Why do people deny evolution?

What specifically do you think is wrong with what Shaprio said. I don't mean what you THINK HE MIGHT have said, or how you want to reword him, I mean what was wrong with what he actually said?

Jeezus, I just went through one example. Im not here to tear down anyones pet beliefs.
Have you read "Evolution-a view from the 21st Century"?

We know wht he said and what he says in Huffpo.



Eg, why cant his "natural genetic engineering" be explained by natural selection.??

I thought it was clear, but perhaps I should have been more specific. About DOGS, I mean. You know the CREATIONIST thing?

This, I mean:

Your initial response was this:


This is some crap that Shapiro had in Huffington.
Its not an "inconvenient fact" at all. Its kind of sounding like Gunga bullshit where Shapiiro is saying that weve not been able to create new limbs so that negates nat Selection. Wheres the evidence of this assertion?
I believe that the Creationist camp should go on and do independent reearch if they are so convinced of the scientific merit of their views.

" Its not an "inconvenient fact" at all." Convenient or not, is it a FACT?

"Selection only modifies existing characters." Is this a FACT, or not?

" human selection for altered traits has never generated a truly new organismal feature (e.g., a limb or an organ) or formed a new species." Is this a FACT, or not?

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/james-a-shapiro/what-natural-genetic-engi_b_2783419.html?view=print&comm_ref=false

The specifics are set forth in the link. You suggest no research has been done on the mechanisms he refers to. He says the contents of this "toolbox of cell processes" have been "empirically demonstrated," and "abundantly documented." Who's right?

Btw, here he also makes it clear that he is referring ONLY to natural processes, even if they are not strictly materialistic.

He uses his Huffpo soapbox to state that with "natural genetic enginering" we should see "Irreducibly complex systems"

Somebody call Michael Behe and let him know that Judge Jones was wrong.

PS, Im not here to do your homework. If you take strong a position you should be able to tell me what research is already available that supports your belief.


Im beginning to wonder whether youve taken up residence with a single point of view without looking to see what the other is even about.

Whatever, Farmer. I don't take a strong position, but YOU do, so I thought you might have something particular to say in support of your summary rejection of, and wholesale "allegations" about, what distinguished biologists say, ya know?

So far your "arguments" kinda seem to come down to this. If you disagree with an evolutionary theorist's conclusions, you say they are CREATIONIST, and that is supposed to be the end of that. As "creationists" they are not entitled to refers to facts. They could say that "the sky is blue," and it would obviously be false, because it is a CREATIONIST saying it.

The type of "argument" you might expect to hear from a dedicated partisan, ya know?

The blatant, and quite naïve, strawman attacks don't serve to give me much confidence that you have reflected much on your "opponents" views either. To suggest that Shapiro thinks there have been no evolutionary changes and is both ignorant of, and denies the findings of, the most commonly known things does not make me think you have given him any kind of "fair" hearing. Who would, with anyone THAT ignorant? The average 9 year old would know better than THAT idiot, eh?

NOT AT ALL. Im only criticizing youre quickness to embrace only a single series of arguments that revolve about Intelligent design and Creationist "Science". Youre arguments are mostly evidence free and rely upon clips from only those quotes from scientists that DO NOT include natural selection as a primary adaptive means of volutionary changes.

Shapiro even says that he seeks a "middle ground" between science AND iNTELLIGENT DESIGN...

WHY ????.
Science only goes where evidence eads it. So far as I know, there is no huge ground swell to discard natural selection and the evidence that underpins it is quite robust.

Ignoring the fossil record as evidence is what Shapiro does to deny. Hes also searching for true "Irreducible compllexity" Science just does NOT work like that .I cannot believe that, if he were a dispassionate objective scientist, why he doesnt try to better blend facts from sister disciplines and areas of research (like those of endemic species, or evidence of adaptive radiation of species) to fit within his selected mechanisms.

LGT has been known for years and endosymbiosis s an area from Margulis"Capturing Genomes" goes back maybe 30 years and Id been teaching that for open discussion in my classes of evolutionary Invertebrate Paleontology.
Where were missing the train in this discussion, is that,(unless we own up to a worldview based agenda) we should never settle in on one area of "proving negatives" and make it a life's work .For example The Grants work on finches of the Galapagos has only recently resulted in a complete genomic study of 15 species of finches, noone has gone out to purposely dethrone (or "throne up") natural selection unless data shows that it must be considered. So far, the radiation of the endemic finches seems to be "Adaptive" and , for the most part, selection driven. Mechanisms of gene transfer are mostly unimportant since hardly any genetic difference exists among all the species.

By using some of the title arguments of creationism and "looking for irreducible complexities as a serch for intelligence", I agree that Shapiro may be trying to join the IDers to " pursue and argument built on ignorance" (As Neil Tyson had so nicely stated)

I gotta get some sleep, Ive got a 350 mile drive back home ,
Keep posting, Ill catch up.

What are you asking, mate?

YOU say they are about intelligent design and creationist science. Can you show me one place where Shapiro, Margulis, Gould, or the many other respected biologists I may have referred to ever, EVER, suggest that "God created man" or anything even remotely akin to that. They're mostly atheists, and strong ones at that. Your (false and slanderous) "labels" don't refute their findings, sorry.

