Creationism, Evolution, and Orthodoxy

[PeterTheAleut]

I remember when I was a kid, they said a super volcano destroyed the dinosaurs, now they are saying it was an astroid, 10 years from now, they may say it was some super solar flare or some mega cosmic ray or something.......anything and everything but the flood.

So you're asserting that it was the Flood that killed the dinosaurs?  What scientific evidence is there for that hypothesis?  Is that hypothesis even falsifiable through scientific testing?

 

[Friul]

Engineering is a science. All forms of Engineering are derivatives of Physics.


Infact, Engineering is called a "Hard Science", whereas other forms of sciences are called "Soft Sciences".

To me, Engineering is real Science.......about as real as you can get.

[...]

ICXC NIKA

I have to disagree that engineering is in and of itself a hard science, but that is for another thread.

 

[Heorhij]

So what's the problem? It's that science works by hypothesis and speculation but proposes all discoveries as definitive truths, time after time, until a new theory will replace it as another "truth". Maybe scientists should stop using expressions such as "X years ago the world was thus" and replace them with "It is speculated/it is a general opinion of the scientific community that X years ago the world was thus". That would make science maybe a little less credible, but surely more humble in its approach to the world.

OK. Then we should say, "it is speculated and is a general opinion of the scientific community that a molecule of water consists of two atoms of hydrogen and one atom of oxygen."

 

[Jetavan]

Before Lucy came Ardi, new earliest hominid found

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091001/ap_on_sc/us_sci_before_lucy

QUOTE:
"WASHINGTON – The story of humankind is reaching back another million years as scientists learn more about "Ardi," a hominid who lived 4.4 million years ago in what is now Ethiopia. The 110-pound, 4-foot female roamed forests a million years before the famous Lucy, long studied as the earliest skeleton of a human ancestor.

This older skeleton reverses the common wisdom of human evolution, said anthropologist C. Owen Lovejoy of Kent State University.

Rather than humans evolving from an ancient chimp-like creature, the new find provides evidence that chimps and humans evolved from some long-ago common ancestor — but each evolved and changed separately along the way.

"This is not that common ancestor, but it's the closest we have ever been able to come," said Tim White, director of the Human Evolution Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley.

The lines that evolved into modern humans and living apes probably shared an ancestor 6 million to 7 million years ago, White said in a telephone interview.

....

To read the rest, please visit the link....

This find doesn't "reverse" anything. It simply indicates that modern humans probably did not evolve from an ancestor that was predominantly "chimp-like", and instead indicates that both modern chimps and modern humans evolved from an ancestor that was probably "chimp-and-human-like". And that ancestor would still be classified biologically as an "ape", though not identical to any species of apes that currently exist.

The recent Ardis find doesn't contradict the commonly held idea (as seen above) that chimps are the closest living relatives of humans. What the find does is indicate that the species located at the "~5mybp [5 million years before present]" point was not as "chimp-like" as previously thought, and probably possessed characteristics that both were both human-like and chimp-like.

This ancestor of both chimps and humans would still be classified as an ape, because both gorillas and orangutans (which split earlier from the human-chimp ancestor lineage) are classified as apes.

 

[Riddikulus]

The problem with science is this:

This grandma objects most strongly to this!!! :laugh:

 

[Jibrail Almuhajir]

This ancestor of both chimps and humans would still be classified as an ape,..

Are you sure?  I would've thought 'hominid'.  :-\

 

[Friul]

Are you sure?  I would've thought 'hominid'.  :-\

Which means...?  Great ape. 

 

[Jibrail Almuhajir]

Are you sure?  I would've thought 'hominid'.  :-\

Which means...?  Great ape.   

And now I know! 

 

[ytterbiumanalyst]

I remember when I was a kid, they said a super volcano destroyed the dinosaurs, now they are saying it was an astroid, 10 years from now, they may say it was some super solar flare or some mega cosmic ray or something.......anything and everything but the flood.

