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Scopes courthouse debate February 3 probably representative, sources say

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Representative, that is, of most American evangelicals who follow the issues.

Further to “Evolutionary creation vs. young Earth creation at Scopes Trial courthouse?” featuring Todd Wood vs. Darrel Falk, sources write to say that both debaters are well-known to close observers in their respective camps, and that young Earth creationism (YEC) and theistic evolution and evolutionary creationism (TE/EC) are the two largest sets of opinion on origins (humans, life, and universe) among American evanelicals, if not among Christians as a group. They point to Pew polls, noting however that Pew’s numbers tend to be high on evolution and low on YEC compared to Gallup long term (using similar questions).

I wonder because—just for example—in Gallup 2012, 46% say “God created humans in present form.” Put that way, it raises the question: In what other form could humans as we recognize them exist?

Shades of Vercors’ Ye Shall Know Them:

Very early one morning a doctor is called out to attend the corpse of a newborn baby who has been killed, the father freely admits, by a shot of strychnine chlorhydrate which he himself has administered. The police are called, but where is the mother? ‘She was taken back to the Zoo yesterday.’ ‘The Zoo? Does she work there?’ ‘No, she lives there … The mother is not a woman, properly speaking. She is a female of the species Paranthropus erectus.’ So begins Vercors’ classic novel raising the question: What is man? Murder or not? The Paranthropus (“tropi” for short) are a large tribe of New Guinea cliff-dwellers who smoke their meat and bury their dead. Simian in many of their physical characteristics, they are normally erect in stance though happy to drop to all fours at a moment’s notice. Australian wool interests hope that the “tropis” will prove to be a dream come true – workers who can be trained to operate a loom without benefit of paycheck. Newspaperman Douglas Templemore, an idealist, considers the tropis a fine chance for a test case. By killing his son (bred by artificial insemination of a female tropi), Douglas hopes to cause a riot in the realm of race relations. Is he a murderer or merely an owner of a pet, which he has “put to sleep”? As Templemore comes up for trial the scientific experts file into the witness box; …

Comments
Supplemental notes;
Human brain has more switches than all computers on Earth – November 2010 Excerpt: They found that the brain’s complexity is beyond anything they’d imagined, almost to the point of being beyond belief, says Stephen Smith, a professor of molecular and cellular physiology and senior author of the paper describing the study: …One synapse, by itself, is more like a microprocessor–with both memory-storage and information-processing elements–than a mere on/off switch. In fact, one synapse may contain on the order of 1,000 molecular-scale switches. A single human brain has more switches than all the computers and routers and Internet connections on Earth. https://uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/nature-wouldnt-have-done-it-that-way/#comment-485929 Darwin’s mistake: explaining the discontinuity between human and nonhuman minds. – 2008 Excerpt: Over the last quarter century, the dominant tendency in comparative cognitive psychology has been to emphasize the similarities between human and nonhuman minds and to downplay the differences as “one of degree and not of kind” (Darwin 1871).,,, To wit, there is a significant discontinuity in the degree to which human and nonhuman animals are able to approximate the higher-order, systematic, relational capabilities of a physical symbol system (PSS) (Newell 1980). We show that this symbolic-relational discontinuity pervades nearly every domain of cognition and runs much deeper than even the spectacular scaffolding provided by language or culture alone can explain,,, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18479531 The Hard Impossible Problem of Consciousness – video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FglKcWBKEu8 The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences – Eugene Wigner – 1960 Excerpt: ,,certainly it is hard to believe that our reasoning power was brought, by Darwin’s process of natural selection, to the perfection which it seems to possess.,,, It is difficult to avoid the impression that a miracle confronts us here, quite comparable in its striking nature to the miracle that the human mind can string a thousand arguments together without getting itself into contradictions, or to the two miracles of the existence of laws of nature and of the human mind’s capacity to divine them.,,, The miracle of the appropriateness of the language of mathematics for the formulation of the laws of physics is a wonderful gift which we neither understand nor deserve. We should be grateful for it and hope that it will remain valid in future research and that it will extend, for better or for worse, to our pleasure, even though perhaps also to our bafflement, to wide branches of learning. http://www.dartmouth.edu/~matc/MathDrama/reading/Wigner.html
