Okay, here comes the evolutionist to point out that these mutations and such, even just the extremely rare beneficial ones, are “reproducible”, or at least observable, and that given enough time they could have been behind all the varied species. Of course, this is not the same as reproducing what is claimed to have taken place, but heck, it sounds fantastic so we’ll go with it anyway. And next week when we stumble upon a problematic area, we’ll just throw a few more billion years in and be all set, never mind that it contradicts the “very reliable” dating methods; people somehow just don’t even think to ask about, when we “discover” that the earth is older, how that could possibly be since the dates were already established by rock solid dating methods. That even disregards the more obvious problem that the earth just got older for no other reason than that the data couldn’t be squeezed in the “solid” theory.

Assume the model is wrong?

“NO!!! It’s rock solid!!! As are the dating methods!!! We were just a little off on the dates; only a few billion years. It’s not a problem.”

Aye. With work like that nothing ever will be a problem, either.

The only “science” in evolution is science-fiction.

I’d love for science to keep marching on, and it will regardless, but the problem as it pertains to this scientific topic is that it does not oblige me the freedom to do the same. Do you now agree that this “theory”, so called, does in fact put God and creation out of the realm of possibility? It does – or attempts to – and by so doing forcibly disrupts my ability to “leave the religious instruction to Sunday school”.

One day a week the kids are taught the truth and then are filled with lies the other six. Who wouldn’t like odds like that in order to get people to think what they want?

I’m all for science when it is real science and it adheres to the true scientific method. Unfortunately, evolution fails miserably here.

Yes, we’re arrogant enough to think that we might have some idea what we’re doing after a few centuries of using the scientific method.

Stop telling scientists how to do their job. Go and annoy car mechanics or computer repair people instead. Why don’t you tell them that they should be putting God into their work. In fact tell me what your job is and I’ll come around to your workplace and tell you that you’re arrogant to think you know how to do your job.

Again, all we want is to let science teachers teach science. Let’s leave the religious instruction to Sunday school shall we?

There’s a guy with your first name who, like me, is a born-again Christian, but he’s also a professional geologist — Brent G. Dalrymple. See if you can find his article “Finding the Age of the Earth — By Physics or by Faith?” If it’s not on the web somewhere you can find it in the collection of essays, Is God a Creationist?

Thanks for that. I’ll look up this info. I have no problem, or fear, looking at what these guys say. I’ve looked a fairly descent amount and am still quite confident that somewhere along the line there always must be a calibration, and that calibration must make assumptions that aren’t verifiable.

And, again, how could we possible know whether God didn’t just “do it that way”? I know that sounds like a cop out that I can fall back to on any point you or anyone could possibly make, but it is nonetheless a fact that if the universe and everything in it was indeed created that God had to do it some way, right? How could we possibly know?

I think it’s funny because the scientists and those who taut the “scientific evidence” yell that God cannot enter into the equation because He/She/It is not possibly scientifically quantifiable. Well, duh! That’s exactly correct, and the very reason why scientists have no standing whatsoever when they attempt to say that the universe wasn’t created in such and such a way. They admit on the one hand they couldn’t know, but on the other that they definitely know. Oh …, I feel the “H” word coming on again.

So, the scientific community thinks they have adequately brushed God aside by saying that He/She/It cannot enter into the discussion, but in so saying they are admitting that they wouldn’t be able to know whether or not God did anything. They unwittingly admit their ignorance, as well as astounding arrogance. Scientists think that there is literally nothing bigger than science. Oh, how wrong.

If “God did it” was a legitimate answer, there would be some supporting evidence. Where is the supporting evidence? Can you point to a single instance where “God did it” is the simplest and most legitimate answer. Can you pray and stop gravity working and say “God did it”

Note; evidence that someone else is wrong, does not make your evidence right. You actually have to provide evidence to back up your claims.