So you're asserting that it was the Flood that killed the dinosaurs?  What scientific evidence is there for that hypothesis?  Is that hypothesis even falsifiable through scientific testing?

Not to mention the Biblical evidence, if one interprets it literally, that Noah must have had four of each species of dinosaur aboard the Ark (seeing as how they were unclean), and therefore they would not have been wiped out by the Flood.

 

[AlexanderOfBergamo]

Dear Heorhij,

So what's the problem? It's that science works by hypothesis and speculation but proposes all discoveries as definitive truths, time after time, until a new theory will replace it as another "truth". Maybe scientists should stop using expressions such as "X years ago the world was thus" and replace them with "It is speculated/it is a general opinion of the scientific community that X years ago the world was thus". That would make science maybe a little less credible, but surely more humble in its approach to the world.

OK. Then we should say, "it is speculated and is a general opinion of the scientific community that a molecule of water consists of two atoms of hydrogen and one atom of oxygen."

No, because you you CAN SEE experimentally how atoms and molecules are built, and the main three forces (electromagnetism, strong interaction and weak interaction) that govern it: the theories have made previsions, and the previsions have been up to now confirmed experimentally; the only certainty is that these theories describe very well reality, but they may be incomplete and need to be filled in with new discoveries (if you're used to physics, an example is the search for the boson of Higgs). What always surprises me is that we arrived at this conclusions in an incredibly easy way despite the many obstacles of looking into the "infinitely little" (including Heisemberg's principle of indetermination).
On the contrary, you can't say with accuracy which ape was an ancestor of modern man. There was a period when scientists taught with certainty that the Cro-magnon man and Neanderthals were son and father, but now the opinion is that they are cousins independently evolved from a common ancestor Homo Heidelbergensis, and that they walked on Earth simultaneously for a long period of their existence. A similar error was made when scientists assumed as obvious that - as reptiles - dinosaurs were cold-blooded. These things were taught as "scientific dogmas" in school books, in my country (I don't know of the US). Recent studies have shown that this certainty was an error, since there are solid hints that they were warm-blooded. Nevertheless, school books of the time gave cold-blooded dinosaurs and our supposed father Neanderthal as certainties, which has been clearly disproved. Proofs are necessary to sustain a theory.
The problem with paleontology is that the only known model for life exists on Earth, so that we can't verify experimentally the path of evolution from one species into another. An Italian physicist, former director of CERN Antonio Zichichi, has been largely criticized for having put in discussion the evolutionary theory as a strictly-speaking scientific theory. Of this theory he criticized the METHODS, since evolution is neither experimental nor mathematical.
I will invent a "visual" experiment, if you like, to explain how evolution is based on a weak scientific base. Let's assume we have a man in front of three different ladders who bring from a point A to a point B. We go away and give a look at this place after one hour, and we find out that the individual has already reached point B. We know that he somehow moved from point A to point B, and we might assume that he did so through the most direct and short of the three ladders, but how can we be sure? He could have taken the longer ladder and be there in an hour. He could have used a different means to reach point B. He could even have travelled as fast as light and have circled the entire Earth, reaching point B from the opposite direction, or he might have used  a teleportation device. There are virtually an unlimited possible range of ways to reach point B from point A, and the most logical may be nevertheless wrong: it's only a GUESS, an hypothesis or theory which we could verify only asking to the individual directly or to an eyewitness who must have seen the entire travel of the individual. Even using alternated cameras along the possible paths from A to B doesn't grant us that, in the points from a camera to another, he might have used other means of travel then the ladders.
Bringing this to evolution, we can easily understand that men and apes are biologically linked (I mean in their DNAs) but:
1) We can't be sure of the evolutionary path of man, i.e. which steps of evolution man has really followed to become what it is.
2) We can't be sure by which means man evoluted from some primate, even if we can take pictures of man (i.e. find the missing links) at some points of his evolutionary process.
We could say this is a "principle of indetermination" applied to evolutionism: as the electrons move in a "cloud of probability", so that we can either calculate the position of an electron, but we can't know how fast it travels before its relevation, in the same way we can calculate the space-time coordinates of a fossil animal and compare with others, but we can't know for sure whence the animal evolved, or what he was going to evolve into.