Verse, Quote, and Music:
Psalm 16:11 You make known to me the path of life; in your presence there is fullness of joy; at your right hand are pleasures forevermore. “The only human emotion I could feel was pure, unrelenting, unconditional love. Take the unconditional love a mother has for a child and amplify it a thousand fold, then multiply exponentially. The result of your equation would be as a grain of sand is to all the beaches in the world. So, too, is the comparison between the love we experience on earth to what I felt during my experience. This love is so strong, that words like “love” make the description seem obscene. It was the most powerful and compelling feeling. But, it was so much more. I felt the presence of angels. I felt the presence of joyous souls, and they described to me a hundred lifetimes worth of knowledge about our divinity. Simultaneous to the deliverance of this knowledge, I knew I was in the presence of God. I never wanted to leave, never.” - Judeo-Christian Near Death Experience testimony I Want to know what love is - Foreigner https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=loWXMtjUZWM
bornagain77
January 11, 2014
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Here are a few more notes about the ‘artistic license’, (imagination instead of hard evidence), being the only ‘real’ support for evolution:
Paleoanthropology Dr. Pilbeam also wrote the following regarding the theory of evolution and paleoanthropology : “I am also aware of the fact that, at least in my own subject of paleoanthropology, “theory” – heavily influenced by implicit ideas almost always dominates “data”. ….Ideas that are totally unrelated to actual fossils have dominated theory building, which in turn strongly influence the way fossils are interpreted” http://conservapedia.com/Evolution#Paleoanthropology My Pilgrimage to Lucy’s Holy Relics Fails to Inspire Faith in Darwinism Excerpt: —”We were sent a cast of the Lucy skeleton, and I was asked to assemble it for display,” remembers Peter Schmid, a paleontologist at the Anthropological Institute in Zurich.,,, “When I started to put [Lucy’s] skeleton together, I expected it to look human,” Schmid continues “Everyone had talked about Lucy as being very modern, very human, so I was surprised by what I saw.” http://www.evolutionnews.org/2009/02/my_pilgrimage_to_lucys_holy_re.html The Truth About Human Origins: Excerpt: “It is practically impossible to determine which “family tree” (for human evolution) one should accept. Richard Leakey (of the famed fossil hunting family from Africa) has proposed one. His late mother, Mary Leakey, proposed another. Donald Johanson, former president of the Institute of Human Origins in Berkeley, California, has proposed yet another. And as late as 2001, Meave Leakey (Richard’s wife) has proposed still another.,,” http://books.google.com/books?id=J9pON9yB8HkC&pg=PT28&lpg=PT28 DeWitt’s digital manipulation of skull 1470 – August 13, 2012 Excerpt: The skull as presented in the news websites has some significant issues that suggests that the facial reconstruction is seriously off. https://uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/dewitts-reconstruction-of-skull-1470/ “No fossil is buried with its birth certificate. That, and the scarcity of fossils, means that it is effectively impossible to link fossils into chains of cause and effect in any valid way… To take a line of fossils and claim that they represent a lineage is not a scientific hypothesis that can be tested, but an assertion that carries the same validity as a bedtime story—amusing, perhaps even instructive, but not scientific.” - Henry Gee (Editor of Nature), In Search of Deep Time: Beyond the Fossil Record to a New History of Life
turell (the Theistic Evolutionist) then asserted this
"They survived without our type of consciousness/intellect just as well as we did until recently when their habitat started to disappear. This proves that our consciousness is not needed for survival. Coming down out of the trees with an upright posture means a slower moving organism which needs more planning and thinking to stay alive. That may have selected for more brain power,"
So turell being made ‘in the image of God’ emerged when some supposed ape ancestor to humans lost its habitat??? And since you said this ‘proves’ your point, may I be so bold as to ask you what proof you actually have that a change in environment will drive evolutionary change?