You try to give the false impression that guys like Shapiro can only get published in Huffpo (only because he has a blog there). It's a ridiculous suggestion, but that doesn't seem to deter you from making it. As geneticist, Dr. Mae-won Ho has noted:



http://www.i-sis.org.uk/Evolution_by_Natural_Genetic_Engineering.php

This guy's been at it, via published books and journal articles, for over 40 years. She elaborates on his research and his (and many others') findings at great length at that site. Her summary contains many links, if you're really looking to see the "evidence" and really want to know what he calls "natural genetic engineering" is about. Shapiro's writings also always have extensive citations and bibliographies, but you want to pretend that there is "zero" evidence for his claims. What's up with that?

Dr. Ho concludes by referring to one of her own treatises, remarking:


That site should at least answer this question, which you posed:


And, no, I don't think she agrees much with your boy, Coyne, either. I suppose that makes her a "creationist," eh?

For anybody who might have missed this earlier....

People deny evolution for the same sort of reason they deny things like Nazism, Communism, Tong societies and the like. They deny evolution because evolution is a brain-dead bunch of ideological bullshit masquerading as a science theory being defended at present only by academic dead wood and losers like "Formerman" here and, worse, because it is not only junk science but a spectacularly vicious and dangerous flavor of junk science which was the basic philosophical corner-stone of Nazism, Communism, and all of the sundry eugenics programs of the last 160 years or thereabouts.

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.

How can I not agree!?


very very good piece.

I assume that you are from the U (or maybe Canadia), so Im certain tht you re eing purposely obtuse about this statement. The "Supernaturalists" (as Shapiro himself calls em) arent so dumb as to make this pronouncements. In fact, they are trying to, by means of their own DISCOVERY INSTITUTE, to divorce themselves from ANY religious references when they use the term "Intelligent design".
They dont post about how a god is behind everything (except to themselves in private). Instead, they pot about volution as a "theory in crisis" or they use Biobabble to try to confuse or deny clear evidence (Sorta like our own two Luddites Quahog nd Gunga)

The very phrases that Hapiro uses ("A dog is still dog") TOTALLY DENIES THE FOSSIL RECORD'S VAST EVIDENCE OF TRANSITION. OR, how qe se that species emerge from progenitory forms through time and only "blossom" during some unexpected incidence of blind opportunist adaptation.

Shapiro misses this whole thing and still preaches about "how to deal with the Supeernaturalists" (MArgulis did not, Gould did not, Eldredge did not, Sean Carroll certainly does not and Coyne. Meyers, Daeschler, Shubin, Lenski, and Futuyama do not).
Youre being a bit naive in trying to post things that (I believe) are a bit sideways of your dayjob, because you fail to "get" how quote mining, misquoting, and using several "code" phrases are plnted in ID converstions merely to ruffle the feathers of various science majors.

You should read the findings of the 2008 Altenberg Conference on the future of evolution (or evo-devo as it hs morphed to be), and compare that with Susan Mazurs "The ALTENBERG 16" a rousing , but fact-free "exposee" on the evolution industry (hich is deeply in crisis, according to her vast experience-) or maybe just half-vast)

I'm thinking the theory of evolution will continue to evolve in response to its stressors in the developing intellectual environment, including newfound empirical data, and that the formulation that is best able to reproduce by meeting the most of those challenges successfully will prevail as long as it is donimant in its niche. Just a guess, of course.

LOL

You are kidding, right???

     ... When one builds something on quicksands what is needed is rather reinforcement of the foundations ... than continue building a skyscaper ... on the shaking assumptions.

1. Where does he deny that? You just allege that he denies it, which he doesn't. He fully believes in common descent, and has made that quite clear.

2. He made a statement about what HUMAN (i.e, deliberate, purposeful) selection had "accomplished" in the way of producing new species, that's all, and you misstate it as he is saying that no evolutionary change occurred whatsoever. Your interpretation of what he said seems to be, honestly, just ridiculous.

3. But furthermore, it's totally irrelevant to the point he was making, so why SHOULD he bring up the fossil record? Btw, I have seen even hard-core Neo-Darwinists concede that if you're looking for "evidence" of macro-evolution in minute steps, then the fossil record is the last place you should look (as Darwin himself conceded).

4. Shapiro does NOT claim that no evolution has occurred. He does question the role that Neo-Darwinists give to both natural selection and genomic changes by "random mutation." Does the "fossil record" give any evidence that mutations are random and/or that 'natural selection" is the driving force of evolutionary change?

It doesn't that I'm aware of. It does, however, seem to somehow convince many who tout NS and RM that they are somehow "right" for reasons unfathomable to me. For them, virtually anything "proves" what they already "know"--which doesn't even require evidence, once you "know" it, really.

Did the death of the neanderthals give life for homo sapiens. So is it not death doing the changing of forms in evolution.

Sorry, Marty, but that claim makes no real sense to me. There are a few (rare) species, such as the octopus, which are genetically programmed to die as soon as they breed. Those might be the best support for your claim (which I still wouldn't understand) if that's what you're looking for. But like I said, it is rare, so.....

As I believe you have (at least implicitly) acknowledged, Lynn Margulis is a vociferous atheist. Yet, she has said things like the following:



http://onwisconsin.uwalumni.com/features/evolution-revolution/

As the author of this piece notes:


It is not only utterly stupid CREATIONISTS who have doubts about the neo-Darwinian account of evolution via random mutation and natural selection, Farmer. Margulis refers to neo-darwinism as a "religious sect" which, in retrospect, will "look ridiculous, because it is ridiculous."

She may be among the most outspoken, but she is far from alone in her views on these topics, from what I can see.