In Christ,   Alex

 

[Heorhij]

Dear Heorhij,

So what's the problem? It's that science works by hypothesis and speculation but proposes all discoveries as definitive truths, time after time, until a new theory will replace it as another "truth". Maybe scientists should stop using expressions such as "X years ago the world was thus" and replace them with "It is speculated/it is a general opinion of the scientific community that X years ago the world was thus". That would make science maybe a little less credible, but surely more humble in its approach to the world.

OK. Then we should say, "it is speculated and is a general opinion of the scientific community that a molecule of water consists of two atoms of hydrogen and one atom of oxygen."

No, because you you CAN SEE experimentally how atoms and molecules are built, and the main three forces (electromagnetism, strong interaction and weak interaction) that govern it: the theories have made previsions, and the previsions have been up to now confirmed experimentally; the only certainty is that these theories describe very well reality, but they may be incomplete and need to be filled in with new discoveries (if you're used to physics, an example is the search for the boson of Higgs). What always surprises me is that we arrived at this conclusions in an incredibly easy way despite the many obstacles of looking into the "infinitely little" (including Heisemberg's principle of indetermination).

Yes, of course, this is all correct, but my point is, we do not directly "see" atoms. The notion that there are three atoms in a molecule of water is DEDUCED from observations, itself not being an observation. Similarly, the notion that substances consist of molecules is also a DEDUCED notion (i.e. hypothesis, not a "fact"). Yes, there is evidence that supports the atomic-molecular hypothesis (or theory). And yet, why do people argue that "evolution is not a fact but merely a theory," and do not usually make the same argument about the atomic-molecular theory of matter?

On the contrary, you can't say with accuracy which ape was an ancestor of modern man.

AFAIK, the current working hypothesis is that the evolutionary ancestor of the present-day species Homo sapiens is extinct.

2) We can't be sure by which means man evoluted from some primate, even if we can take pictures of man (i.e. find the missing links) at some points of his evolutionary process.

I think we can. There are five principal mechanisms of evolution: mutations, natural selection, genetic drift, gene flow, and non-stochastic sexual replication. All of them make a certain contribution into the diversification of life forms. No reason to exclude them from the evolution of hominids.

 

[AlexanderOfBergamo]

I think we can. There are five principal mechanisms of evolution: mutations, natural selection, genetic drift, gene flow, and non-stochastic sexual replication. All of them make a certain contribution into the diversification of life forms. No reason to exclude them from the evolution of hominids.

Are these mechanisms certain to have worked on hominids to bring such to our actual form? Where's the scientific proof that these factors contributed to evolution? Maybe we could discover that, for example, the genes have a "reason", so-to-say, in other words that they tend to channel informations to the new generations so that evolution is no more a natural selection (the best new characteristics make some animals survive and some others die), but a natural adaptation (over time DNA adapts from one generation and another to produce better characteristics). this is one of the many possible ways evolution could occur. Another one is sudden genetic mutations due to catastrophs or radiations. In this case, entire processes of evolution would be ignited from outside.

In the atoms, things are different. We assist to a cause-effect phenomenon in a direct way. We see the forces in action NOW, and we perceive their effects... we can even capture or sense the bosons resulting from the fundamental interactions (except for gravitons, I know), and science as verified that they have the characteristics of electric charge, flavour, color, spin and mass anticipated by the Standard Model. So YES, I think the model of an atom is as clear as the anatomy pf a human: some mechanisms may be still unknown, but what is known is entirely certain and can be verified by common experience and by scientific tests. That's what lab science serves for.
Now, physics, chemistry and other sciences can make precise predictions of the future. Evolution, on the contrary, is the observation of old or new phenomena, but no mathematical prevision of new phenomena is possible. There's more certainty in model of physics then in the theory of evolution - which doesn't mean that evolution is plainly faulty, but just that we can't be sure of how it worked/works.