Another Difficulty with Darwinian Accounts of How Human Bipedalism Developed – David Klinghoffer – February 21, 2013 Excerpt: A Darwinian evolutionary bedtime story tells of how proto-man achieved his upright walking status when the forests of his native East Africa turned to savannas. That was 4 to 6 million years ago, and the theory was that our ancestors stood up in order to be able to look around themselves over the sea of grasslands, which would have been irrelevant in the forests of old. A team of researchers led by USC’s Sarah J. Feakins, writing in the journal Geology, detonate that tidy explanation with their finding that the savannas, going back 12 million years, had already been there more than 6 million years when the wonderful transition to bipedalism took place (“Northeast African vegetation change over 12 m.y.”). http://www.evolutionnews.org/2013/02/another_difficu069411.html Donald Prothero: In evolution, stasis was general, gradualism rare, and that’s the consensus 40 years on – February 2012 Excerpt: In four of the biggest climatic-vegetational events of the last 50 million years, the mammals and birds show no noticeable change in response to changing climates. No matter how many presentations I give where I show these data, no one (including myself) has a good explanation yet for such widespread stasis despite the obvious selective pressures of changing climate. Rather than answers, we have more questions— Donald Prothero – American paleontologist, geologist, and author who specializes in mammalian paleontology. https://uncommondescent.com/darwinism/donald-prothero-in-evolution-stasis-was-the-general-pattern-gradualism-was-rare-and-that-is-still-the-consensus-40-years-later/
turell (the Theistic Evolutionist) then offered this Theistic caveat at the end of his paragraph,,,
"but why then did we leave the trees? I fully believe our evolution was guided."
Well turell, that is just so sentimental of you to give God a little room right there at the end because you can’t seem to imagine a job for natural selection to do (never mind that natural selection can’t explain trees or monkeys (or proteins) in the first place)! I’m sure He is mighty pleased that you did not completely forget him in your just so story.,,, But may I offer word of advice from the wise wordsmith of old England?
“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” William Shakespeare – Hamlet
bornagain77
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Skull “Rewrites” Story of Human Evolution — Again – Casey Luskin – October 22, 2013 Excerpt: “There is a big gap in the fossil record,” Zollikofer told NBC News. “I would put a question mark there. Of course it would be nice to say this was the last common ancestor of Neanderthals and us, but we simply don’t know.” http://www.evolutionnews.org/2013/10/skull_rewrites_078221.html No Known Hominin Is Common Ancestor of Neanderthals and Modern Humans, Study Suggests – Oct. 21, 2013 Excerpt: The article, “No known hominin species matches the expected dental morphology of the last common ancestor of Neanderthals and modern humans,” relies on fossils of approximately 1,200 molars and premolars from 13 species or types of hominins — humans and human relatives and ancestors. Fossils from the well-known Atapuerca sites have a crucial role in this research, accounting for more than 15 percent of the complete studied fossil collection.,,, They conclude with high statistical confidence that none of the hominins usually proposed as a common ancestor, such as Homo heidelbergensis, H. erectus and H. antecessor, is a satisfactory match. “None of the species that have been previously suggested as the last common ancestor of Neanderthals and modern humans has a dental morphology that is fully compatible with the expected morphology of this ancestor,” Gómez-Robles said. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/10/131021153202.htm
In fact, the ‘march to modern man’ drawing as depicted in popular imagination (and as is 'still' depicted in grade school textbooks), has been known to wrong for over 60 years:
