Evidences Class

Getting to the Heart of Evolution

Rule #1: Understand EvolutionRule #2: Watch out for religious presuppositions

Rule #1: Understand EvolutionThe millions of diverse living species we find around us in the modern world are all descended from a common ancestor that lived in the remote past. The processes that have brought this diversity about are collectively called evolution.

Stephen Jay Gould*

Natural Selection or Survival of the Fittest

The process whereby organisms best adapted to local environments leave more surviving offspring and spread their favored traits through populations.

Stephen Jay Gould*

Bacterial resistance to antibiotics

Insect pests become resistant to pesticides

From the PBS Evolution Website

The Simple MousetrapIrreducible Complexity

Evolution cannot think ahead

Change Change

Evolution cannot think ahead

Change

1. Small Change2. Improvement3. More Survivors – S.O.F.

Nose Trunk

Nature Designed (or Created) …

“Defy your genetics; nature designed you to hold as little muscle and as much fat as possible” (internet ad quote)

Natural Selection?

The Icon of Intelligent Design

100,000 RPM

5% Vision is not 5% of an Eye

Vision that is 5 percent as good as yours or mine is very much worth having in comparison with no vision at all. So is one percent vision better than total blindness. And 6 percent is better than 5, 7 percent better than 6, and so on up the gradual, continuous series.

Richard Dawkins

Rule #1: Understand EvolutionRule #2: Watch out for religious arguments

Creation Science

Ken Ham – The Creation Museum

Henry Morris

Problem #1 – Some Bad Science

Finite Element Model of the Ark???What’s the point???

Problem #2 – Questionable Bible Interpretation

T-Rex was a plant eater???

Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned.(Romans 5:12 ESV)

However ….He drove out the man, and at the east of the garden of Eden he placed the cherubim and a flaming sword that turned every way to guard the way to the tree of life. (Genesis 3:24 ESV)

And God blessed them. And God said to them, "Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth." (Genesis 1:28 ESV)

Now the serpent was more crafty than any other beast of the field that the LORD God had made. He said to the woman, "Did God actually say, 'You shall not eat of any tree in the garden'?" (Genesis 3:1 ESV)

Religious presuppositions are not limited to the creation scientists.

Ultimately, evolution is not about the scientific details. Ultimately, evolution is about God. (Cornelius Hunter)

Proof of Evolution????In mammals, for instance, the recurrent laryngeal nerve does not go directly from the cranium to the larynx, the way any competent engineer would have arranged it. Instead, it extends down the neck to the chest, loops around a lung ligament and then runs back up the neck to the larynx. In a giraffe, that means a 20-foot length of nerve where 1 foot would have done. If this is evidence of design, it would seem to be of the unintelligent variety. (NYT)

More from the New York Times

Consider how humans and other animals are intermittently tortured by pain throughout their lives, especially near the end. Our pain mechanism may have been designed to serve as a warning signal to protect our bodies from damage, but in the majority of diseases -- cancer, for instance, or coronary thrombosis -- the signal comes too late to do much good, and the horrible suffering that ensues is completely useless. (NYT)

More from the New York Times

And why should the human reproductive system be so shoddily designed? Fewer than one-third of conceptions culminate in live births. The rest end prematurely, either in early gestation or by miscarriage. Nature appears to be an avid abortionist, which ought to trouble Christians who believe in both original sin and the doctrine that a human being equipped with a soul comes into existence at conception. Souls bearing the stain of original sin, we are told, do not merit salvation. That is why, according to traditional theology, unbaptized babies have to languish in limbo for all eternity. Owing to faulty reproductive design, it would seem that the population of limbo must be at least twice that of heaven and hell combined. (NYT)

The Humpback Whale’s Legs???

http://www.edwardtbabinski.us

Darwinist #1 – Douglas Futuyma

Do the creation scientists really suppose their Creator saw fit to create a bird that couldn’t reproduce without six feet of bulky feathers that make it easy prey for leapards?

Darwinist #2 – Stephen Jay Gould Orchids manufacture their intricate devices from the common components of ordinary flowers, parts usually fitted for very different functions. If God had designed a beautiful machine to reflect his wisdom and power, surely he would not have used a collection of parts generally fashioned for other purposes. Orchids were not made by an ideal engineer; they are jury-rigged from a limited set of available components. Thus, they must have evolved from ordinary flowers.

Darwinist #3 – Steve JonesThe feeblest of designers could improve it.(Complex organs) are not the work of some great composer but of an insensible drudge: an instrument, like all others, built by a tinkerer rather than a trained engineer.

Darwinist #4 – Michael Ruse

Given an all-wise God, just why is it that different forms appear in similar climates, whereas the same forms appear in different climates? It is all pointless without evolution.

Darwinists #5 – Dodson and Dodson

Had all species been created in the places where they now exist, then amphibian and terrestrial mammals should be as frequent on oceanic islands as on comparable continental areas. Certainly, terrestrial mammals should have been created on these islands as frequently as were bats.

Darwinist #6 – J. B. S. Haldane

The Creator has an inordinate fondness for beetles to have created over 250,000 different species.

Darwinist #7 – Ken Miller

[Pseudogenes reveal a designer who] “made serious errors, wasting millions of bases of DNA on a blueprint full of junk and scribbles.”

Darwinist #8 – Charles Darwin

Why should the brain be enclosed in a box of such extraordinary shaped pieces of bone representing vertebrate? … Why should similar bones have been created to form the wing and leg of a bat, used as they are for such totally different purposes, namely flying and walking?

Darwinist #9 – Richard DawkinsAll the great religions have a place for awe, for ecstatic transport at the wonder and beauty of creation. And it's exactly this feeling of spine-shivering, breath-catching awe — almost worship — this flooding of the chest with ecstatic wonder, that modern science can provide. And it does so beyond the wildest dreams of saints and mystics. The fact that the supernatural has no place in our explanations, in our understanding of so much about the universe and life, doesn't diminish the awe. Quite the contrary. The merest glance through a microscope at the brain of an ant or through a telescope at a long-ago galaxy of a billion worlds is enough to render poky and parochial the very psalms of praise.

Could Ethiopian skull be missing link?Scientists believe find could link homo erectus and modern man (cnn.com on March 25, 2006)

Delson said the fossil found in Ethiopia "might represent a population broadly ancestral to modern humans or it might prove to be one of several side branches which died out without living descendants."

The hominid cranium -- found in two pieces and believed to be between 500,000 and 250,000 years old -- "comes from a very significant period and is very close to the appearance of the anatomically modern human," said Sileshi Semaw, director of the Gona Paleoanthropological Research Project in Ethiopia.

"The Gawis cranium provides us with the opportunity to look at the face of one of our ancestors," the archaeology project said in a statement.