In Christ,  Alex

 

[Dan-Romania]

:laugh: what else is new?

oh, please , The Evolution theory is a joke.

 

[minasoliman]

Rather than humans evolving from an ancient chimp-like creature, the new find provides evidence that chimps and humans evolved from some long-ago common ancestor — but each evolved and changed separately along the way.

This article doesn't know how to portray the science of this.  First of all, biologists never said chimps evolved into humans.  They ALWAYS said, as the article points out that chimps and humans share a common ancestor.  That is not a theory, that is considered FACT (remember? Theory explains fact?).  The theory is when, or who, or what fossil can be shown to be this common ancestor.  They were wrong earlier (actually they weren't wrong, they might have simply found a more encompassing ancestor, maybe even a common ancestor to chimps, humans, and Lucy...so I wouldn't criticize anything yet), and they found this new hominid to explain it.

The media doesn't know how to explain science.  Poorly written article, and I would suggest reading what the researchers said.

If you keep reading the article, the article actually implied Darwin even said chimps and humans share a common ancestor:

White noted that Charles Darwin, whose research in the 19th century paved the way for the science of evolution, was cautious about the last common ancestor between humans and apes.

"Darwin said we have to be really careful. The only way we're really going to know what this last common ancestor looked like is to go and find it. Well, at 4.4 million years ago we found something pretty close to it," White said. "And, just like Darwin appreciated, evolution of the ape lineages and the human lineage has been going on independently since the time those lines split, since that last common ancestor we shared."

Now compare this yahoo self-contradictory article with this description:

In its 2 October 2009 issue, Science presents 11 papers, authored by a diverse international team, describing an early hominid species, Ardipithecus ramidus, and its environment. These 4.4 million year old hominid fossils sit within a critical early part of human evolution, and cast new and sometimes surprising light on the evolution of human limbs and locomotion, the habitats occupied by early hominids, and the nature of our last common ancestor with chimps.

Think about how many times the media misrepresented Orthodox Christianity in a little, but major way in their articles, and you will understand why scientists slap their foreheads at them, and at the repercussions of people like you who don't go and read the boring source.

 

[minasoliman]

:laugh: what else is new?

oh, please , The Evolution theory is a joke.

Don't laugh at what you don't know.  In the end, people might think you're the joke.

 

[Second Chance]

The problem may the dumbing down of "theory" by scientists themselves. From the Wiki (and I would appreciate if any scientists among us would correct this entry):

In pedagogical contexts or in official pronouncements by official organizations of scientists a definition such as the following may be promulgated.

According to the United States National Academy of Sciences,

   Some scientific explanations are so well established that no new evidence is likely to alter them. The explanation becomes a scientific theory. In everyday language a theory means a hunch or speculation. Not so in science. In science, the word theory refers to a comprehensive explanation of an important feature of nature supported by facts gathered over time. Theories also allow scientists to make predictions about as yet unobserved phenomena, [5]

   A scientific theory is a well-substantiated explanation of some aspect of the natural world, based on a body of facts that have been repeatedly confirmed through observation and experiment. Such fact-supported theories are not "guesses" but reliable accounts of the real world. The theory of biological evolution is more than "just a theory." It is as factual an explanation of the universe as the atomic theory of matter or the germ theory of disease. Our understanding of gravity is still a work in progress. But the phenomenon of gravity, like evolution, is an accepted fact.[6]

The primary advantage enjoyed by this definition is that it firmly marks things termed theories as being well supported by evidence. This would be a disadvantage in interpreting real discourse between scientists who often use the word theory to describe untested but intricate hypotheses in addition to repeatedly confirmed models. However, in an educational or mass media setting it is almost certain that everything of the form X theory is an extremely well supported and well tested theory. This causes the theory/non-theory distinction to much more closely follow the distinctions useful for consumers of science (e.g. should I believe something or not?)." (my emphasis). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory#List_of_notable_theories

