaroo) trace your ancestors back far enough you will eventually hit a shared ancestor. To a pedant, these are still hypotheses which may be fallsified tomorrow. But they never will."
good night,
TS -
AlanF
qcmbr,
To the ignorant, your multiplicity of words seems significant. To those who know better, such seeming glibness speaks only of ignorance.
To be blunt, you have no idea what you're talking about with respect to the fossil record.
Given your track record on this forum, it would be a waste of finger-time to post a few simple refutations of your nonsense. So I won't, unless you break out of your claypot Mormon mold and say something not dictated by Mormon Braindeadness -- the same sort of braindeadness that infects the Jehovah's Witnesses.
AlanF
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OldSoul
AlanF: same sort of braindeadness that infects the Jehovah's Witnesses.
An infection is a good way to look at it. It is hard to think too meanly of someone who acts based on their mental defect.
Respectfully,
OldSoul -
doofdaddy
To the mormon guy
With all your pseudoscience and "rational"arguement. You ...believe...an ..old ....man ...with...a......beard....created....everything...in....seven....days......
Oh please!