New Creation-Evolution Site

6 Comments

1. I tend to squirm whenever I see the term “Neo-Darwinian” but will have to spend more time on the site, nonetheless. And you’re right to take issue with his post on thermodynamics 🙂

   1. Well, hopefully someone will either respond or link to one of the articles on this topic before I get around to doing so. Right now I’m working more on Biblical and theological stuff.

      I have mixed feelings about Darwinian/Darwinism, hyphenated or not. On the one hand I think it’s great to acknowledge the large scientific debt we owe Charles Darwin. On the other there’s the negative way in which it is used, and also the fact that it tends to obscure all the progress the science has made since.

      I think I can take two analogies from Biblical studies. The first is the very standard “Bible based” idea. There, if you prove the Bible unreliable, doctrines based on the Bible fall. Thus some think that if you prove Darwin made a mistake, the structure of evolution will fail. Science doesn’t work that way, of course.

      The second is simply taking on the easier target. In textual criticism, for example, advocates of either the KJV-Only or the majority text approaches like to attack Westcott and Hort, who were pioneers. You’ll find a lot of their work in modern textual criticism, but the field has moved on substantially.

2. Sorry, Henry (or Laura). Anyone who starts a post with this statement is headed for pure confusion from the get-go:

   Big Science teaches that all living things are the product of time and chance as proposed by Neo-Darwinism or current evolutionary theory.

   Nope. That’s not what is proposed by current evolutionary theory. Wrong from the first sentence.

   Then he plays the “wowie-zowie-big-numbers-teeny-probabilities” game using an example that doesn’t model the phenomenon he wants us to conclude has problems:

   For all practical purposes, there is ZERO chance that a working single cell organism could be produced by the mechanism of nearly infinite time and chance.

   Sorry, bunky. Cells didn’t emerge by “time and chance.” Nor do sheets of paper with letters on them, however improbable their occurrence by chance, model the evolutionary processes that account for the diversity of life.

   Then he asks why we don’t see new life emerging in cesspools where all the constituents are available. Um, because there’s already lots of long-evolved and well adapted critters there ready to eat struggling newcomers before they even get off the ground, maybe?

   Then it’s another chestnut, how can DNA and DNA polymerase have both evolved if they need each other? (Hint: RNA world)

   And then it’s off to DNA “code” (a metaphor mangled) and the promise of a foray into information theory by someone who doesn’t provide any indication that he understands the relation between models and reality (see above: “wowie-zowie-big-numbers-teeny-probabilities”). If the terms and operators of the math don’t map veridically onto the objects and processes of the phenomena, the results of manipulating the math tell us precisely nothing about the phenomena.

   I see nothing new there. I’m afraid it’s just another instance in support of the Salem hypothesis.

   1. I read the one on thermodynamics, and I’ll probably link soon to one of the existing articles responding to that issue. I just need to make my selection. 🙂

3. Sorry — make that “sheets of paper with digits on them,” not letters.

4. And I suppose I should link to the post I critiqued above. Must be getting late. 🙁

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