Happy Cornelius Hunter vs The Angry Professor

Does evolution have enough time to produce highly advanced designs in nature?  Within the framework “time” produces miracles for evolution but advances in science they claim, doesn’t increase the difficulty in natural processes creating life. An angry professor was asked this question about probability and here is what he states…

“This represents my more substantive response because I know she is interested in an actual answer. A problem comes from the nature of the question itself. I do not know the context with which these statements of mathematicians came up. Was the discussion with an actual mathematician or is this some second hand remark made by a stealth-creationist.”

He then dives into the history of evolution since Darwin’s time. He says that evolution is dramatically different from that time which is true.  He then argues trying to use “inductive reasoning” in a way which means that a conclusion could come out false even though all other aspects are true. So he outlines old earth assumptions that were proven wrong but were still right on the earth being extremely old.

For instance, the angry professor and others have attacked Cornelius Hunter for degree credentials but he still uses Darwin who had no degree and who considered himself a  geologist. The angry professor points out that Darwin claimed that Weald in England was at least 300 million years but was wrong as he did not take into account according to the angry professor, factoring how much time it would take to deposit all the material to be eroded.

This has nothing to do with nature producing a living cell, rather he suspects that the reason why the question was brought up in the first place was because of a creationist. And of course, creationists (but not all) believe the earth is in the 6,000 year range.  So he then proceeds as though he is debating a creationist. He makes an analogy of flipping a coin which a strange way of trying to prove that probability is on their side.

“Let’s start with a simple probability idea and work our way up. If we get a penny and flip it, the chance of it coming up heads is ½ or 50% (the other possibility being tails of course). The odds of getting heads twice in a row is ¼ (½ x ½) or 25%. Similarly the odds of flipping a coin and having it come up heads and then tails is also ¼. We can take this a little further, the chance of flipping a coin 10 times and having it come up heads each time is 1/1024. 1/1024 is the same as 0.0009765 or 9.77×10^-4 or ~1×10^-3. It’s about 1 time in a 1000. The important thing here is that the odds of getting any specific combination of heads and tails in 10 flips is about 1 in a 1000. However, if you flip a coin 10 times, you will get a specific combination. I just flipped a nickel 10 times and got T(ails), T, H(eads), T, H, T, H, H, T, H. Was the chance of that happening 1 in a 1000? Well, it was before I flipped the nickel the first time, but now that it has happened the chance that it happened is 100% or 1/1. …”

“Remember when we flipped the coin 10 times above? The odds were ~1/1000 (a 1 followed by 3 zeros) that any specific sequence would come up. Well if we flip that coin 270 times, the odds of it coming up heads every time, or any other specific sequence, is 1/1.9×10^81. If I flip that coin every 15 seconds, it will take me just over an hour to get enough flips to get a sequence of heads and tails. If we calculate the odds of getting that sequence ahead of time, we get a number greater than the number of atoms in the universe! Using the creationist logic, then it was impossible to get the sequence of 270 Heads or Tails we just got.”

The angry professor claims all outcomes are one in the same like flipping a coin to designing human beings. Meaning that they all eventually come true given enough time. He then fails to mention that over 50 years of research in the lab, nobody has ever observed natural processes creating a cell outside an organism’s body. Therefore the angry professor resorts to flipping a coin.

Sadly, the angry professor fails to recognize the person whom he is debating with. Cornelius Hunter is not a young earth creationist nor is he up on the latest of what creationists advocate. He is however, in the modern intelligent design movement which claims such things as one species turning into another, the only difference between Darwinism and ID is, how that information was designed in the first place. Evolutionists claim it was through a mindless process while the ID movement relies on some sort of vague intelligent agent or agents at work but never attempt to identify what that is nor explain what that agent or agents are because they say it goes beyond the realm of science.

Cornelius then uses the poker analogy where he believes many evolutionary scientists bluff on having the royal flush. He writes…

“For instance, evolutionists claim that all the evidence supports evolution. Amazingly, they say there is no contradictory evidence, no scientific problems to deal with. When I first heard this argument I was astonished. But when you are certain you are right, then any and all arguments must support evolution.”

