Evolution Fallacies

[Bastet]

I think you are referring to a different kind of evolution. An evolution of culture or ideas, perhaps.

The human brain has had no major changes to it in the recent past. The reason why people conceived of ideas such as airplanes and electricity is because they had the ideas of those before them to refer to. If you locked a modern day human at birth in a sealed environment simulating cave man times, then he wouldn't magically think up of electricity. Maybe he might figure out fire.

If you secluded a group of modern day adult humans on an island, away from all other contact, then, over time, they would lose what technology they had to begin with. In my travels, I found this rather interesting site...I refer you to the part about Tasmanians. No offense to any Tassies on board, but gee...sure explains a lot!

http://home.entouch.net/dmd/neantas.htm

 

[YawgmothsAvatar]

Humans have actually been growing taller for a long time, as well as shrinking in brain size (For quite a while).

I have heard the taller thing... but I never heard of the brain shrinkage. Mind getting a source?

Oh, and the reason why are getting taller is primarily nutritional.

 

[Druidus]

The advent of agriculture was no ordinary event in human evolution. Agriculture allowed us to sustain very large populations. About 100Kyr ago the population was only about 10,000 and now very soon we will be crossing the 10 billion mark – a million-fold increase in just a few millennia! Though we generally regard hunting-gathering as a primitive stage and attribute civilisation to agricultural surplus, agriculture brought several problems with it. The easily digestible food of Homo sapiens gradually led to shrinking of the jaw. Our jaw now can accommodate only 28 teeth. The wisdom teeth create a variety of problems when they erupt. About 15% Europeans and 30% East Asians do not grow more than 30 teeth. During the last 10Kyr H. sapiens is shrinking. From Cro-Magnon man's 6' height, it has come down to 5'8'' today. Even our brains are shrinking. Molleson (1994), who studied skeletons from Abu Hureyra (Syria) dating back to 11.5 -7.5 Kyr, found that daily grinding of grain for several hours resulted in damaged discs and crushed vertebrae. Maize cultivation, which started 8000 years back by the American Indians, resulted in several fold increase in tooth cavities, anaemia, TB, yaws, arthritis and syphilis. Almost 1/5th population died in infancy. Dense populations led to a variety of epidemics. Agriculture and ceramic technology had a dramatic effect as porridge could now substitute the breast milk. Regular breast-feeding suppresses ovulation and weaning of infants from breast milk led to more frequent pregnancies and an increase in population.

http://www.infinityfoundation.com/mandala/t_rv/t_rv_agraw_pottery.htm

I'm sorry I can't find more, it's an obscure topic. Take my word for it though, I wouldn't post it here if I knew it was a fallacy.

 

[YawgmothsAvatar]

Interesting. I was under the impression that humans jaws were getting smaller to accomodate our growing brains, not because of agriculture.

The question that next needs to be asked is why is this important, what does the gene mutation actually do? What is being suggested is that when the gene mutated, there was less muscles pulling and attached on the cranial bone of our ancestors. And because muscles can stunt bone growth and will sculpt the bones that it is attached to. It can have a crucial role in bone growth, in this case skull growth. When the head structures of the macaque (as well as other primates) were compared to humans, it was seen that the crests on the heads differed as well. The large crests on the macaque exemplify the how jaw muscles attach to the head and leave little room for the brain, and this crest is close to non-existent in human heads for smaller, less powerful jaws. By having smaller muscles there are smaller anchors attached to the head and the skull is free to grow into a round shape. It is thus suspected that powerful jaws are incompatible with large powerful brains (Hopkin).

From http://www.priweb.org/ed/ICTHOL/ICTHOL04papers/68.htm

 

[Druidus]

Our brain still is quite large, and was large as well, so we probably lost that back when it started to grow.

 

[Pah]

Reason # 20 makes an assumption that is not proven. It quotes Genesis 1:29 Vegaetation "was upon the face of the earth" as meaning there was only one climate that it covered the world. What utter nonsense!!! It flies in the face of seasons produced by earth rotation and angle of inclination toward the sun

-pah-

 

[Pah]

Reason # 22 contradicts reason # 4

Reson # 7 does not give a rate of Helium leakage from the misidentified primary resevoir. It (reason # 7) specifies rock as the source whereas Science identifies natural gas.