Paleoanthropologist Exposes Shoddiness of “Early Man” Research – Feb. 6, 2013 Excerpt: The unilineal depiction of human evolution popularized by the familiar iconography of an evolutionary ‘march to modern man’ has been proven wrong for more than 60 years. However, the cartoon continues to provide a popular straw man for scientists, writers and editors alike. ,,, archaic species concepts and an inadequate fossil record continue to obscure the origins of our genus. http://www.evolutionnews.org/2012/07/the_fragmented_062101.html “We have all seen the canonical parade of apes, each one becoming more human. We know that, as a depiction of evolution, this line-up is tosh (i.e. nonsense). Yet we cling to it. Ideas of what human evolution ought to have been like still colour our debates.” Henry Gee, editor of Nature (478, 6 October 2011, page 34, doi:10.1038/478034a), “most hominid fossils, even though they serve as basis of endless speculation and elaborate storytelling, are fragments of of jaws and scraps of skulls” Stephen Jay Gould The Fragmented Field of Paleoanthropology – July 2012 Excerpt: “alleged restoration of ancient types of man have very little, if any, scientific value and are likely only to mislead the public” Earnest A. Hooton – physical anthropologist – Harvard University http://www.evolutionnews.org/2012/07/the_fragmented_062101.html Paleoanthropology Excerpt: In regards to the pictures of the supposed ancestors of man featured in science journals and the news media Boyce Rensberger wrote in the journal Science the following regarding their highly speculative nature: “Unfortunately, the vast majority of artist’s conceptions are based more on imagination than on evidence. But a handful of expert natural-history artists begin with the fossil bones of a hominid and work from there…. Much of the reconstruction, however, is guesswork. Bones say nothing about the fleshy parts of the nose, lips, or ears (or eyes). Artists must create something between an ape and a human being; the older the specimen is said to be, the more apelike they make it…. Hairiness is a matter of pure conjecture.” http://conservapedia.com/Evolution#Paleoanthropology “National Geographic magazine commissioned four artists to reconstruct a female figure from casts of seven fossil bones thought to be from the same species as skull 1470. One artist drew a creature whose forehead is missing and whose jaws look vaguely like those of a beaked dinosaur. Another artist drew a rather good-looking modern African-American woman with unusually long arms. A third drew a somewhat scrawny female with arms like a gorilla and a face like a Hollywood werewolf. And a fourth drew a figure covered with body hair and climbing a tree, with beady eyes that glare out from under a heavy, gorilla-like brow.” “Behind the Scenes,” National Geographic 197 (March, 2000): 140 https://uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/human-evolution-skull-1470-it-turns-out-has-a-multiple-personality-disorder/ Filling in the blanks: Interview with illustrator Ronald J. Ervin Excerpt: “I was told to make the illustrations either more or less human or modern—whatever the subject was. I was pleased as an artist to have the freedom to create a drawing no one could question, because they didn’t know for sure themselves what the creature looked like.” “He originally drew this Australopethecus as too human-like for the book’s authors. ‘I was told to make her more ape-like, or more “transitional” in appearance’, he said. ‘I had been given a cast of a skull, and I was shown some drawings other artists had done of “Lucy”, and was asked to improve on these—to make her look more transitional. I had to make some things up, while keeping the anatomical bones intact, like the temple bone and other features which are standard.’” http://creation.com/filling-in-the-blanks
One can clearly see that ‘artistic license’ for human evolution being played out on the following site.
10 Transitional Ancestors of Human Evolution by Tyler G., March 18, 2013 http://listverse.com/2013/03/18/10-transitional-ancestors-of-human-evolution/
Please note, on the preceding site, how the sclera (white of the eye), a uniquely human characteristic, was brought in very early on, in the artists’ reconstructions, to make the fossils appear much more human than they actually were, even though the artists making the reconstructions have no clue whatsoever as to what the colors of the eyes, of these supposed transitional fossils, actually were.
