Lots of creationism to debunk

Rye · Post by **Rye** » 2003-05-20 07:00pm

Just look at it all!
creationism!

Wicked Pilot · Post by **Wicked Pilot** » 2003-05-20 07:49pm

I particularly enjoyed the section relating to 2nd Thermo. The author should take the advice of a very wise man who once said "the trouble with simple things is that one must understand them very well".

I can assume with a reasonable degree of success that the rest of the site is bullshit also.

InnerBrat · Post by **InnerBrat** » 2003-05-21 10:04am

*hands up*
can I take this one?
It' might take a while, but I'm bored with no exams, so can I do it tomorrow? (going to gym now)

Thankee.

Majin Gojira · Post by **Majin Gojira** » 2003-05-21 10:33am

Ow! The Stupid! It BUUUUUUUURRNS!

Peregrin Toker · Post by **Peregrin Toker** » 2003-05-21 01:03pm

Actually, I'm afraid I'm starting to ignore cretinism.... oops, I mean creationism whenever I hear about it... I'm that accustomed to that nonsense.

Post by **Alyrium Denryle** » 2003-05-21 07:16pm

innerbrat wrote:*hands up*
can I take this one?
It' might take a while, but I'm bored with no exams, so can I do it tomorrow? (going to gym now)

Thankee.

Oh please do. Lay the biological smackdown on their asses!

Rye · Post by **Rye** » 2003-05-21 07:29pm

Innerbrat, do you think you could post lil snippets of the best bits in here?

SyntaxVorlon · Post by **SyntaxVorlon** » 2003-05-21 10:17pm

Left handed proteins...
Didn't Wong refute that?

Post by **Sea Skimmer** » 2003-05-21 10:23pm

Looks like a typical load of crap, not worth spending a minute on.

Illuminatus Primus · Post by **Illuminatus Primus** » 2003-05-21 10:42pm

http://www.darwinismrefuted.com/science ... sm_01.html

Demirsoy writes that he prefers the impossible, in order not to have to accept supernatural forces-in other words, the existence of a Creator. However, the aim of science is not to avoid accepting the existence of supernatural forces. Science can get nowhere with such an aim. It should simply observe nature, free of all prejudices, and draw conclusions from these observations. If these results indicate that there is planning by a supernatural intelligence, then science must accept the fact.

Under close examination, what they call the "scientific cause" is actually the materialist dogma that only matter exists and that all of nature can be explained by material processes. This is not a "scientific cause," or anything like it; it is just materialist philosophy. This philosophy hides behind such superficial words as "scientific cause" and obliges scientists to accept quite unscientific conclusions. Not surprisingly, when Demirsoy cites another subject-the origins of the mitochondria in the cell-he openly accepts chance as an explanation, even though it is "quite contrary to scientific thought":

As observed, this moron does not even understand the Scientific Method.

Post by **Darth Wong** » 2003-05-21 10:56pm

SyntaxVorlon wrote:Left handed proteins...
Didn't Wong refute that?

Yes, by simply pointing out that their argument rests upon the unstated assumption that it is impossible for life to exist without all-LH proteins, rather than simply theorizing that life adapted this preference over time.

Most cretinist probability arguments employ the same basic technique: select some attribute of modern life, assume that life is impossible without this attribute, assume total randomness rather than chemical determinism, and then calculate the resulting wildly inflated odds.

InnerBrat · Post by **InnerBrat** » 2003-05-22 08:07am

Right, I'm taking it page by page, and I've just finished the first one. As I hate long posts, I'll keep adding new ones as I do them.

Comments on my arguments, please. Science I can do, arguing is my weak point. Any logical fallacies (of mine) to be highlighted, as well as things I missed out.
OK, here goes:

A Short history
While the history of the theory of evolution is interesting, and often (as here) misrepresented by creationists, things like the personal beliefs of scientists don't hold a whole lot of weight to either argument, so Ill overlook this section for now.

The mechanisms of Darwinism
The first couple of pages here simply go over Natural Selection, deliberately excluding the possibility of mutations - there are a few assumptions made here, and claims athat are not backed up, but I'm willing to forego this in the hope that the points will be more clearly made later on.

A Struggle for Existence

The essential assumption of the theory of natural selection holds that there is a fierce struggle for survival in nature, and every living thing cares only for itself. At the time Darwin proposed this theory, the ideas of Thomas Malthus, the British classical economist, were an important influence on him. Malthus maintained that human beings were inevitably in a constant struggle for survival, basing his views on the fact that population, and hence the need for food resources, increases geometrically, while food resources themselves increase only arithmetically. The result is that population size is inevitably checked by factors in the environment, such as hunger and disease. Darwin adapted Malthus's vision of a fierce struggle for survival among human beings to nature at large, and claimed that "natural selection" is a consequence of this struggle.

