Latest Challenges to the Teaching of Evolution

This kind of humor cant be created. OH wait, it just was!!

Nikto Barado

I agree, if you can't talk the talk it's pretty funny, and I didn't know the language when I wrote it. I thought the picture of how quarks and bosons are arranged is easy to see with a vague non scientific explanation. I was wrong. I know the language now, and I know my picture is right. I am in the process of translating it to the proper scientific language and update the page occasionaly. Communicating with you helped. Thanks

if creationism is taught in the classroom, then all forms of creationism should be taught. For example, "A giant Cobra floated on the waters. Asleep within its endless coils lay the Lord Vishnu. He was watched over by the mighty serpent. Everything was so silent and peaceful that Vishnu slept undisturbed by dreams motion. From the depths a humming sound began to tremble, Ohm. It grew and spread, filling the emptiness and throbbing with energy.

The night had ended, Vishnu awoke. As the dawn began to break, from Vishnu's navel grew a magnificent lotus flower. In the middle of the blossom sat Vishnu's servant, Brahma. he awaited the Lord's command.

Vishnu spoke to his servant: "It's time to begin", Brahma vowed. Vishnu commanded: "Create the world". A wind swept the waters. Vishnu and the serpent vanished.

Brahma remained in the lotus flower, floating and tossing on the sea. He lifted up his arms and calmed the wind and the ocean. Then Brahma split the lotus flower into three. He stretched one part into the heavens. He made another part into the earth. with the third part of the flower he created the skies.

The earth was bare. Brahma set to work. He created grass, flowers, trees and plants of all kinds. To these he gave feeling. Next he created animals and the insects to live in the land. He made birds and many fish. To all these creatures he gave the sense of touch and smell. He gave them the power to see, hear and move. The world was soon bristling with life and the air was filled with the sound of Brahma's creation."

Evolution is quite able to 'defend' itself in the classroom. The problem is that science depends on empirical evidence and testing. It cannot be defended against something that depends on, "I believe it, so it's true." That is, some religions. You cannot argue with evidence when none exists, as with creationism.

Then let it defend itself.

No one is seriously proposing teaching 'creationism' in the classroom. I and others would like to see Evolution taught to a much deeper level where the challenges to it can be made. If you don't really understand evolution and the underlying biology, you can't understand the questions about it.

When you leave it to 'the experts' and don't allow questioning of the dogma, it doesn't say much for it's ability to defend itself. If you rely on obscure legal court decisions (like K. vs Dover) to form your position it just shows you don't understand the argument.

If one wants to know more about evolution all they have to do is buy some science mags. I buy 3.

A proof or disproof is a kind of a transaction. There is no such thing as absolutely proving or disproving something; there is only such a thing as proving or disproving something to SOMEBODY'S satisfaction. If the party of the second part is too thick or too ideologically committed to some other way of viewing reality, then the best proof in the world will fall flat and fail.

In the case of evolution, what you have is a theory which has been repeatedly and overwhelmingly disproved over a period of many decades now via a number of independent lines reasoning and yet the adherents go on with it as if nothing had happened and, in fact, demand that the doctrine be taught in public schools at public expense and that no other theory of origins even ever be mentioned in public schools, and attempt to enforce all of that via political power plays and lawsuits.

At that point, it is clear enough that no disproof or combination of disproofs would ever suffice, that the doctrine is in fact unfalsifiable and that Carl popper's criteria for a pseudoscience is in fact met.

Once again for anybody who may have missed this earlier:


The educated lay person is not aware of how overwhelmingly evolution has been debunked over the last century.

The following is a minimal list of entire categories of evidence disproving evolution:

The decades-long experiments with fruit flies beginning in the early 1900s. Those tests were intended to demonstrate macroevolution; the failure of those tests was so unambiguous that a number of prominent scientists disavowed evolution at the time.

The discovery of the DNA/RNA info codes (information codes do not just sort of happen...)

The fact that the info code explained the failure of the fruit-fly experiments (the whole thing is driven by information and the only info there ever was in that picture was the info for a fruit fly...)

The discovery of bio-electrical machinery within 1-celled animals.

The question of irreducible complexity.

The Haldane Dilemma. That is, the gigantic spaces of time it would take to spread any genetic change through an entire herd of animals.

The increasingly massive evidence of a recent age for dinosaurs. This includes soft tissue being found in dinosaur remains, good radiocarbon dates for dinosaur remains (blind tests at the University of Georgia's dating lab), and native American petroglyphs clearly showing known dinosaur types.

The fact that the Haldane dilemma and the recent findings related to dinosaurs amount to a sort of a time sandwich (evolutionites need quadrillions of years and only have a few tens of thousands).