If everything was created in a magic burst of noodliness last Thursday whilst the Flying Spaghetti monster and the Invisible Pink Unicorn did battle mightily… Why does the evidence suggest the universe is much older, and keep in mind that the evidence is supported by multiple sources. Not just a single point.

For you to be right, virtually all of science has to be wrong. Which is more likely do you think?

And Einstein didn’t disprove the validity of Newtonian physics. He knew that whatever else his theories did, they must reproduce the results of Newtonian physics on the macro-scale.

None of your examples show an undermining of existing theories. Instead, they led to a broadening of knowledge.

A person who attempts to undermine evolution is not interested in broadening our knowledge. Such people have only destructive intentions and the best they can do is to confuse themselves and others.

I expect that Einstein will eventually be trotted out in any argument, especially if someone doesn’t have a leg to stand on.

So spare me. Make your point without resorting to Einstein, Feynman, Sagan or Newton, etc. etc. These sorts of people were bona-fide geniuses who were smart enough to think the big questions. Without meaning to be insulting- you’re probably not in their league. (Neither am I.)

I’ve said several times now that I’m not an expert on the philosophy of science, so enough with the cheap shots about my competence as a scientist. Perhaps contrary to your belief, we don’t sit around all day discussing abstract philosophical questions about what is and what isn’t science. That sort of thing is fun to write about on blogs, but it doesn’t keep me in cat-food.

Are you sure you’re a scientist? I hope your expertise in science is better than your expertise in history appears to be. Are you talking about amateurs like:

Albert Einstein, the amateur physicist who worked as a patent clerk and overturned the foundations of physics

Gregor Mendel, the German monk who dabbled with growing pea plants in his spare time and established a new science called genetics

Michael Faraday, the lab assistant and amateur scientist who discovered electrical induction and laid the groundwork for much of our modern electrical industry

Here is a URL with several more:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/orchid/amateurs.html

You don’t have to be paid to know what you’re talking about or to challenge existing scientific theories.

If you want to make a contribution, then work on a simple problem, which you think isn’t well enough understood. That way you stand a chance of increasing our knowledge, rather than look like someone who wants to stir up some false controversy.

People who challenge evolution are at the same level as inventors of perpetual motion machines and are taken about as seriously.

[[Yes, I’m saying dating methods are all whacked. When we can get some good dino DNA we assume the miracle is how long it was preserved instead of the more obvious and logical conclusion that dinos didn’t live nearly as long ago as believed, and that dating methods are unreliable at best. Funny how evolutionists readily believe in any miracle that is necessary to keep the fantasy “believable”.]]

Brent, radioactive decay is one of the more thoroughly understand areas of modern physics. The chance that there’s some huge systematic error in all the different forms of it (carbon-nitrogen, rubidium-strontium, potassium-argon, uranium-lead, thorium-lead, etc.) is so small it can be justifiably ignored.

And radioactive decay dates are not the only reasons for thinking the Earth and the Universe very old. The geologists of the 18th century — believers in divine special creation to a man — concluded that it had to be very old long before radioactive decay was even known about.

Then there’s starlight. We can see galaxies billions of light-years away. The speed of light is fixed. If we see a galaxy ten billion light-years away, the light took ten billion years to get here. Heck, we can see globular clusters 8,000, 20,000, and 65,000 light-years away. Same argument.

There’s a guy with your first name who, like me, is a born-again Christian, but he’s also a professional geologist — Brent G. Dalrymple. See if you can find his article “Finding the Age of the Earth — By Physics or by Faith?” If it’s not on the web somewhere you can find it in the collection of essays, Is God a Creationist?

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It’s fine for experts or established scientists to take on big questions from time to time. For instance, occasionally a professor will challenge the orthodoxy of an almost universally held opinion or assumption. Arguably, Einstein, Newton and Darwin are examples of that.”