It is worth noting here that the adaptation of Malthus' ideas to the natural world as a whole is not unique to Darwin. Alfre4d Russel Wallace made the exact same connection while suffering a fever in Indonesia, and as a result, came up witht the idea of Natural Seelection completely independantly.

Further research, however, revealed that there was no struggle for life in nature as Darwin had postulated. As a result of extensive research into animal groups in the 1960s and 1970s, V. C. Wynne-Edwards, a British zoologist, concluded that living things balance their population in an interesting way, which prevents competition for food. Animal groups were simply managing their population on the basis of their food resources. Population was regulated not by elimination of the weak through factors like epidemics or starvation, but by instinctive control mechanisms. In other words, animals controlled their numbers not by fierce competition, as Darwin suggested, but by limiting reproduction.(V. C. Wynne-Edwards, "Self Regulating Systems in Populations of Animals, Science, vol. 147, 26 March 1965, pp. 1543-1548; V. C. Wynne-Edwards, Evolution Through Group Selection, London, 1986.)

Using this one reference like this is stupid. The idea of struggle for existence does not necessarily mean by fierce violence, as seemingly implied here, but that some organisms will successfully breed, and others won't.
A self-imposed barrier to p0opulation growth is still a barrier to population grwoth, no matter how non-violent it is, as some animals will still have more offspring than others. It is still, therefore, a struggle for existence.

Even plants exhibited examples of population control, which invalidated Darwin's suggestion of selection by means of competition. The botanist A. D. Bradshaw's observations indicated that during reproduction, plants behaved according to the "density" of the planting, and limited their reproduction if the area was highly populated with plants.(A. D. Bradshaw, "Evolutionary significance of phenotypic plasticity in plants," Advances in Genetics, vol. 13, pp. 115-155; cited in Lee Spetner, Not By Chance!: Shattering the Modern Theory of Evolution, The Judaica Press, Inc., New York, 1997, pp. 16-17.)

Again, a study is taken completely out of context. It's clearly to the plant's advantage if it does not waste too much time and energy trying to reproduce at a time when competition is fierce. It's a clear play off, in which by sacrificing present reproductive success the plant can maximise future reproduction, at a time when competition might not be so intense.

On the other hand, examples of sacrifice observed in animals such as ants and bees display a model completely opposed to the Darwinist struggle for survival.

So altruism between siblings is ati-evolutionist?
OK, time for some maths. Let r be the coefficient of relatedness between organism a and organism b. Between parent and a sexually produced child it is 0.5 - assuming the parents are unrelated. Between siblings it is also 0.5 (0.5*0.5=0.25 through the father, 0.25 through the mother).
It is therefore as beneficial to any organism to look after its siblings as it is its own offspring. This is also expressing through Hamilton's Rule:

Altruism will occur when r1b > r2c
Where r1=coefficient of relatedness to the recipients offspring
r2=coefficient of relatedness to own offspring
b=beneift to recipient
c=cost to actor

With ants and bees, (order Hymenoptera), the genetics of altruism tkaes on a new twist - haplodiploidy. Within this order, females are diploid (two sets of chromosomes, one from each parent), while males are haploid (one set of chromosomes, from the mother only).now, if the queen mates only once, then the all sperm she stores is exactly the same - comes from one haplois male. All her daughters, therefore, have an interrelatedness of 0.5*0.5+0.5*1=0.75, and so are more related to each other than they would be to any offspring they would have, so it is advantageous for their own genes if they improve their mothers reproductive success over their own.
(my reference for this is notes I wrote myself for an essay a year ago, which has now been destroyed by Mozilla, so I can't find my original refereneces. Howeverm there is also information on alturism in Krebs, J. R. and Davies, N. B., 1993, An Introduction to Behavioural Ecology (3rd Ed) Blackwell Science, Oxford, p265-290)

In recent years, research has revealed findings regarding self-sacrifice even in bacteria. These living things without brains or nervous systems, totally devoid of any capacity for thought, kill themselves to save other bacteria when they are invaded by viruses. (Andy Coghlan "Suicide Squad", New Scientist, 10 July 1999)

this is an even clearer example of altruism through relatedness. In a bacterial colony, most of the cells are very nearly identical, so of coruse there is an evolutionary advantage if bacterial cells invected by a bacteriophage destory themselves to protect the rest of the colony.

These examples surely invalidate the basic assumption of natural selection-the absolute struggle for survival. It is true that there is competition in nature; however, there are clear models of self-sacrifice and solidarity, as well.

Nope, not even close - surely there are less easily explained examples of altruism to use.