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Dec. 9, 2005 Lets give Tracey a research grant and a handsome salary, he seems to have singlehandedly found flaws in evolution – scientists of the world, apologize and get behind the man. Actually, Tracey is not at fault, it's his sources which are obviously the culprits. He's de-evolved his position (no pun intended). He started out with Intelligent Design, but realized that ID is not a scientific theory, so he's gone back to Creationism, something so patently non-scientific that even Kansas didn't fall for it. Evolution is not only accepted as fact, it's the backbone of modern biology. Why is a rock not alive? A rock is not alive because it can't eat, it can't move, it can't excrete, and, oh yes, because it cannot evolve. Yes, evolution is now widely accepted as part of the very definition of life itself. But don't take the word of the scientists for it, after all, that would be somewhere between elitism and an appeal from authority, depending on how we frame it – I have a semi-reasonable layman's understanding of the theory that I can address some of his “issues” myself. I may get some of the details wrong - I'm not a scientist, but what I'm saying is in general accurate; this entire article is straight from my head. This bit: “Biochemical analysis identified more than 250 components which constitute an axoneme. Nine pairs of microtubule protofilament doublets form a ring and surround two central single microtubules.” Is Creationist speak for, “DAMN this is complex!” The number of components don't so much matter. The parts are assembled from instructions. Introduce a change in the instructions, and the parts and results change. Those structures he speaks of in cells and their increased complexity are irrelevant to how evolution works. To give the LEGO castle a complex draw-bridge, we simply have to make a slight alternation in the instruction booklet, and the castle will be assembled differently. A few extra or changed scribbles of direction on my notepad, for example, and I can have my servant go to Hong Kong instead of across the street; looking at how much further away Hong Kong is says nothing about the process or the instructions. They've found genes that can singlehandedly account for vast body changes in animals, for example, something Creationists tend not to mention. “Science
is currently not able to find a viable evolutionary
pathway of
successive, slight modifications, because the
selectable function is
only present when all parts are assembled. Simply
stated evolutionists
don’t have any idea’s either on how something like
that could have
developed.”
I think he's talking about that cell stuff still, the “hairs” that let the little boogers move about, but it doesn't matter. It could be the breast, or the eye, or the nose, or crab shells, etc. The argument is misleading – we may never know a precise path for any given structure to evolve, but we don't need to know every precise path for evolution to be sound. Tracey has a slight misunderstanding of how science works. For example, what is gravity? Are there gravity particles? If so, how are they made? What can we slam together in particle accelerators to make gravity? What keeps the Earth going around the sun? What keeps the moon going around the Earth? Gravity, of course. We accept the various theories that explain gravity, even if we don't know exactly what gravity is, even if we will never know exactly what gravity is. Similarly, we may never understand how a certain volcano functions specifically, or when it will erupt, even if we understand volcanism very well in general. How did, specifically, Mount Saint Helens form? If we don't know, does it mean that volcanism is bunk? What about plate-tectonics, is that theory bunk too? But back up a moment however – we already have models for how something as complex as the eye could have evolved. Did the eye evolve in the same way as the model shows? Maybe not, but it doesn't matter, what matters is that we can show a way that successive mutations can lead to such a complex structure, and the model obeys the rules of science and the theory of evolution. Tracey correctly assumed that some reading his piece may have a problem with this bit: “So,
according to Darwin here, if it’s good, it gets used.
If it’s bad or
useless, then it gets rejected. I know that someone is
going to state
that I’v paraphrased it incorrectly. Let’s make it
simpler.
Good=improvement. Bad=rejecting.”