The C-value paradox is not some anomaly concerning reptilian or amphibian DNA. Rather, we see drastically different amounts of DNA in different species even within the same family. DNA is the blueprint for building the organism. Therefore we would expect that if you have a very complicated organism to build, it requires a lot of DNA and if you have a very simple organism to build, it requires a small amount of DNA. But this is not what we actually observe in practice. Hence, the term paradox.

O.K. So it’s fine for “experts” to challenge accepted scientific theories but NOT O.K. for us mere mortals. That seems to be what you’re implying. Of course, this is coming from a system which claims to be non-authoritarian. I believe Sagan said something to the effect that arguments from authority in science are worthless and anyone from anywhere can challenge anything in science at anytime.

“Your complaints sound like mostly the result of individual poor schools and maybe poor textbooks. See Doc’s comments above for a different experience.”

http://4brevard.com/choice/international-test-scores.htm

The United States finished behind the following countries in terms of grade 12 science:

Sweden, Netherlands, Iceland, Norway, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, Switzerland, Austria, Slovenia, Denmark, Germany, France, Czech Republic, Russia

It finished ahead of these countries: Italy, Hungary, Lithuania, Cyprus, South Africa

For grade 12 mathematics the United States finished behind the following countries:

Netherlands, Sweden, Denmark, Switzerland, Iceland, Norway, France, New Zealand, Australia, Canada, Austria, Slovenia, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Russia, Lithuania, Czech Republic

It finished ahead of these countries: Cyprus, South Africa

Here are some comments from that study:

“Among teachers of high school biology and life sciences classes, approximately 31 percent of them do not have at least a minor in biology. Among high school physical science teachers, over half, 55 percent, do not have at least a minor in any of the physical sciences. Again we might question the focus of the teachers on social re-engineering instead of subject areas.”

“Textbooks U.S. textbooks treat topics with a “mile-wide, inch-deep” approach, Schmidt said. A typical U.S. eighth-grade math textbook deals with about 35 topics. By comparison, a Japanese or German math textbook for that age would have only five or six topics. Comparisons done elsewhere between French and American math books show more innovative approaches to finding, for instance, the volume of a pyramid. Fractions don’t lend themselves to computerization, so they’re relegated to an importance slightly above Roman numerals. Calculators are here to stay, so kids breeze through long division. They concentrate on how to use math rather than how to do math, and with less entanglement in social philosophy.”

So I think my claim that U.S. science education is pathetic is well founded. The U.S. was 3rd from last in mathematics and 6th from last in science. And this despite the fact that the U.S. spends more money per student for public education than any other country in the world. Funny how I never see any topics on this blog talking about this as “dooming” the United States. It’s much easier and a lot more fun to bait the creationists by poking fun at them. Unfortunately that does nothing to fix our education system.

I don’t have a problem with the hypothesis that we all have a common ancestor; it isn’t an idea, on the very surface, that is unthinkable to come up with. I do have a problem when “evidence” is forced into supporting that and giving it “theory” status, and then trumpeted and beaten into our kids brains with tax money.

Again though, my main point, is that evolutionists say that the origin of life isn’t something they must account for; it doesn’t matter. Yet, they prove over and over and over again that they know it does.

H-Y-P-O-C-R-I-T-E-S

Unfortunately you’ll no longer be able to post here, but at least you’ll be leading a more Christian life in which you’re not troubled by the fruits of modern science.

I’m quite happy for you to trust your life to God over science, but you should be consistent in your approach, or else people might think you’re picking and choosing. Think of this as an opportunity to prove to God how little you value arrogant science, which consistently shows using multiple independent dating methods that we live in a universe that is billions of years old.

“Because they believe “God did it!” is a legitimate answer to a scientific query.”

It is a legitimate answer if it is true, wouldn’t you agree? The real problem is that, in fact, science has pre-assumed no God and therefore have no hope but to misinterpret data.