Evolution of human eye as a device for communication – Hiromi Kobayashi – Kyoto University, Japan Excerpt: The uniqueness of human eye morphology among primates illustrates the remarkable difference between human and other primates in the ability to communicate using gaze signals. http://www.saga-jp.org/coe_abst/kobayashi.htm
bornagain77
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Moreover, it is seriously questioned whether or not ‘form’ is even reducible to the reductive materialism of neo-Darwinism:
Darwin or Design? – Paul Nelson at Saddleback Church – Nov. 2012 – ontogenetic depth (excellent update) – video Text from one of the Saddleback slides: 1. Animal body plans are built in each generation by a stepwise process, from the fertilized egg to the many cells of the adult. The earliest stages in this process determine what follows. 2. Thus, to change — that is, to evolve — any body plan, mutations expressed early in development must occur, be viable, and be stably transmitted to offspring. 3. But such early-acting mutations of global effect are those least likely to be tolerated by the embryo. Losses of structures are the only exception to this otherwise universal generalization about animal development and evolution. Many species will tolerate phenotypic losses if their local (environmental) circumstances are favorable. Hence island or cave fauna often lose (for instance) wings or eyes. http://www.saddleback.com/mc/m/7ece8/ HOW BIOLOGISTS LOST SIGHT OF THE MEANING OF LIFE — AND ARE NOW STARING IT IN THE FACE – Stephen L. Talbott – May 2012 Excerpt: The question is indeed, then, “How does the organism meaningfully dispose of all its molecules, getting them to the right places and into the right interactions?” The same sort of question can be asked of cells, for example in the growing embryo, where literal streams of cells are flowing to their appointed places, differentiating themselves into different types as they go, and adjusting themselves to all sorts of unpredictable perturbations — even to the degree of responding appropriately when a lab technician excises a clump of them from one location in a young embryo and puts them in another, where they may proceed to adapt themselves in an entirely different and proper way to the new environment. It is hard to quibble with the immediate impression that form (which is more idea-like than thing-like) is primary, and the material particulars subsidiary. http://www.netfuture.org/2012/May1012_184.html#2
As well, the genetic evidence for the hypothesized ape to human transition is now known to not be nearly as conducive to Darwinian speculations as was/is erroneously believed in popular imagination:
Human Origins(?) by Brian Thomas, M.S. – December 20, 2013 Excerpt: Three major pillars supporting a human-chimp link crashed in 2013. 1. Genetic similarity (70% instead of 98%) 2. beta-globin pseudogene (functional instead of leftover junk) 3. Chromosome 2 fusion site (encodes a functional feature within an important gene instead of a being a fusion site) All three key genetic pillars of human evolution (for Darwinists) turned out to be specious—overstatements based on ignorance of genetic function. http://www.icr.org/article/7867/
Moreover, just as with the genetic evidence, the anatomy between chimps and humans is far different than most people imagine it to be:
Although humans and chimpanzees are rather similar in the structure of the thorax and arms, they differ substantially not only in brain size but also in the anatomy of the pelvis, foot, and jaws, as well as in relative lengths of limbs and digits (38). Humans and chimpanzees also differ significantly in many other anatomical respects, to the extent that nearly every bone in the body of a chimpanzee is readily distinguishable in shape or size from its human counterpart (38). Associated with these anatomical differences there are, of course, major differences in posture (see cover picture), mode of locomotion, methods of procuring food, and means of communication. Because of these major differences in anatomy and way of life, biologists place the two species not just in separate genera but in separate families (39). David Berlinski – The Devil’s Delusion – Page 162&163 The Red Ape – Cornelius Hunter – August 2009 Excerpt: “There remains, however, a paradoxical problem lurking within the wealth of DNA data: our morphology and physiology have very little, if anything, uniquely in common with chimpanzees to corroborate a unique common ancestor. Most of the characters we do share with chimpanzees also occur in other primates, and in sexual biology and reproduction we could hardly be more different. It would be an understatement to think of this as an evolutionary puzzle.” http://darwins-god.blogspot.com/2009/08/red-ape.html Mona Lisa smile: The morphological enigma of human and great ape evolution – 2006 Excerpt: The quality and scope of published documentation and verification of morphological features suggests there is very little in morphology to