The dna analysis eliminating neanderthals and thus all other hominids as plausible human ancestors.

The total lack of intermediate fossils where the theory demands that the bulk of all fossils be clear intermediate types. "Punctuated Equilibria" in fact amounts to an attempt to get around both the Haldane dilemma and the lack of intermediate fossils, but has an entirely new set of overwhelming problems of its own...

The question of genetic entropy.

The obvious evidence of design in nature.

The arguments arising from pure probability and combinatoric considerations.


Here's what I mean when I use the term "combinatoric considerations"...

The best illustration of how stupid evolutionism really is involves trying to become some totally new animal with new organs, a new basic plan for existence, and new requirements for integration between both old and new organs.

Take flying birds for example; suppose you aren't one, and you want to become one. You'll need a baker's dozen highly specialized systems, including wings, flight feathers, the specialized system which allows flight feathers to pivot so as to open on upstrokes and close to trap air on downstrokes (like a venetian blind), a specialized light bone structure, specialized flow-through design heart and lungs, specialized tail, specialized general balance parameters etc.

For starters, every one of these things would be antifunctional until the day on which the whole thing came together, so that the chances of evolving any of these things by any process resembling evolution (mutations plus selection) would amount to an infinitessimal, i.e. one divided by some gigantic number.

In probability theory, to compute the probability of two things happening at once, you multiply the probabilities together. That says that the likelihood of all these things ever happening, best case, is ten or twelve such infinitessimals multiplied together, i.e. a tenth or twelth-order infinitessimal. The whole history of the universe isn't long enough for that to happen once.

All of that was the best case. In real life, it's even worse than that. In real life, natural selection could not plausibly select for hoped-for functionality, which is what would be required in order to evolve flight feathers on something which could not fly apriori. In real life, all you'd ever get would some sort of a random walk around some starting point, rather than the unidircetional march towards a future requirement which evolution requires.

And the real killer, i.e. the thing which simply kills evolutionism dead, is the following consideration: In real life, assuming you were to somehow miraculously evolve the first feature you'd need to become a flying bird, then by the time another 10,000 generations rolled around and you evolved the second such reature, the first, having been disfunctional/antifunctional all the while, would have DE-EVOLVED and either disappeared altogether or become vestigial.

Now, it would be miraculous if, given all the above, some new kind of complex creature with new organs and a new basic plan for life had ever evolved ONCE.

Evolutionism, however (the Theory of Evolution) requires that this has happened countless billions of times, i.e. an essentially infinite number of absolutely zero probability events.

I ask you: What could be stupider than that?

Fruit flies breed new generations every few days. Running a continuous decades-long experiment on fruit flies will involve more generations of fruit flies than there have ever been of anything resembling humans on Earth. Evolution is supposed to be driven by random mutation and natural selection; they subjected those flies to everything in the world known to cause mutations and recombined the mutants every possible way, and all they ever got was fruit flies.

Richard Goldschmidt wrote the results of all of that up in 1940, noting that it was then obvious enough that no combination of mutation and selection could ever produce a new kind of animal.

There is no excuse for evolution to ever have been taught in schools after 1940.

youre a broken record full of idiotic Bullshit. Youre not even fun to dick with anymore. Get some help asshole!!

Was he ever? I've always found him to be completely repulsive, his primitive superstitions are secondary to his general nastiness.

he used to be. He would post some neat "research" that some Creationist would be conducting.
For example, one time he posted a dinosaur fossil site where the dino had , still in its jaws, the skeleton of a hominid. (probably a Australopithecus). The point the "fossil site" was trying to make was that dinonsaurs and hominids lived together, thus casting doubt on stratigraphy and an "old earth'
(It was later found out that the hominid was actually a fibreglas model.


Gunga was always good for a laugh because you had to believe that he wasnt that stupid to buy many of the arguments he posted. His arguments were always quick to "jump to conclusions" from bases of bad science rather than careful analyses that the real workers in the fields demand.
Hell, qeve been having an argument on th evolution of warm bloodedness for years and arguments can get relly heated. The only difference is that arguments in a conference on evolution are always based on large bqse of knowledge among the arguers, not some batch of bullshit drivvle glommed from Creationist websites, made by popl whov yet to post anything that underpins their beliefs.
After all that though, I wonder whether gunga doesnt actually believe the crap he spews

The disagreements on specific "Biological constraints" are frequent and distributive. As a fixed "believer" in ID you generally ignore the basics of the science and tend to try todraw excuses from your religious viewpoint.
Thats prfectly ok, since the belief in Theistic evolution merely hs to leave its core belief in how an intelligence drives evolution, by the lab door because there really is no plqce to insert it in reql reseaarch. You alwaysw seem to miss that basic point.
IF ID had somehwere to insert itself in science, dont you think the IDers would be wetting their underpants? So far their argumnts have gone silent qnd theyve spent (in the US at least), their entire time trying to affect political changes.