Assume with me for a minute that God in fact did create the universe 6,000 years ago and created life as we see it today, i.e. different species as we know them today. How should God have done it? Go ahead and tell God how to do it. Who are you, or we, to tell God how to do anything? It would be silly for us to attempt to council God. So, how is it that you assume the “evidence” that is observed isn’t simply how God did it? How would you know?

You wouldn’t, and you don’t.

You all are so confident in the age of the earth and universe as told you by science, and yet to extrapolate data to arrive at the supposed age you must assume that there was no deliberate act of creation somewhere along the line. If you assumed and believed that there was a definite time in history that the universe were created, you could easily use the very same data, calibrated differently, to point to that.

Before you raise your arms over that point, please remember: Any method whereby we measure something depends on calibration. There must be some standard by which we measure anything. So, when dealing with history before any reliable records how can you presume that dating methods are calibrated to a reliable and accurate standard? You cannot. There must be an assumption, and we all know what that assumption has been …, no G-O-D, or creation.

Yes, I’m saying dating methods are all whacked. When we can get some good dino DNA we assume the miracle is how long it was preserved instead of the more obvious and logical conclusion that dinos didn’t live nearly as long ago as believed, and that dating methods are unreliable at best. Funny how evolutionists readily believe in any miracle that is necessary to keep the fantasy “believable”.

Your complaints sound like mostly the result of individual poor schools and maybe poor textbooks. See Doc’s comments above for a different experience.

What I still don’t understand are your nitpicking comments on reptile DNA. It seems that in your experience, we’re nowhere near the stage where teachers would need to go into such detail about an oddity regarding the amount of junk DNA in reptiles.

Were you using that as an example of critical thinking? Because it’s not a very good one. Critical thinking isn’t normally taught so that the students can poke holes in very-well established theories, giving them the impression that you shouldn’t trust anything in science.

It’s fine for experts or established scientists to take on big questions from time to time. For instance, occasionally a professor will challenge the orthodoxy of an almost universally held opinion or assumption. Arguably, Einstein, Newton and Darwin are examples of that.

But, we’re beyond the stage in science where it’s possible that a 15 year old kid is suddenly going to throw over a field on the scale of evolutionary theory with her critical thinking skills. The evidence is too solid, and even if there were an even more general principle to which evolution is just a good approximation- I wouldn’t expect a 15 year old to discover what’s so far eluded every biologist on the planet.

So, critical thinking has its place, but children should also be taught that evolution is almost certainly true because of the millions of independent bits of confirming data and the 100′s of 1000′s of papers that have been published using its theories.

Evolution is a mature and tested theory. It’s not going to go away. There might be small changes in the details, but in its broad picture, it is almost certainly correct. Working biologists are about as confident in evolution as physicists are in the existence of electrons. No amount of nitpicking is going to change that.

I’m only a physics postdoc, and again- I don’t pretend to be an expert in the scientific method. I do know that individual scientists can be flawed, but the scientific process as a whole tends to hone in on the right answers. I’m not the right person to argue with about the fine-points of evolution, but I can state with utter certainty that if your goal is to undermine its status as one of our most important theories- you will certainly fail.

Nitpickers are often under the illusion that they’re helping science with their critical thinking. Well, they’re not. It’s because their motivation is almost always the undermining of a solid body of work that has withstood the test of time. A true critical thinker is interested in furthering our knowledge and not in sowing the seeds of doubt and muddying up the waters to make it look like a controversy exists where there is none.

The following comments are applicable to K through 12 education in the U.S.:

Teaching of science in the schools is PATHETIC in general. Science is taught as a collection of facts. Laboratory work is atrocious – the student must get the expected result in order to get a good grade. Of course this leads to the subliminal message that scientists already have all the answers which is not the message we ought to be sending our young people. Critical thinking and the scientific method are usually not taught at all, or if they are, only lip service is given to them.