support a unique common ancestor for humans and chimpanzees.,,, http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ar.b.20107/abstract A chimp-pig hybrid origin for humans? – July 3, 2013 Excerpt: Dr. Eugene McCarthy,, has amassed an impressive body of evidence suggesting that human origins can be best explained by hybridization between pigs and chimpanzees. Extraordinary theories require extraordinary evidence and McCarthy does not disappoint. Rather than relying on genetic sequence comparisons, he instead offers extensive anatomical comparisons, each of which may be individually assailable, but startling when taken together.,,, The list of anatomical specializations we may have gained from porcine philandering is too long to detail here. Suffice it to say, similarities in the face, skin and organ microstructure alone is hard to explain away. A short list of differential features, for example, would include, multipyramidal kidney structure, presence of dermal melanocytes, melanoma, absence of a primate baculum (penis bone), surface lipid and carbohydrate composition of cell membranes, vocal cord structure, laryngeal sacs, diverticuli of the fetal stomach, intestinal “valves of Kerkring,” heart chamber symmetry, skin and cranial vasculature and method of cooling, and tooth structure. Other features occasionally seen in humans, like bicornuate uteruses and supernumerary nipples, would also be difficult to incorporate into a purely primate tree. http://phys.org/news/2013-07-chimp-pig-hybrid-humans.html
Nor does the fossil record reveal a gradual transition between apes and humans, as Darwinists would prefer people to imagine:
Human Origins and the Fossil Record: What Does the Evidence Say? – Casey Luskin – July 2012 Excerpt: Indeed, far from supplying “a nice clean example” of “gradualistic evolutionary change,” the record reveals a dramatic discontinuity between ape-like and human-like fossils. Human-like fossils appear abruptly in the record, without clear evolutionary precursors, making the case for human evolution based on fossils highly speculative. http://www.evolutionnews.org/2012/07/human_origins_a_1061771.html Read Your References Carefully: Paul McBride’s Prized Citation on Skull-Sizes Supports My Thesis, Not His – Casey Luskin – August 31, 2012 Excerpt of Conclusion: This has been a long article, but I hope it is instructive in showing how evolutionists deal with the fossil hominin evidence. As we’ve seen, multiple authorities recognize that our genus Homo appears in the fossil record abruptly with a complex suite of characteristics never-before-seen in any hominin. And that suite of characteristics has remained remarkably constant from the time Homo appears until the present day with you, me, and the rest of modern humanity. The one possible exception to this is brain size, where there are some skulls of intermediate cranial capacity, and there is some increase over time. But even there, when Homo appears, it does so with an abrupt increase in skull-size. ,,, The complex suite of traits associated with our genus Homo appears abruptly, and is distinctly different from the australopithecines which were supposedly our ancestors. There are no transitional fossils linking us to that group.,,, http://www.evolutionnews.org/2012/08/read_your_refer_1063841.html If Modern Humans Are So Smart, Why Are Our Brains Shrinking? - January 20, 2011 Excerpt: John Hawks is in the middle of explaining his research on human evolution when he drops a bombshell. Running down a list of changes that have occurred in our skeleton and skull since the Stone Age, the University of Wisconsin anthropologist nonchalantly adds, “And it’s also clear the brain has been shrinking.” “Shrinking?” I ask. “I thought it was getting larger.” The whole ascent-of-man thing.,,, He rattles off some dismaying numbers: Over the past 20,000 years, the average volume of the human male brain has decreased from 1,500 cubic centimeters to 1,350 cc, losing a chunk the size of a tennis ball. The female brain has shrunk by about the same proportion. “I’d call that major downsizing in an evolutionary eyeblink,” he says. “This happened in China, Europe, Africa—everywhere we look.” http://discovermagazine.com/2010/sep/25-modern-humans-smart-why-brain-shrinking
bornagain77
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Although I am neither a YEC or a Theistic Evolutionist, I am much more sympathetic to the YEC position than I am to the Theistic Evolution camp since I find Theistic Evolutionists, just like materialists/naturalists, to be radically compromised of any solid foundation within science. But be that as it may, here is my recent response to a Theistic Evolutionist about his comment for how humans originated: ,,,turell, I’m seriously having trouble with your whole evolutionary narrative even if it has a Theistic caveat at the end. It simply is a mishmash of unsupported assertion and conjecture: First you (turell) asserted:
"We broke off from apes and chimps, six-ten million years ago."
