What's so great about Charles Darwin?

bob_2 · 03-19-09 1:48 am

<blockquote><hr size=0><!-quote-!>quote:In the first place if Darwin was correct you would expect species to appear gradually, have a period of stasis and then gradually disappear from the fossil record. This is not what seems to happen. Instead we seem to have periods when many, many new species 'explode' into the fossil record. Then we have long periods of stasis before many species disappear as quickly as they appeared and new species 'explode' into the fossil record. This was particularly true in Cambrian times. In the Pre-Cambrian rocks there is very little evidence of life forms - the fossils are sparse. But suddenly, in the Cambrian times the seas were seething with fully-formed, highly-complex life forms. Not what evolution and natural selection would expect! Indeed Stephen J Gould writes in "The Panda's Thumb", - "The fossil record had caused Darwin more grief than joy. Nothing distressed him more than the Cambrian explosion, the coincident appearance of almost all complex organic designs..." Gould tried to adapt Darwin's idea by talking about "punctuated equilibrium" in order to explain these explosions of new species. Even so, he may have been describing accurately what had happened but was at a loss to explain why it had happened. Both forms of evolution, however, share more problems. In the second place if evolution (either form) was the correct explanation we would expect many, many transitional forms between species. But we have none. The traditional explanation for the dearth of these transitional forms is that they were unsuccessful, died out and by bad luck no fossil record of them was left. Darwin, himself, made the point that of all past lifeforms only a tiny percentage died in conditions ripe for their fossilisation. This seems to me to be a poor excuse for the lack of evidence of transitional species. The number of such transitional species must have been huge and so the number of such individual animals must have been truly mindboggling! To have left no fossil record seems incredible! For a while there were attempts to claim that archaeopteryx was a transitional species. Archaeopteryx was a fossil which looked like a bird at first glance. Only, it had teeth and seemed to have small hooks or claws on the front of the wings. This was claimed to be the intermediate between birds and dinosaurs and to predate the arrival of birds by sixty million years. In 1977, however, archeologists working out of Brigham Young University discovered a bird (identified as a bird beyond all doubt) in rocks of the same period as archaeopteryx. This suggests that archaeopteryx was no transitional creature but just one of the many strange birds alive at that period. In the third place, one of Darwin's main interests was pigeon breeding and he cited in "The Origin" how pigeon fanciers would breed pigeons. He carefully described how they would select the features they wanted to emphasise or eliminate and so choose the birds to be mated over the generations. He gave this as evidence of artificial natural selection. I have heard ardent evolutionists cite dog and horse breeding as evidence too. The problem here is that no matter which animal you select, albeit pigeon, dog or horse or any other creature you are talking about causing changes within one species. There is no question of the chosen creature becoming a new species. So Darwin's claims have no relevance to natural selection or the origin of species! This takes us to my fourth point and this involves two of the core beliefs of the philosophy of science. Firstly when putting forward a hypothesis or theory more weight should be given to the facts which don't fit in with it than to the facts which do. This means that evolutionists should be worried by the lack of transitional species and the species explosions. They should be emphasising, when explaining natural selection that these are severe problems for the theory of evolution. They are, however, strangely quiet on the subject. Secondly, The great philosopher of science, Karl Popper, held that science works by falsification. His beliefs were not too dissimilar from those of the logical positivists led by A. J. Ayer. They held that unless you could adequately describe how you could prove your hypothesis to be either true or false then your hypothesis was meaningless. You would be in a scientific sense be talking non sense ( two words non and sense). Popper, himself said "Darwinism is not a testable scientific theory but a metaphysical research programme." It is very hard to imagine a workable test for evolution. We can breed new varieties of pigeons etc but this is intra species not inter species. Even experiments with fruit flies have not yet bred enough generations to see mutations to a new species and it is unlikely they ever will. I accept what Popper said about Darwinism not being scientific but he goes on to say that it is certainly useful and points the way to the true scientific story. But i still cannot understand why these qualifications were not made plain when the mainstream media made their programmes lauding Darwinism. <!-/quote-!><hr size=0></blockquote> <a href="http://www.scienceray.com/Philosophy-of-Science/So-Whats-So-Great-About-Charles-Darwin.599349" target=_top>http://www.scienceray.com/Philosophy-of-Science/So -Whats-So-Great-About-Charles-Darwin.599349</a> This has been my point all along, all Darwin was playing with was microevolution, but never saw or producted macroevolution. Not in the fossil record and not in his observations.

bob_2 · 03-19-09 2:01 am

Here is another topic that shoots down Darwin's theories: MENDEL’S ACCOUNTANT: A BIOLOGICALLY REALISTIC FORWARD-TIME POPULATION GENETICS PROGRAM J. SANFORD, J. BAUMGARDNER, W. BREWER§, P. GIBSON, AND W. REMINEK <a href="http://www.scpe.org/vols/vol08/no2/SCPE_8_2_02.pdf" target=_top>http://www.scpe.org/vols/vol08/no2/SCPE_8_2_02.pdf</a>

john8verse32 · 03-19-09 8:43 am

your "scienceray" web site is fascinating, if not scholarly.... but after reading this post they provide, I wonder why you even bother to quote them: Why ever did people believe that we came from animals!? They have slightly similar skeletons, but completely different! What the bible says is true, it doesn't even need to be proven, it's the word of God! For example, in the red sea, they found thousands of skeletons from when Moses parted it, and that was meant to be thousands of years ago. Find me a half human, half something else and I'll believe in evolution.** There is evolution (adaption) between species, but not between kinds! God made the earth, the stars, and the heavens. Even leaves are extremely well designed! so , Bob, you can now give up trying to prove the Bible is true....its not necessary, since the Bible itself says its all true, and all those skeletons at the bottom of the Red Sea should prove it for us. ** is that what Sister White was looking for too, with her "amalgamation" theory....?

bob_2 · 03-19-09 7:20 pm

John, after all that back and forth, I am glad you finally see the light!!!<img src="http://www.atomorrow.net/discus/clipart/kiss.gif" border=0>

john8verse32 · 03-19-09 9:47 pm

but what if there are no skeletons at the bottom of the Red Sea? what if there is no Ark on top of Mt Ararat? what if there IS evidence in the fossil record of half human/half monkey ancestors? problem, Bob, is the light I see, often has taken hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions of years to reach me... proving that the universe is older than 6000 yrs.

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#1 03-19-09 1:48 am