Teaching of evolution in the schools is even more PATHETIC. The student is lucky if he/she gets to handle a real fossil, say a trilobite, or something like that. Often times the only material is some book with a picture of a T. rex or a cave man in it. So it could not be much worse even if the creationists were in charge of it. But you’re the professional in the field. What is your opinion of the current teaching of evolution in the schools?

According to the Wikipedia article you linked to, the initial paradox has been largely resolved by the realization that most of the DNA sequence is ‘junk’ DNA, though it still seems unclear why there’s so much of the stuff hanging about. (I be not a biologist, so I’m only passing on my Wikiknowledge.)

Your argument seems exactly like the sort of nitpicking that is common to people who want to undermine the credibility of a scientific field by pointing to a not-fully solved question.

I wasn’t aware that any field had a complete solution to all its problems, and if you can find one, then why are people still doing research in it?

I believe it’s already the case that science teachers routinely point out the more speculative and controversial nature of some topics (e.g. dark-matter, or string theory) if and when they have the need to discuss them. If they were to teach the subject of reptilian DNA, then the ‘C-Value’ topic might be justified in mentioning, but I doubt that this area would be covered in high-school biology.

I’m not really interested in a dialogue with someone whose ultimate motive is to hinder science teachers from teaching science. If you want a response from me, I’ll need a much clearer statement of your position on the current teaching of evolution in classrooms.

Well, it was brought up as an example of biological data which the theory of evolution did not predict and does not adequately explain. So the theory is not perfect and does not explain everything in its domain. That might be mentioned in biology class from time to time but I doubt it will be.

Brent: Nobody here is likely to disillusion you of your religious speculation on the origin of life. Still, because your ideas are not amenable to independent verification by those who do not share your faith, they have no place in science, much less the classroom.

Melusine: I’m not a US citizen and so won’t be voting. My boss will though. He’s already done more than his fair share by hosting a recent radio program on these issues.

Darwin did not have the concept of allopatric speciation which is currently the favored mechanism among evolutionists for how species come to be. This idea did not come about until the 1930′s and 1940′s with the “evolutionary synthesis” led by people such as Ernst Mayr, Julian Huxley, Theodosius Dobzhansky, and many others.

“Presumably because natural selection has favored having a lot of DNA in amphibians. Why is this a problem? If you think “simpler” species should have less genetic material, you should know there’s no clear correlation.”

Why do you presume? Why doesn’t your theory clearly predict that amphibians have more DNA based on such and such environmental influences? And do other species that live in similar environments also have more than the average amount of DNA? Anyone can do hand-waving after the fact.

[[when someone brings up God (not me, by the way), then you say He/She/It cannot co-exist with Evolution. ]]

I certainly don’t say that. I think evolution is God’s method of creating biological diversity. The people who say “evolution proves there’s no God” understand neither evolution nor God. Theism and evolution are not rival scientific theories, whatever someone like Richard Dawkins says.

[[Despite being named “On the Origin of Species by Natural Selection” by Darwin in 1859, the original book did not actually explain how species originated. That problem was not solved until 1942, 83 years later, when Ernst Mayr published his book “Systematics and the Origin of Species”. So it’s a little disingenuous to claim that the theory has explained everything for 150 years.]]

Darwin not only explained how species originate, he diagrammed it. The one illustration in the book is of life-forms speciating.

[[Even today there is a lot of data that the theory cannot explain. Take, for example the C-value paradox:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C-value_paradox
How is it that amphibians have ten or more times the amount of DNA that humans have? How does the theory of evolution explain that data?]]

Presumably because natural selection has favored having a lot of DNA in amphibians. Why is this a problem? If you think “simpler” species should have less genetic material, you should know there’s no clear correlation. The protozoan Aulacantha has 1,600 chromosomes. A fern has 1,250. A human being has 46.

If I had to make a guess, I’d hypothesize that because amphibians are more sensitive to environmental mutagens — frogs are “the canary in the coal mine” for local environmental contamination — they need more copies of vital genes. I don’t know if anyone has tested this or not. Does anyone on the blog know?