Really??? How do you know this? What is your specific evidence? We can’t even get a bacteria to evolve into a different type of bacteria!
Scant search for the Maker Excerpt: But where is the experimental evidence? None exists in the literature claiming that one species has been shown to evolve into another. Bacteria, the simplest form of independent life, are ideal for this kind of study, with generation times of 20 to 30 minutes, and populations achieved after 18 hours. But throughout 150 years of the science of bacteriology, there is no evidence that one species of bacteria has changed into another, in spite of the fact that populations have been exposed to potent chemical and physical mutagens and that, uniquely, bacteria possess extrachromosomal, transmissible plasmids. Since there is no evidence for species changes between the simplest forms of unicellular life, it is not surprising that there is no evidence for evolution from prokaryotic to eukaryotic cells, let alone throughout the whole array of higher multicellular organisms. – Alan H. Linton – emeritus professor of bacteriology, University of Bristol. http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storycode=159282 A review of The Edge of Evolution: The Search for the Limits of Darwinism The numbers of Plasmodium and HIV in the last 50 years greatly exceeds the total number of mammals since their supposed evolutionary origin (several hundred million years ago), yet little has been achieved by evolution. This suggests that mammals could have “invented” little in their time frame. Behe: ‘Our experience with HIV gives good reason to think that Darwinism doesn’t do much—even with billions of years and all the cells in that world at its disposal’ (p. 155). http://creation.com/review-michael-behe-edge-of-evolution “The immediate, most important implication is that complexes with more than two different binding sites-ones that require three or more proteins-are beyond the edge of evolution, past what is biologically reasonable to expect Darwinian evolution to have accomplished in all of life in all of the billion-year history of the world. The reasoning is straightforward. The odds of getting two independent things right are the multiple of the odds of getting each right by itself. So, other things being equal, the likelihood of developing two binding sites in a protein complex would be the square of the probability for getting one: a double CCC, 10^20 times 10^20, which is 10^40. There have likely been fewer than 10^40 cells in the world in the last 4 billion years, so the odds are against a single event of this variety in the history of life. It is biologically unreasonable.” - Michael Behe – The Edge of Evolution – page 146 Michael Behe, The Edge of Evolution, pg. 162 Swine Flu, Viruses, and the Edge of Evolution “Indeed, the work on malaria and AIDS demonstrates that after all possible unintelligent processes in the cell–both ones we’ve discovered so far and ones we haven’t–at best extremely limited benefit, since no such process was able to do much of anything. It’s critical to notice that no artificial limitations were placed on the kinds of mutations or processes the microorganisms could undergo in nature. Nothing–neither point mutation, deletion, insertion, gene duplication, transposition, genome duplication, self-organization nor any other process yet undiscovered–was of much use.” http://www.evolutionnews.org/2009/05/swine_flu_viruses_and_the_edge020071.html
Nor do we have evidence that a fruit fly can evolve into anything but another fruit fly:
‘No matter what we do to a fruit fly embryo there are only three possible outcomes, a normal fruit fly, a defective fruit fly, or a dead fruit fly. What we never see is primary speciation much less macro-evolution’ – Jonathan Wells Darwin’s Theory – Fruit Flies and Morphology – video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZJTIwRY0bs Experimental Evolution in Fruit Flies (35 years of trying to force fruit flies to evolve in the laboratory fails, spectacularly) – October 2010 Excerpt: “Despite decades of sustained selection in relatively small, sexually reproducing laboratory populations, selection did not lead to the fixation of newly arising unconditionally advantageous alleles.,,, “This research really upends the dominant paradigm about how species evolve,” said ecology and evolutionary biology professor Anthony Long, the primary investigator. http://eebweb.arizona.edu/nachman/Suggested%20Papers/Lab%20papers%20fall%202010/Burke_et_al_2010.pdf