Doesn’t it seem odd that scientific theories can encounter some contradictory evidence but not evolution? That is because evolution is not a scientific theory, it’s a man-made story where aspects may change but its essence remains the same. Using flipping of a coin analogy is one of the weakest arguments one has ever seen that allegedly prove time is on evolution’s side.

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Accomplishing Innovation Through Mistakes?

Nature is remarkably designed for instance, one-cell animals that were once considered simple creatures, have mind-blowing complexity with more of it yet to be uncovered, how could such innovations be created in the first place? The story begins in science daily with an idea that claims that evolution accomplishes it through mistakes.

“Some individuals are better adapted to a given environment than others, making them more likely to survive and pass on their genes to future generations. But exactly how nature creates variation in the first place still poses somewhat of a puzzle to evolutionary biologists.”

“Now, Joanna Masel, associate professor in the UA’s department of ecology and evolutionary biology, and postdoctoral fellow Etienne Rajon discovered the ways organisms deal with mistakes that occur while the genetic code in their cells is being interpreted greatly influences their ability to adapt to new environmental conditions — in other words, their ability to evolve.”

So here we have the implication of  animals having the ability to evolve which then leads to innovation like bacteria to man because later. How can they get  from errors to innovation? Here is an interesting analogy…

“Evolution needs a playground in order to try things out,” Masel said  who had his paper published in PNAS,  “It’s like in competitive business: New products and ideas have to be tested to see whether they can live up to the challenge.”

Random mutations are like an idea formulated by intelligence? Certainly natural selection has no ability to think in order to direct what mutations are produced in the first place while knowing which ones should be tested and others that should be discarded. What’s more puzzling about that analogy is the fact that when companies are originally created, there is a purpose in place for it. It’s basically intelligently designed to either provide a particular service or sell a particular product.

In no way does innovation of companies comes from no ideas and no purpose or direction. Some companies may fail do to lack of direction and purpose or no market for what product or service they are offering. Certainly evolution with its lack of purpose, and non-thinking process doesn’t remotely compare with a business. So overlooking that error, evolutionists go into detail about accomplishing innovation through various mistakes…

“In nature, it turns out, many new traits that, for example, enable their bearers to conquer new habitats, start out as blunders: mistakes made by cells that result in altered proteins with changed properties or functions that are new altogether, even when there is nothing wrong with the gene itself.  Sometime later, one of these mistakes can get into the gene and become more permanent.”

Keep in mind, we want to see how innovations like brains, eyes, or wings, got there. All we have are protein mistakes. The gene was fine, then something happened… “Sometime later, one of these mistakes can get back into the gene,” they claimed. Is there any evidence for this claim?  None found in the article.

The explanation then takes a more bizarre turn, by invoking global and local solutions. A global solution has “a proofreading mechanism to spot and fix errors as they arise.”  Something “watches over the entire process,” wait a minute, how can an entire process that oversees errors and being able to fix them be a product of errors itself?  It appears that global solutions nothing more than about preserving integrity of the genome, not innovating brains, eyes or wings.  So that means innovation must be local…

“The alternative is to allow errors to happen, but evolve robustness to the effects of each of them.  Masel and Rajon call this strategy a local solution, because in the absence of a global proofreading mechanism, it requires an organism to be resilient to each and every mistake that pops up.”

“We discovered that extremely small populations will evolve global solutions, while very large populations will evolve local solutions,” Masel said.  “Most realistically sized populations can go either direction but will gravitate toward one or the other.  But once they do, they rarely switch, even over the course of evolutionary time.”

Using a purposeful concept, the explanation in the evolutionary framework entails a lot of strategy like a chess game! Now if an organism has an ability to use strategy in order to allow some errors to creep in, but then “evolve robustness” to their effects, did that strategy itself evolve through step by step mistakes?  The article doesn’t say.

The story plot thickens with the introduction of a contrast between “regular variation”, and what they call “cryptic variation.” Regular variation for the majority of it’s production, produces something non-useful or bad with very slim odds of producing something useful. While on the other hand, cryptic variation is supposed to produce something non-deadly and mostly harmless. Even so, cryptic variation doesn’t have the power to innovate.  Here they come up with a story about it for it to supposedly work…

“So how does cryptic variation work and why is it so important for understanding evolution? By allowing for a certain amount of mistakes to occur instead of quenching them with global proofreading machinery, organisms gain the advantage of allowing for what Masel calls pre-selection: It provides an opportunity for natural selection to act on sequences even before mutations occur.”

