Creation: Darwinian Evolutionary Frauds Pt. XIV

You said this:
….”One of the strongest arguments against Darwinism is the lack of ethics and morality that both the belief and its defenders demonstrate.”
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I work in research. One of the benefits of working with scientists is that in general they ARE ethical and moral, both in their work and in the rest of their lives. This group includes Christians, people of other faiths, and nonbelievers. In my experience, the idea that ‘Darwinists’ are unethical and immoral, to the extent that ‘Darwinists’ means biological researchers who accept the idea of biological evolution, is so far from the truth that I can’t take it seriously.

Gregg, did you read the Cherfas article? I don’t think you did.

Did you read anything that you didn’t find on a creationist website?

From your comment:
…”hd — what are you implying. Did Cherfas not conclude that the talus was wrong?”
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It was more complicated than that.
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…”If I am not mistaken, the bulk of Darwinists moved off of Lucy the chimp years ago as a possible savoir of the theory.”
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I think there is still controversy about the details of afarensis. But I don’t know what theory you mean that needed a savior – not evolution because that is strongly accepted. Not the idea that humans evolved from other promates because that is strongly accepted.
(You could call those ideas premises or assumptions in the structure of an argument, but they are also considered by biologists to be essentially facts based on a lot of interconnecting evidence.)
So what theory are you talking about here?
It is inaccurate in a biological sense to call the ‘Lucy’, or the species Au. afarensis, a chimp.
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…..”Then, almost immediately, they jumped all over Ardi the ape as the icon upon which to hang all their hopes and dreams. When Ardi didn’t pan out either..”
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Icon to hold all their hopes and dreams??? You are into the hyperbole again. And I don’t know what you mean about Ardi not panning out?
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Lots of bloggers I read said here was way too much hype about the fossil that has been called Ida. There were claims for that fossil which using your words, didn’t pan out. That fossil is a fine fossil wherer it is, but not in the line leading directly to humans.

You said this:
….”In 1984, suspicions began to surface that the bones presented by Johanson and White as one skeleton came from two different sources. What was the first clue? Well, the famous leg bones with the pivitol “human like knee” was found more than three miles away. Just how fast was that 3 million year old train going when it hit Lucy, I wonder? And the leg bones don’t jive with the arm bones at all.”
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Talk Origins has a detailed examination of this incorrect claim with the heading ‘Lucy’s knee joint’. According to TO, Johanson was asked after a speech how far from Lucy the knee-joint was found. His anwser was two to three kilometers. However he was not talking about the knee joint from the Lucy skeleton, but a knee joint from a separate afarensis fossil. This misunderstanding was used by a number of creationists to cast doubt on the Lucy find. The TO essay describes many attempts to get various creationists to fix this incorrect information in their publications or websites, but the misinformation continues and now you are passing it on yet again.
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You put in this quote:
…”“To complicate matters further, some researchers believe that the afarensis sample [Lucy] is really a mixture of two separate species. The most convincing evidence for this is based on characteristics of the knee and elbow joints.”
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Peter Andrews, British Museum of Natural History, “The Descent of Man,” New Scientist, 102:24 (1984).”
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I assume you took this quote from a creationist source, not from reading the actual article. The reason I think that is that the article did not include “[Lucy]” in it. Many creationist websites do include the word Lucy in their post of this quote.
This is important because there is a difference between the particular skeleton labelled ‘Lucy’ and the sum of all the different fossils grouped as afarensis. The way you have included ‘Lucy’ it misleadingly suggests that the bones in the so-called Lucy skeleton were actually a mixture of two different speceis, invalidating the Lucy skeleton. In fact, the quote is referring to all the fossils grouped as afarensis. There were other bones that were larger than Lucy’s. The conclusion by Johnason and others was that the difference was due to Lucy being a female and the larger bones being males. An alternate view was that Lucy’s skeleton was a different species than the larger bones. There was controversy and I think there still is. But the controversy is not about the Lucy skeleton itself. BY putting in the word ‘Lucy’ which was not in Andrews’ actual article, you have muddied the waters.
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You said this:
…”Today, most scientists are convinced that the bones of Lucy, in fact, come from two different sources. So much for the most complete early human skeleton from a single source.”
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I think this is a false statement and I think you have no citations to back this. I think you drew this conclusion from creationist websites and did not check to be sure it was accurate.