Nor does empirical evidence coupled with mathematics support that such a transition is even possible from apes to humans by gradual mechanisms in the first place:
Thou Shalt Not Put Evolutionary Theory to a Test – Douglas Axe – July 18, 2012 Excerpt: “For example, McBride criticizes me for not mentioning genetic drift in my discussion of human origins, apparently without realizing that the result of Durrett and Schmidt rules drift out. Each and every specific genetic change needed to produce humans from apes would have to have conferred a significant selective advantage in order for humans to have appeared in the available time (i.e. the mutations cannot be ‘neutral’). Any aspect of the transition that requires two or more mutations to act in combination in order to increase fitness would take way too long (>100 million years). My challenge to McBride, and everyone else who believes the evolutionary story of human origins, is not to provide the list of mutations that did the trick, but rather a list of mutations that can do it. Otherwise they’re in the position of insisting that something is a scientific fact without having the faintest idea how it even could be.” Doug Axe PhD. http://www.evolutionnews.org/2012/07/thou_shalt_not062351.html More from Ann Gauger on why humans didn’t happen the way Darwin said – July 2012 Excerpt: Each of these new features probably required multiple mutations. Getting a feature that requires six neutral mutations is the limit of what bacteria can produce. For primates (e.g., monkeys, apes and humans) the limit is much more severe. Because of much smaller effective population sizes (an estimated ten thousand for humans instead of a billion for bacteria) and longer generation times (fifteen to twenty years per generation for humans vs. a thousand generations per year for bacteria), it would take a very long time for even a single beneficial mutation to appear and become fixed in a human population. You don’t have to take my word for it. In 2007, Durrett and Schmidt estimated in the journal Genetics that for a single mutation to occur in a nucleotide-binding site and be fixed in a primate lineage would require a waiting time of six million years. The same authors later estimated it would take 216 million years for the binding site to acquire two mutations, if the first mutation was neutral in its effect. Facing Facts But six million years is the entire time allotted for the transition from our last common ancestor with chimps to us according to the standard evolutionary timescale. Two hundred and sixteen million years takes us back to the Triassic, when the very first mammals appeared. One or two mutations simply aren’t sufficient to produce the necessary changes— sixteen anatomical features—in the time available. At most, a new binding site might affect the regulation of one or two genes. https://uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/more-from-ann-gauger-on-why-humans-didnt-happen-the-way-darwin-said/
In fact, we have no evidence whatsoever that radical plasticity of body plans is even possible:
Response to John Wise – October 2010 Excerpt: A technique called “saturation mutagenesis”1,2 has been used to produce every possible developmental mutation in fruit flies (Drosophila melanogaster),3,4,5 roundworms (Caenorhabditis elegans),6,7 and zebrafish (Danio rerio),8,9,10 and the same technique is now being applied to mice (Mus musculus).11,12 None of the evidence from these and numerous other studies of developmental mutations supports the neo-Darwinian dogma that DNA mutations can lead to new organs or body plans–because none of the observed developmental mutations benefit the organism. http://www.evolutionnews.org/2010/10/response_to_john_wise038811.html “Perhaps the most obvious challenge is to demonstrate evolution empirically. There are, arguably, some 2 to 10 million species on earth. The fossil record shows that most species survive somewhere between 3 and 5 million years. In that case, we ought to be seeing small but significant numbers of originations (new species) .. every decade.” Keith Stewart Thomson, Professor of Biology and Dean of the Graduate School, Yale University (Nov. -Dec. American Scientist, 1997 pg. 516) Phenotypic Plasticity – Lizard cecal valve (cyclical variation)- video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zEtgOApmnTA
bornagain77
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In what other form could humans as we recognize them exist?
Off the top of my head- Giants; elongated skulls- or were you talking about something else?Joe
January 11, 2014
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