Tuesday, 27 March 2012

15 questions evolutionists cannot satisfactorially explain.

I thought I'd try my hand at these ... questions in caps (sorry).

Most are "so what?" questions. Unlike religions, science does not claim to have all the answers. One of the things scientific method is good at is identifying things that don't need to be true. Thus, although we have uncertainty about what we know to be true, we can have a lot of confidence in what we know to be superfluous.

It is not possible to dissuade, through reason, someone from a position they did not arrive at through reason, so none of the answers will be "satisfactory" to the creationist. This blog is too small to give complete answers anyway - the best I can do is indicate where a decent reply may be found.
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1 – HOW DID LIFE ORIGINATE?
Through the laws of physics and natural selection.
We actually know a lot of ways that life could originate and understand a lot of the mechanisms. It is not so much that we don't know how life originated as that we are unsure of exactly which of the available methods actually happened.

2 – HOW DID THE DNA CODE ORIGINATE?
Via chemistry. It's a bit like the above - except we have fewer options.

3 – HOW COULD MUTATIONS—ACCIDENTAL COPYING MISTAKES (DNA ‘LETTERS’ EXCHANGED, DELETED OR ADDED, GENES DUPLICATED, CHROMOSOME INVERSIONS, ETC.)—CREATE THE HUGE VOLUMES OF INFORMATION IN THE DNA OF LIVING THINGS?
The huge volume of information is there without any of those processes.
Note: the question confuses DNA-level events with Chromosome level processes.

4 – WHY IS NATURAL SELECTION, A PRINCIPLE RECOGNIZED BY CREATIONISTS, TAUGHT AS ‘EVOLUTION’, AS IF IT EXPLAINS THE ORIGIN OF THE DIVERSITY OF LIFE?
It isn't. Natural selection is taught as one of the driving principles in the overall theory of evolution. It is not taught as if it were all of the theory.

5 – HOW DID NEW BIOCHEMICAL PATHWAYS, WHICH INVOLVE MULTIPLE ENZYMES WORKING TOGETHER IN SEQUENCE, ORIGINATE?
Through natural selection via intermediate processes. You'll have to be specific.

6 – LIVING THINGS LOOK LIKE THEY WERE DESIGNED, SO HOW DO EVOLUTIONISTS KNOW THAT THEY WERE NOT DESIGNED?
Living things only look designed from a distance. On closer examination we see that they lack many of the features humans usually associate with design like high levels of symmetry, regularity in components, efficiency, and so on.

7 – HOW DID MULTI-CELLULAR LIFE ORIGINATE?
From single-celled life which formed colonies.

8 – HOW DID SEX ORIGINATE?
From specialization within colonies.

9 – WHY ARE THE (EXPECTED) COUNTLESS MILLIONS OF TRANSITIONAL FOSSILS MISSING?
They aren't. We do not expect to find "countless milions" of fossils of any kind of organism: fossilization is a rare event. We have found "transitional" fossils though: of organisms that lie between two modern species.

10 – HOW DO ‘LIVING FOSSILS’ REMAIN UNCHANGED OVER SUPPOSED HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS OF YEARS, IF EVOLUTION HAS CHANGED WORMS INTO HUMANS IN THE SAME TIME FRAME?
They didn't. They mutated and radiated and selected. We are surrounded by their changed offspring.
You mean: "how is it that the anchient form is still around?" The answer is because they didn't get selected out. The theory of evolution means there is a chance that some forms will not vanish. It is a small chance, but you will notice that living fossils are rare and scarce.

11 – HOW DID BLIND CHEMISTRY CREATE MIND/INTELLIGENCE, MEANING, ALTRUISM AND MORALITY
Through evolution in social animals.

12 – WHY IS EVOLUTIONARY ‘JUST-SO’ STORYTELLING TOLERATED
Because it is better supported than the other forms of "just so" story-telling that preceded it, including the "just so" storytelling of creationists.

13 – WHERE ARE THE SCIENTIFIC BREAKTHROUGHS DUE TO EVOLUTION?
All through biology and chemistry - and videogames.

14 – SCIENCE INVOLVES EXPERIMENTING TO FIGURE OUT HOW THINGS WORK; HOW THEY OPERATE. WHY IS EVOLUTION, A THEORY ABOUT HISTORY, TAUGHT AS IF IT IS THE SAME AS THIS OPERATIONAL SCIENCE?
Evolution is a theory about biology, not history. "Operational" science is not taught in school as there is no such thing.

Evolution is a theory which informs a great many scientific experiments and which is supported by many as well. However it is not taught as experimental science either since it is not an experimental science. It is a part of the framework of modern biology - which is an experimental science.

15 – WHY IS A FUNDAMENTALLY RELIGIOUS IDEA, A DOGMATIC BELIEF SYSTEM THAT FAILS TO EXPLAIN THE EVIDENCE, TAUGHT IN SCIENCE CLASSES?
Fundamentally religious ideas and dogmatic belief systems are not taught in science classes.
Anyway you've got it backwards: scientific theories are not expected to explain the evidence - that would be unscientific - instead, the theories are expected to be supported by the evidence.

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Hopefully you can see that the questions represent fundamental misunderstanding about what science does. Many people are looking for some sort of certainty, some sort of Answer, in life. Science is not that Answer - though it can provide useful tools to seek one. Scientists do not know everything and do not claim to. It is the religious people who claim access to absolute Truth and by pointing to the absence of the same from scientific theories they are just saying that science is not a religion.

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