While Masel’s recalls Darwin’s personified depiction of his theory, yet even Darwin might have had doubts of natural selection keeping harmless variations in the junkyard for later analysis and future usage. Masel argued that “the organism doesn’t pay a large cost for it, but it’s still there if it needs it.”

So now we know how important cryptic variation is to evolution but still one asks…Is natural selection a person?  Does it have a plan?  How would natural selection have any precognition of the need for an eye, a wing, or a brain? A mistake that leads to a misfolded protein are very deadly for the organism.

Purifying selection (eliminating mistakes) and compensating selection (tolerating mistakes) are not controversial for creationists. But having those protections still won’t give you a brain, eye or a wing! The analogy they made between a business and evolution demonstrates they have the idea it’s intelligent design but they are trying desperately to invoke miracles in evolution.

Lyell Geology Influence Found To Be Incorrect

In the year of a celebration concerning the found of evolution, geologists decided to revisit a site where Darwin himself had visited during his voyage of the Beagle.  Darwin was first a geologist, his study of the boulders were declared wrong  In fact, modern geologists say, the “Darwin’s Boulders” were deposited by a completely different process.

Geological Society of America’s December issue stated the reason for this error was based on a bad influence…

“Darwin’s thinking was profoundly influenced by Lyell’s obsession with large-scale, slow, vertical movements of the crust, especially as manifested in his theory of submergence and ice rafting to explain drift.”  Lyell, in turn, felt vindicated: “Lyell celebrated these observations because they supported his idea of uniformitarianism—that continued small changes, as witnessed in the field, could account for dramatic changes of Earth’s surface over geologic time.”

Here’s Darwin’s story:  the land supposedly rose slowly over millions of years where icebergs carrying boulders from far away became stranded in the shallow water.  Then these boulders and where left behind. However, the latest story is much different: supposed avalanches up in the Andes dropped the boulders onto glaciers, which ferried them many miles toward the coast.  When the glaciers melted, the boulders were left behind.

Notice the differences.  Darwin interpretation was based on his vision of slow and gradual. Lyell’s geology was accommodating to the new hypothesis. Today, geologists envision the potential of massive avalanches and long-distance glaciation. based on cosmogenic nuclide dating methods. These dating methods place the boulders age  around 22-74 thousand-year range – not millions of years old. However as you might have noticed already, they had their own problems with this data.

“Our Bahía San Sebastian dates reveal anomalously young ages (74.4 to 38.1 k.y.) for moraines previously interpreted to be ~1 m.y., thus requiring significant reworking.”

Let’s see, Darwin got it wrong because he was influenced by Lyell but modern secular geologists were influenced by Darwin and got it right. It’s interesting to note that the article did not have anything particularly nice to say about Lyell or uniformitarianism. But in light of that downplayed it so Darwin didn’t look bad only that he lacked the tools.

Creationism has been light years ahead in geology compared to Darwinists. Nicholas Steno, the father of stratigraphy, was a creationist.  Many early geologists like Sedgwick had a Biblical framework and criticized Darwin himself for rejecting modern geology at that time.  Lyell was the first to try and separate geology from the biblical account.

Creation papers that describe a universal flood do so within the constraints of the geological processes involved rather than with a filtered worldview of Lyellian uniformitarian.

Darwinian Evolution Getting Into Religion?

Let’s see, they keep telling us that science is science, and religion is religion, Stephen Jay Gould stated that science would stay out of religion if religion stayed out of science? Does this mean science by their definition is now unto religion?

Elizabeth Culotta wrote an article in science about the origin of religion using the evolutionary framework.

“How and when did religion arise? In the 11th essay in Science’s series in honor of the Year of Darwin, Elizabeth Culotta explores the human propensity to believe in unseen deities. No consensus yet exists among scientists, but potential answers are emerging from both the archaeological record and studies of the mind itself. Some researchers, exploring religion’s effects in society, suggest that it may boost fitness by promoting cooperative behavior.”