Reason # 10 poses two questions "How would the earth have survived without the moon and how would the moon have gotten here without getting so close" It only addresses the second question and fails to account for various masses orbiting other masess. Pluto is the example that shots down their answer to the second question. The smaller moons (Leda, for example) of Jupiter beyond Io (the 3rd largest) should have flown off if Reason #10's logic is to be beleived.

-pah-

P.S.
Maybe, just maybe I'll invest good time in showing more fallacies in the fallicies

 

[LongGe123]

Yes once again I'm with you Druidus (if this is the first one you've seen I posted something on a different thread of yours, one to do with Hell).

But as for the original idea about the Big Bang being a big dud - no offence to whoever said that put up by the admin guy but that idea about "where did it all come from" is so old. So we don't know for sure how it all works it doesn't make it nonsense. It's not as though scientists generally claim the Big Bang to be gospel - it just seems a fairly good start to an explanation. We're on a tiny insignificant rock with some water on it floating around in space, what the hell chance do we have of truly finding out how the universe was made in the forseeable future?

Frankly the idea of a great cosmic being making everything is in my opinion childish, talk about searching for an easy way to explain-away everything. At least science makes more of an endeavour to seek out the truth in a rational way from the evidence we can see and measure in our universe. This is more worthy of our praise in my opinion. I believe the world would be better if we all encouraged and rewarded academic, artistic and scientific endeavour more strongly and shook off the religious shackles holding the world back!

 

[Quiddity]

It quotes Genesis 1:29 Vegaetation "was upon the face of the earth" as meaning there was only one climate

Pah,
How does this mean that there is only one climate?

~Victor

 

[Ryan2065]

The site no longer works =( I was going to read all the points and respond to them...

 

[Pah]

Pah,
How does this mean that there is only one climate?

~Victor

I honestly don't know. I tried to go to the list and see if it was the reason I used those words - but alas the link is no longer valid. It is not a thought that I would have - so that's why I wanted to check it.

 

[Quiddity]

Oh ok....you have bad luck with links man.....

~Victor

 

[CaptainXeroid]

The site no longer works =( I was going to read all the points and respond to them...

That's one of the drawbacks of resurrecting a nearly year old thread. I tried the root website of the link, and it came up 404 as well. I bet you can find simliar answers on answersingenesis or whatever that site was.

 

[dorsk188]

what is the male gender creater for?

How a little thread called "Evolution Fallacies" almost became "The Evolution of Phalluses."

The best things in life are free...

 

[michel]

How a little thread called "Evolution Fallacies" almost became "The Evolution of Phalluses."

The best things in life are free...

I must admit the idea of how the thread got to the point of someone posting "what is the male gender creater for?" has me a bit confused!

If anyone is interested in resurecting this thread, I think the best Idea would be to do so, with Rex's opening posts as a starter, and we go from there; would anyone wish me to do that ?

 

[JerryL]

Replying to the original post.

The Big Bang as taught by evolutionists was supposed to happen in the neighborhood of sixteen to twenty billion years ago. All the matter and energy in the universe was drawn into a ball (the size of a proton, called a "cosmic egg." Violation of conservation of mass and energy by the way.) of energy spinning rapidly.

Firstly: The Big Bang theory is part of astrophysics, not evolution. Secondly, it really doesn't say anything about the nature of the universe prior to the Big Bang. We know that the bang started from a very small area (relatively) and we can speulate on what the universe might have been like at that point, but we really have no idea... and any guess about how the universe got that way, or what it was like before before the big bang is just that: a guess.

Eventually this ball of matter and energy exploded and hurled out particles the size of our Milky Way galaxy and all of the planets, etc.

This is not an accurate depection of the very early universe. Just after the big bang, the energy state in the universe was too high for even atoms to form. The universe was just time-space and energy. It took time for the universe to cool down anough for matter to form.