If you call the third Federal District " Obscure",
YOU DONT UNDERSTAND THE ARGUMENT. Teaching ID was exactly where that school district went , with the consent of the goverened.

In the trial , the concept of ID was vetted carefully and scientifically and ID came up short.The several tests that the Constitution relied upon in order to insure a "wall of separation would be maintained" were invoked and the judge produced a long(ish) decision which, bsed upon precedent from earlier USSC cases, has NEVER been challenged or taken higher . In district 3 we dont have the ability to develop a "Christian Sharia".
AS far as DOVER, The Discovery Institute bailed out and went bqck to the west cost. Since 2005,Discovery has pretty much gone underground qnd is still trying to affect legislatures by chipping away at the First Amendment NCSE keeps tabs on them and several other Creation/ID organizations (They are all over the US).

By the way,Allowing discussions and arguments against evolution are already part of biological curricula in colleges and many "Magnet High SChools". They are encouraged especially when they help the overall understanding of science.

Catholic HS' have presented the Historical concepts of where the Churches beliefs had been in error over the centuries. (Its an honest disclosure that covers Darwin nd Galileo as star witnesses).

Sounds just like your kind of "science", farmerman.

thats it? youre running a lot of your crap over and over. Lotsa new stuff science has come up with on the facts of evolution. Seems you deniers could b a bit more compelling, at least come up with something that doesnt smack of fact free Fundamentalism.

Basic reality... I'm not posting this stuff for Formerman; I don't really give a rats ass what Formerman may or may not think about any of this stuff. I post that longish list of disproofs on one or two of these threads once in a while for the benefit of newcomers who may not have seen it and who may not be aware of the size of the case against evolutionism at this point in time. The post is nothing but a list of entire categories of disproofs, no one of which depends upon any of the others in any way, and the list is minimalistic.

Evolution is a zombie theory, basically a dead theory walking and, at this point in time, is no longer being defended by anybody with brains or talent or anything like that at all; it is being defended by what I would call academic dead wood (like Formerman) and, and another 20 years or thereabouts, will pretty much be gone. The thing which is really killing it is the Internet age; they can't really keep information away from people anymore.

Chuck Darwin himself said that if anybody could ever demonstrate a single feature of a living creature which could not plausibly evolve stepwise in the manner which he described, that his entire theory would crash and burn.

To my thinking, the most obvious choice for such a feature would be flight feathers. Flight feathers are hugely different from ordinary down feathers which serve only for insulation; flight feathers have a complex system of barbs and books which generate the structural strength needed to bear weight. Flight feathers also have to rotate since they open (like a Venetian blind) on upstrokes and close again to trap air on downstrokes. That is why there is a short and a long side to a flight feather, that is, the short side locks to the next feather while the long side traps air.

But evolution itself is supposed to be driven by mutations. For a creature like your evolutionists: bird-wannabe coelurosaur to become a flying bird, you will need TWO mutations and not one: he will need one mutation to get from fur or scales to down feathers and then a second mutation to get from down feathers to flight feathers, but ONLY on his arms where they will be needed for flight after those arms are turned into wings by other mutations.

So that is the question: what kind of a magical mutation is going to turn down feathers into flight feathers ONLY on the arms, and not on the creatures head, his stomach, his a**, or his d***?? That, of course, is before you even get to the question of how it down feathers supposed to mutate into something is wondrously complex as a flight feather.

some interesting reading (although open to some critique) on gunga' s pet topic
Cowen, R., and J. H. Lipps. 2005. The Origin of Feathers and the Origin of flight in birds.

Several researchers have argued that, despite its wiring and some of its feather, Archeopteryx wasnt capapble of flight. Anyhow, by the mid Jurassic birds had already been flying and the claass Aves hd been establihed as an outgrowth of the theropoda.

Question: Did y ver notice how feather structure nd development is "recapitulated" on birds like chickens and owls? (downy feathers to feathers that develop initial rachii and subsequently barbules , anterior and posterior.???

Id think youd try to dance around this evo/devo evidence and, like the focused fundamentlist you are, you doo.

Don't let these guys get away with dancing around the evidence, farmerman. Nothing is worse, nothing is more unscientific than those who avoid/dance around the evidence.

These kinds of people are most assuredly not of science. Keep up the excellent work, Mr scientist!

The world has no place for "focused fundamentlist[s]".

I like the original you much better, gunga. It somehow just seems to better capture the real you.