“And in the past 15 years, a growing number of researchers have followed Darwin’s lead and explored the hypothesis that religion springs naturally from the normal workings of the human mind. This new field, the cognitive science of religion, draws on psychology, anthropology, and neuroscience to understand the mental building blocks of religious thought.”

Now they have sociologists who are studying the propensity of humans to explain things when they happen. Also, psychologists investigating “theory of mind” explanations that compare mental states with others and evolutionary anthropologists consider the social aspects of sharing beliefs in gods to develop social cohesion. Elizabeth admits there are huge gaps when it comes to this part of evolution concerning the origin of religion.

Don’t fall for this story line, it’s explanation of nature is highly flawed let alone trying to explain where the belief in God comes from. This study has no evidence whatsoever that religion or Christianity comes from evolution, it’s only in their imagination which is confined to a certain framework evoked on the population known to be “evolution.”

New Survey About Science Conducted By The British Council

Ten countries participated in the new survey about teaching science where it stated it had established an international consensus on accepting the hypothesis of evolution. With a description like that one would think there is this is not good news about creationism, right? Partly, it’s not good, but on the other hand, there is some good news.

About 10,000 people from Argentina, China, Egypt, India, Mexico, Russia, South Africa, Spain, and the U.S. all took part in the survey. Communist China with it’s poor human rights record had the highest percentage (67 percent) of their responses which believed totally in the story telling of evolution while rejecting being designed first by supernatural intervention.

Here is what the survey says…

The results show that the majority of adults surveyed have heard of Charles Darwin and know at least a little about this theory of evolution with the highest levels in Great Britain (71%), the USA (71%), Mexico (68%), Argentina(65%), China (54%) and Russia (53%) whilst 62 percent of adults surveyed in Egypt and 73 percent in South Africa said they had never heard of Charles Darwin or his theory of evolution. Overall, the majority (70%) of adults surveyed across the 10 countries have at least heard of the British naturalist.

In all countries surveyed more people showed some agreement than disagreement that ‘it is possible to believe in a God and still hold the view that life on Earth, including human life, evolved over time as a result of natural selection’. Adults in India showed the highest level of agreement (85%) from all the countries, followed by Mexico(65%), Argentina (62%), South Africa (54%), Great Britain (54%), Russia (54%), USA (53%), Spain (46%), Egypt(45%), and China (39%).

Now the good news, less than half of the respondents in America believe there is enough scientific merit that verifies evolution!  There was no majority in any country that thought evolution should be the only alternative for explaining man’s origin!  Despite the slant on this survey, it’s clear that many people prefer opened ended science rather than closed to a particular framework!

Evolution’s Dominating Metaphor Finally Obsolete?

When we were taught about evolution during our early school years, we all came to learn about Darwin’s tree of life. But in recent year especially this one and last year, there has been a challenge to do away with the metaphor because the details of life which is vastly complex doesn’t match with it.

In the Journal of Biology which has open access rather than a required fee to view, stated the following…

• “The tree of life is, probably, the single dominating metaphor that permeates the discourse of evolutionary biology, from the famous single illustration in Darwin’s On the Origin of Species to 21st-century textbooks…the original tree of life concept is obsolete: it would not even be a ‘tree of one percent’.“

Wow, Darwin’s tree according to observations would be impossible for even one percent of a tree. What happened here? Why is the so-called tree of life so way off? Apparently, horizontal gene transfer has scrambled the genes in prokaryotes so there is no trace of common ancestry! This means there is no empirical evidence for Darwin’s tree of life.

The paper suggested an objective scientist would have consider another alternative, biology’s big bang where prokaryotes arose explosively. Now the paper also goes into detail about how the metaphor might be salvaged…

• “The message from this analysis is twofold.  On the one hand, we detected high levels of inconsistency among the trees comprising the forest of life, most probably due to extensive HGT, a conclusion that is supported by more direct observations of numerous probable transfers of genes between archaea and bacteria.”

• “On the other hand, we detected a distinct signal of a consensus topology that was particularly strong in the NUTs.  Although the NUTs showed a substantial amount of apparent HGT, the transfer events seemed to be distributed randomly and did not obscure the vertical signal. ”
  

• “Moreover, the topology of the NUTs was quite similar to those of numerous other trees in the forest, so although the NUTs certainly cannot represent the forest completely, this set of largely consistent, nearly universal trees is a reasonable candidate for representing a central trend.”
  