However, you should ask, where did all this energy for this Big Bang come from, where did the laws of nature come from such as the laws of gravity, centrifugal force, inertia, etc.

"Laws of nature" are simply written down things on "how reality works". So your question is "Why is reality the way reality is". I don't know that there is a "why", and if there is I don't know what it would be. You could ask the same question of God to a theist (why is God the way God is), and likely the answers are the same.

Energy just doesn't "happen," it has to have a source. I always hear "the universe breaks down at a singularity." If you back the universe up 16 billion years it would collapse into a "cosmic egg." What they don't like to discuss is what happened prior to this "singularity" and where the matter and energy came from. The fact is, they don't know and it plain and simply doesn't happen. Of course, they don't know where these laws came from either or how they came into effect, but they believe it happened.

You are correct in the statement "we don't know what the universe was like before it became the universe". It's also true that we don't know where the matter-energy came from. Perhaps it always existed. Perhaps it was created. Perhaps it just popped into being. We don't know anything about the nature of reality outside of the universe, nor the nature of the universe pre-big-bang.

A large problem with your argument is that from "we know nothing" you then assert things you claim are true (you claim to know something). For example, you claim that the energy came into being and that such an act is impossible in extra-universal reality. You don't know either of these to be true.

Since your presuppositions are entirely unestablished, no valid conclusions may be drawn from them.

That is why Evolution is a religion; I think it is a dumb religion. Nobody was there for this "Big Bang" but somehow it happened.

Evolution is a different theory in a different branch of science. Evolution is well proven.

Here is my point. According to the Law of Conservation of Angular Momentum when a spinning object breaks apart in a frictionless environment (such as the Big Bang) ALL the fragments will spin in the same direction.

No. All objects will continue with their current inertia unless influenced by outside objects. The number of assumptions in there (from material consistancy to yoour choice to completely ignore gravity, magnitisim, and dark energy) is rife and problamatic to your position.

However, Venus and Uranus spin BACKWARDS from all the other planets. Uranus actually spins on its side like a wheel. Six of the sixty-three moons in our solar system rotate backwards. Jupiter, Saturn and Neptune all have moons orbiting in BOTH DIRECTIONS. If this problem is solved by saying for example, Uranus getting a "thwack" from an object as I was told by Talk Origins, that creates another problem. Growing a planet by numerous collisions would be largely self-canceling and would produce a planet with no spin at all. This cannot explain why all planets spin. This is yet another problem for those who want to believe that this universe is a big accident.

You now move on to another (non-evolution) topic that again assumes an awful lot about the nature of the solar-system which is unknown.

I'll ignore getting into a detail of how we go from solar nebula to proto-solar-system as you've not complained on that, and we will skip forward to the point where the sun has coeleced, along with most of the planetary disk. At this point, they are all orbiting in the same direction and spinning along with their orbits (there's an interesting gravitational locking that occurs to encourage this).

Why do they spin? As a rotating cloud condenses it gets hotter and spins faster. It's a basic law of physics to maintain the same momentum, if no outside forces are acting which was the case. But now it's called angular momentum, since it's motion of gas (and some dust, it turns out) is more-or-less along circles and not along straight lines. So all that was needed was a big cloud of gas and dust spinning somewhat slowly to give a small fast spinning planet after gravitational condensing. Notice that the planets are nearly spherical in shape, including Earth. Well, as the parts of the big cloud condense and heat up they go into a molten state, making it easy for the internal gravitational forces acting uniformly in each (in a spherical sense) to make a lot of spinning spheres. In physics we say it's a minimum energy state, which nature always strives for.

In many cases the moons form around planets in the same way that the planets formed around the sun... so they too fall into predictable planes and rotations. There are exceptions however.

In the case of Earth's moon, the moon was actually ejected from the Earth's mass by a collossal impact. In other cases, "free-range" objects are trapped by the gravity of a planet. Usually that just spins them off in some odd direction. Sometimes it creates an orbit that eventually collieds with the planet (The Shoemaker_levy comet when it got trapped by Jupiter), and sometimes they end up in a reasonably stable orbit (Earth does have a couple of captured rocks in orbit).