I am not a scientist but I am involved in "performance management" and am conscious of the fact that in any formal argument the premise(s) must be true to have a valid conclusion. For example, in process improvement one must have valid baseline data which is then contrasted to the results after a change has been implemented. In this field, datapoints are very important, as it is in biology, for example. Modern biology can show that organisms evolve because scientists have before and after data. When it comes to human evolution, however, the baseline data are scarce and arrived at by applying the principles of evolution backwards: that is, there are more than one conclusion and some of them put forth as premises. If I may chart it in formal logic,

Premise 1: Evolution theory (and current empirical evidence that organisms evolve)
Premise 2/Conclusion 1: There must be a logical progression from the baseline (whatever and whenever it was) to now.
Premise 3: Observation shows common traits between species
Premise 4/Conclusion 2: Working backwards in accordance with Premises 1, 2 and 3 will allow us to find the baseline.
Premise 5: Lucy is the oldest datapoint that we have and confirms that men and apes have a common ancestor.

Conclusion: Man did evolve from an ancestor of both men and apes.

This is  fascinating but does not rise to the confidence level that the Academy of Sciences posits, that is, a reliable account  of the real world. Evolution theory is a valid scientific theory but it does not empirically prove the conclusion of the argument I made above. Also, I believe that this has risen to the level of scientific dogma (a contradiction in terms but there you have it), fiercely defended by some scientists as if it is more than a matter of science.

 

[Dan-Romania]

:laugh: what else is new?

oh, please , The Evolution theory is a joke.

Don't laugh at what you don't know.  In the end, people might think you're the joke.

Is evolution your religion too?

 

[Heorhij]

I think we can. There are five principal mechanisms of evolution: mutations, natural selection, genetic drift, gene flow, and non-stochastic sexual replication. All of them make a certain contribution into the diversification of life forms. No reason to exclude them from the evolution of hominids.

Are these mechanisms certain to have worked on hominids to bring such to our actual form? Where's the scientific proof that these factors contributed to evolution? Maybe we could discover that, for example, the genes have a "reason", so-to-say, in other words that they tend to channel informations to the new generations so that evolution is no more a natural selection (the best new characteristics make some animals survive and some others die), but a natural adaptation (over time DNA adapts from one generation and another to produce better characteristics).

That's not what modern biology holds as its working hypothesis. Our current understanding is that mutations are absolutely random. DNA has no "brain" and mutagens have no "brain." It is the environment that selects those mutants that are better fit to it - not anything in the intrinsic mechanism of mutation. And just what is "better" or "best" characteristics? If you live in Italy or New York city, getting the mutation that causes sickle-cell anemia is "bad." But if you are living in those parts of the world where malaria is all around, getting the SAME mutation is "good," because the malaria plasmodium cannot live in s-hemoglobin-containiang red blood cells, so you live longer and have more children...

this is one of the many possible ways evolution could occur. Another one is sudden genetic mutations due to catastrophs or radiations. In this case, entire processes of evolution would be ignited from outside.

Well, essentially, all mutations are "from outside" - they are caused by mutagens like UV light, cosmic rays, gamma rays etc. Sudden catastrophies lead to the so-called genetic drift, when the whole subset of genetic variants in a population is lost and the genetic makeup of the population changes dramatically over a very short time. And yes, the genetic drift is a powerful driving force in evolution.

 

[minasoliman]

:laugh: what else is new?

oh, please , The Evolution theory is a joke.

Don't laugh at what you don't know.  In the end, people might think you're the joke.

Is evolution your religion too?

Is ignorance one of your traits too?

 

[Dan-Romania]

:laugh: what else is new?

oh, please , The Evolution theory is a joke.

Don't laugh at what you don't know.  In the end, people might think you're the joke.

Is evolution your religion too?

Is ignorance one of your traits too?

Oh no!Not you too!They`ve got you?