• “However, the opposite side of the coin is that the consistency between the trees in the forest is high at shallow depths of the trees and abruptly drops, almost down to the level of random trees, at greater phylogenetic depths that correspond to the radiation of archaeal and bacterial phyla.”
  

• “This observation casts doubt on the existence of a central trend in the forest of life and suggests the possibility that the early phases of evolution might have been non-tree-like (a Biological Big Bang).  To address this problem directly, we simulated evolution under the CC model and under the BBB model, and found that the CC scenario better approximates the observed dependence between tree inconsistency and phylogenetic depth.”
  

• “Thus, a consistent phylogenetic signal seems to be discernible throughout the evolution of archaea and bacteria but, under the CC model, the prospect of unequivocally resolving the relationships between the major archaeal and bacterial clades is bleak.”

This is when the evidence points to creationism, while struggling mightily trying to fit in a naturalistic setting. In creationism we of course believe God created the animals from the very beginning at a fast pace. “The explosion” in which scientists in the secular world are finding more of in nature is an indicator of this concept such as the prokaryotes just bursting onto the scene..

Evolution cannot account for the sudden appearance of prokaryotes and bacteria, with all their molecular machines, systems, networks, genetic codes and specified complexity. We want data, not a story! A biological big bang? Face it, it’s over, obsolete, you have beat this metaphor over and over again, it’s not savable. But there is one thing which we are happy about, the research points to creationism more than ever before.

Creationist Museum’s Second Anniversary

Containing more space than London’s Natural History Museum, the BBC asks the question, “who goes to the creationist museum and what motivates people to make a visit?

I remember the controversy when this particular creationist museum was proposed. As I recall, they had to change locations due to special interests groups which turned out to be much better, and added more space to the project. When the museum did finally open it was greeted with some protesting from airplanes flying by to protesting signs on the ground…

I find it interesting, those who believe in a faulty view of separation from church and state (the government can only disagree with religion), would be so worried about a creationist museum. One of the reasons is competition from other museums, another is the fact that they just don’t like Christianity or any other religion.

Back to the BBC quest in answering why people go to a creationist museum. They interviewed a few people, not a very good study but interesting comments nevertheless…

Laurie Geesey, the former high school teacher, who says she believes God created “everything visible and invisible”, feels people look down on her views “especially under the current [White House] administration”. “It interferes with their lifestyle, you know ‘If it feels good go ahead and do it’ – the Bible doesn’t teach that,” she says.

Scott Rubin, “Evolution is a good theory, I don’t believe in it, but parts of it are sensible and parts of creationism are sensible,” he says. “When it comes down to it, how can you know for sure? What I do know is God’s changed my life. I believe God created the world in six days, I do believe that.”

Dan Schoonmaker, the Army helicopter pilot (who as a member of the military gets in free) described himself as a “creationist in training”, admitting it needed “a lot of faith”. “I personally don’t know, but natural selection seems to be the only thing people go on. It should be more open,” he says.

Robert Mailloux, the retired businessman dismisses Darwin’s theory as “not even a low grade hypothesis” and said it had “no substantial science” in it. “The Bible says God created the Earth in six days and we flat believe that. There are over 100 ways science is able to look at the Earth and 90 say it is thousands of years old – only 10 say it’s real old…Darwin buried with kings at Westminster Abbey? He’s not a king. He’s the king of the atheists’ movement.”

What I found also interesting, the BBC enters the creation vs evolution debate by trying to make a case for evolution with the fossil Ida found years ago, which has been dismissed by most evolutionists even as a ‘missing link’ and used for profit reasons.

So there has been skepticism from the other side about Ida’s impact on the hypothesis of evolution but the BBC makes a weak attempt to say otherwise…“The most recent such finding, a “47-million-year-old fossil” of a primate, called Ida, may have given scientists a “fresh insight” into evolution.”

Speaking of skepticism, what I found lacking in the BBC report, was the fact that anti-creationists have visited there as well, not just outside protesting, but actually taking on tour on the inside. The Creationist Museum is a great family destination,  and refreshing to see that evolution is not taught like a religion like you see in secular museums.