As to Uranus: something hit it pretty hard and tilted it up on its side. It maintained it's original pole and spin, but the orientation relative to the sun moved. Most all planets show some level of deviation from perpendicular, and most all show some level of wobble.

Another problem is when the gases contracted after the Big Bang to form the sun. This would have caused the sun to spin very rapidly. Actually the sun spins very slowly while the planets move very rapidly around it. The sun has over ninety-nine percent of the mass of our solar system while it has only two percent of the angular momentum.

The sun is also less contracted than most (the ice-skater has put her arms out during her spin). In point of fact, the sun does not have a single rotational speed: the core rotates differently than the equater surface which is different from the pole's surface.

But feel free to put up your actual math and we can discuss it.

Why does Saturn have rings?

Gogole has your answer. I don't see enough relevence to type it out for you.

Why is the earth unlike any other planet in the solar system?

Earth is similar to Mars and practically identical to Venus. Unless you are discussing the results of sitting where they do in the solar-system (Mars is arid and cold, venus is a hot-house), in which case your answer includes "because Earth is in a different spot than every other planet".

Most likely if the Big Bang did happen the planets wouldn't spin but yet they all do and at different speeds. Could such an explosion be the source for all these planets, stars, and spiral galaxies spinning in such intricate precision, not very likely at all? The truth is, the Big Bang is a big dud, it didn't happen.

These are simply unspported assertions.

 

[Finnyhaha]

Perhaps if they had the referance to the unfossilized dinosaur bones it would have seememd more plausible...

This was bothering me so I did a quick search on yahoo. Came up with this:
http://www.dinosauria.com/jdp/misc/dna.htm
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/25/science/25dino.html?ei=5090&en=b273d4463ac5bade&ex=1269406800&adxnnl=1&partner=rssuserland&adxnnlx=1124662548-0IbI6QZ2ptSJ6rWlemIgiA
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinosaur

The wikipedia article includes this:

Discovery of probable soft tissue from dinosaur fossils

In the March 2005 Science magazine, Mary Higby Schweitzer et al. announced material, after re-hydrating, that resembled soft tissue was discovered inside a Tyrannosaurus rex leg bone from the Hell Creek Formation in Montana, from about 68 million years ago.[22]. When the fossilised bone was treated over several weeks to remove mineral content (demineralise) from the fossilised bone marrow cavity, Schweitzer found evidence of intact structures such as blood vessels, bone matrix, and connective tissue (bone fibres). Scrutiny under microscope further revealed the putative dinosaur soft tissue had retained fine structures (microstructures) even at the cellular level. It has not been made clear of what this flexible material is actually composed, although many news reports immediately linked it with the movie, "Jurassic Park" and the interpretation of the artifact, as well as its relative importance of Dr. Schweitzer's discovery is still undecided.

Far from saying that DNA has been extracted from unfosilized dinosaur bones, but we all know how things get a little stretched once in a while.

Peace,
Finny

 

[painted wolf]

ahh but this isn't what the site was refering to... they clame that a whole unfossilized hadrosaur had been found in Alaska...
Not a chemically softened bits of a Montaian T.rex... though many Creationists like to misrepresent that find now too.

wa:do

 

[Parma]

Parma : I felt compasion today, I saw this girl on TV. who was not well. I asked people
around me. Do you think god has compasion after seeing it . They all turned around and said that she must
have done somthing evil in her past life. Now what view would you follow? I cant accept there's. Reason if I do I
lose my compasion and gain there thought which is the total opposite, am I wright or am I wrong?
[Parma] 2:18 pm: I created room "How do you percieve others ?"

 

[Parma]

What I learnt was that a person that can bring into the world the purity of another persons soul without uttering a word, but just by looking at them is beyond the deeds of many great men. Has to be a great being. The view of them being something from an evil past to me is something that has changed into todays saint. There isnt many religions or philiosophers that are more influencial then a person that that can bring influnce onto someone with one look. An influence of your own pure soul with one look is beyond a thousand words and to me I'd class that girl as a saint. Please correct me if im wrong?