Similar to the eye, we have a model of how a ground dwelling rodent with big eyes and good sight could evolve into a underground dwelling rodent with small, poor eyes. Contrary to Tracey's understanding of evolution, the mole is actually a problem. Why should it have small eyes? After all, evolution doesn't “know” that it can't see, small eyes are neither a help nor a hindrance underground; why should it lose them? There is a very simple and very sound and very thorough explanation. Could we add wings to a horse to make it fly? If we did, it would be a whole lot more flesh, meaning, the creature would need more blood and a bigger heart. Adding powerful fleshy wings to a horse would make a sluggish beast with low blood pressure that could barely walk, let alone fly. We would likely have to shrink other parts to allow this change. Keeping that in mind, moles have been compared to genetically close, non-blind relatives, and several interesting things have been found. The parts of the brain normally associated with generating a visual picture from sight have been converted to generating a picture built up from touch. The feelers on the moles are also bigger, whiskers more sensitive, and muscles in the face near the whiskers more bulky perhaps, and so forth – I honestly don't recall all of the details, but in the end, they found that the mole changed as little as possible to adapt to underground life. Its eyes didn't shrink because evolution “knew” it wouldn't need them, its eyes shrunk as its whiskers grew. Something had to give, and since the eyes were useless, their shrinkage didn't adversely affect the animal. At no point in this process did we have an incomplete system. Evolution often cheats and takes shortcuts and finds the easiest path possible. For every change such as the rather mild change above that we do have good models for, there are a thousand we do not have good models for, and so it may always be. But we do have good models for many “tricky” feats of evolution, social insect colonies, for example, and the breast. I won't get into those here, but for anyone that wants to look them up, they are not only fascinating, but make so much sense we'd almost have to think evolution was a fact ;) I won't respond to all of Tracey's arguments – anyone that really feels that the evolution of sex somehow throws out the theory, for example, should simply check talkorigins.org - they can explain this stuff far better than I can, but I do want to talk about fish. Tracey missed the idea of pre-adaptation. There is no need for “incomplete” animals as he wrongly supposes in evolution. There are fish, right now, that can breathe air to a limited extent – they've evolved their air bladder into a primitive lung which can hold oxygen. An air bladder is something that modern fishes have (but not primitive fishes such as sharks), allowing them to float. By controlling the amount of gas in their air bladder, fish can rise and sink or hover, something most sharks cannot do, and something similar to what modern submarines do by pressurizing gas into liquid and back. Anyway, these fish didn't evolve this ability for the purpose of one day crawling up on land, and they won't hop out on land as “half land animals”, with “half lungs”, they evolved it to survive in the mangrove roots as the ocean recedes with the tide. When that happens, they find themselves in dank, oxygen poor water, so getting air from someplace else and using it efficiently is a plus. Naturally we can say that this would also help them nicely to evolve into a real lung at some point. If evolution goes that route for this species, we can say that surviving in dank mangrove water pre-adapted them for land. Likewise, there are fish right now that walk along muddy bottoms. They walk because it gives them better control than swimming in that environment – they don't bob around in the water as much, etc. They already have legs, as it were - such fish are “pre-adapted” to walking on land. So, it's not as if an ocean just dried and any fish egg that hatched a fish with lung and some legs lived, and those that did not, died. There are lots of examples of pre-adaptations. The muscles and bones that chimps use to climb match the ones we use to walk. A slight change in the bones, and we already have the stuff built in, the movement and the coordination, for walking. In other words, many seemingly large transitions aren't that large at all. So, folks, you won't see animals with “half legs”, or partially formed eyes. Just look at flying squirrels and imagine something like a bat a million years hence, or look at a seal and imagine a dolphin at some future point. A seal doesn't have “half useless legs”, it has structures that enable it to swim better in the water, even if it is slow and clumsy on land. A fossil of a modern seal might be considered, in a million years, a “transitional” fossil, something half-way between a land mammal and a sea mammal. But just like any animal, it's not on its way from Point A to Point B anymore than any creature is, it's a completely formed animal in its own right uniquely adapted to do what it needs to do. I have never heard anyone refute evolution that actually understood just how evolution works. I have to wonder at the motivations of the people giving out bad information to those seeking answers. Creationist information sources are full of such phony-science that an elementary school kid could refute some of it, the laws of thermodynamics and the “closed system Earth” that's not actually a closed system, for example. If a source of information has such obvious science flaws, why trust anything else from such a source in relation to science? ------------ About the author Frederick Smith: I enjoy writing about the positive virtues of humanism - humanists are the good guys. I now have a blog that I will start to increasingly maintain and update. Here is the link: fredsuberview.blogspot.com/ This is my second foray into the UK writing discordia. This time around, I want to be a tad more raw - maybe a bit edgier (does that sound "art-see"?) Maybe I'll address even more issues that most Americans consider taboo... About my personal background and life: I was born, I got some education, worked, ate, and had some kids. It seems I like to write � something that was unknown to me until relatively recently...How's that for detail? ;) Hate mail is welcome unless you are from the Army Of God. Please! It's not that I mind seeing pictures of aborted fetuses in my inbox, but once you've seen one you've pretty much seen them all... Email: dahlek65@yahoo.com Tell a friend about this site! ------------ All articles are EXCLUSIVE to Useless-Knowledge.com. Please link to this article rather than copying and pasting it onto your site (which would be unauthorized and illegal). |
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