I’m not sure where you going with this, and I’m still thinking about it.
I’m not sure what you mean by design. To the extent that a design is an immaterial idea, it could not play a role in evolution unless it was physically imposed on a living organism.
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If you’re thinking back to cosmology, I know nothing about that. I’m interested in the abiogenesis, biological evolution parts. About the big bang, when people say the universe started from nothing, no space, I imagine that this point of nothingness which expanded into the universe was within a something which we have no ability at all to observe. But it’s not a topic I can talk about usefully.

If a physical event occurs, there is no way to investigate whether some hypothetical supernatural action caused it. A supernatural action is by definition not observable or measurable by physical methods. Science observes and investigates the physical world only. To try to attribute a physical event to some supernatural entity goes beyond what science can usefully consider. All science can say is that there is no current explanation for some observation – an explanation based on hypothetical religious or supernatural forces is beyond the scope of science.
Suppose there is an earthquake which kills lots of people. Science can look at physical causes for the earthquake to the best of current knowledge. Beyond that, all you can say is that an answer is not currently known. What value is there in hypothesizing that some particular god or gremlin caused it? How can that be tested? It brings nothing useful to physical information. What’s worse is when people decide that the earthquake was caused by the Wrath of some particular god or demon, and that steps must be taken to appease that god. Maybe by killing bullocks,or ‘witches’, or gays? A huge value of science is that it provides physical explanations that replace harmful paranoid supernatural ones.
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I assume that an acceptance of the predictability of the physical world is how you live your daily life. Suppose that a muffin that was left on the table disappears? I think the normal response is to look for a physical cause – the dog took it, or a kid or other person took it. You don’t assume that God took it to give to some starving child or to keep you from overeating, or that the devil took it to make you unhappy. You also don’t think of aliens or time travellers popping in for a quick visist. And even if you decided that the dog and the human family members did not take it, I would guess that you’d leave it as an unexplained mystery and that you still would not decide that God took it, or that aliens or pixies took it.
When you sit in a chair you don’t test it with your hand first to see if the laws of chemistry have suddenly changed and the atoms of the chair were no longer bonded. When you drop something you expect it to fall and not suddenly fly up and hit the ceiling. You expect that the physical world is consistent even if you believe that supernatural forces have the power to change it unexpectedly at any instant.
There was a time when scientists and other people thought that there was a special life force in every cell. If research had stopped at that point, we would still be in the dark ages of biological knowledge. Because scientists continued to work at the edge of their current knowledge instead of being stopped by the idea of a nonphysical life force, they were able to discover biochemistry and cellular function. Science keeps investigating the physical universe, excluding any appeals to the supernatural, and it has been very successful in doing this. Doing experiments without worrying about the possible undetectable influence of supernatural forces has built up a huge body of interconnected knowledge.

chemical bonds

In my view (not proof or evidence), the information arises in this way: a certain order of nucleotides results in a certain order of amino acids. If that amino acid sequence promotes a more successful cell (or protocell or organism, whatever level we are talking about) then that nucleic acid sequence and resulting amino acid sequence becomes reinforced in the population. The information is that this sequence works. The information is not imposed from outside; it arises by trial and error, by selection.
If you watch the videos of Joyce and Szostak talking about the experiments they do in the lab, the videos give an idea of what the earliest phases of abiogenisis MIGHT have been like. The cells or protocells would not have begun with all the mechanisms that exist now; those mechanism developed by a process of biochemical evolution. Which amino acids associated with which sets of RNA (or similar nucleotides) would initially have been determined by their chemical bonding properties.
The information in DNA is not as a whole ‘perfect’. You can see variations in the code in different organisms, and variation in some of the amino acids. I don’t know why you would expect it to be perfect anyway; I’d think you would expect it to be flawed after the earth was cursed.

hd,

You are correct, it is not that the randomness brings design, but rather that natural selection imposed on that randomness causes selection of those arrangements best suited to the environment, which from the outside give the appearance of design.

Gregg,

Which scientific laws specifically prevent what hd is describing?

Gregg, you said this:
….”And amino acids and proteins do not form randomly. Their arrangements are highly specific.”
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Again, proteins are highly specific now, although there can be variation, except in certain functional regions. They did not have to start out that way.

(BTW, when this came up before, I bought Meyer’s ‘Signature in the Cell’ and two Dembski books, ”No Free Lunch’ and ‘The Design Revolution’, also Behe’s two books (Amazon used is my friend). All I did was skim them though, but if you happen to be using those particular books, you could list pages. Or if there’s a different book you like, you could mention it.
Also I know you don’t like links, but I think there are a number of discussions online about these books which are likely to be much more informed than anything I could come up with.)