You are correct - they merely summarize the enormous amounts of data sets that have gone into the study of plant evolution, specifically trees, and reproduce it in an easy-to-follow chart which has keywords written up and down the length of it. If there is anything that you'd like to know about any of the stages of development that our modern trees went through before reaching their current form, all you need to do is google those words and educate yourself. The chart is an aid - the links are the supporting information which help to augment and explain what you're looking at in the chart.
No - it's "advertising" what has been discovered in the field of plant evolution.
Complex things are merely a combination of several lesser complexities.
For example, what is water without hydrogen? What is it without oxygen? Where did those less complex ingredients come from? How did they form? What more primitive thing are they made of?
It states that because the people who wrote the Bible didn't know any better...If they were told that this is how trees came to be, then God conveniently misled them, causing them believe something that wasn't true. Nothing, "just came to be one day". Everything that you'll ever experience in life had a precursor event to it. Everything.
You did not just come to be one day. There is a whole story about why and how your parents got together, completely independent of you. That's a fact. Your knowledge of ignorance of those events will never change the fact that they happened. This thought experiment can be applied to absolutely everything, ever.
There's a reason for that...
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/sci...ratory-sparking-debate-about-playing-god.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Craig_Venter
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eckard_Wimmer
Not having done something is very different from not being able to do something...
It takes time to figure things out. There was once a period in our history when humanity felt powerless to combat the natural forces around us, dying from illnesses that today we barely sneeze at (pun intended.) Not even cancer is the immediate death sentence that it once was - all of this is because of discovery, innovation, and pragmatic application of what we know, knowledge which we've attained through science.
This, right here, is why Creationists don't get published in peer-reviewed publications...
If the deluge of Genesis was a factual event, it would be evidenced somewhere in the geologic record. We can nail down local floods in Mesopotamia 7,000 years ago but we can't find evidence of a global flood or of human genetic bottlenecks, which must have existed were the story of Noah accurate. Why isn't there evidence for such an event? A creationist scientist or organization that could actually produce such evidence would change the world forever. But, alas, they never have. And I'll wager that they never will.
http://earthsky.org/earth/how-did-the-first-plant-seeds-evolve
You can very easily refute this if you think that the explanations of seed evolution are simply produced to fit a specific "theory" - This challenge applies to you and to any accredited Creation scientist who has a problem with current biological assertions. Produce for me (and for the entire world) evidence of an angiosperm or a gymnosperm existing deeper in the fossil record than we currently know of. Show us a seeded plant that was not preceded by a spore-bearing plant, for example, historically. It's really as simple as that. As with anything, just show us physical evidence of more complex organisms preserved in a strata that they otherwise should not be in...
Can you do that?
If trees just appeared one day, as per the Bible, why do we see clear evidence of them NOT doing that? Why do we find gymnosperms much higher in the geologic timeline than, say, the first ferns? Why are ferns predated by bryophytes? Why don't we find these before we find green and red algae? Why do we find cyanobacteria predating all of it?
These are simple questions.
If the Bible is correct, cyanobacteria and seeded, ancient, flowering plants should be found along side them, shouldn't they? If things were just miraculously created mature, why don't we find evidence of that?
Please see the challenge above
Evolution isn't a fact because I say it is. It's not a fact because I like it better. It's not a fact because there are more people who claim that it is...
It's a fact because it"s evidenced.
It was an idea, formed through questioning and observation, that turned out to hit the nail on the head in every other biologic endeavor that we encountered. It's not a conspiracy and it's not an anti-religious movement. It's only a threat to faith when that faith is based on something that it shouldn't be.
Personally, I'd suggest you think about that last part for a minute.
Complex things cannot exist without less complex things coming before it... This is not a crazy idea. You can't bake a cake without accumulating lots of non-cake material first. Cakes don't just appear, fully baked and covered in icing.
I assure you that if the "science" produced by creationists was not biased nonsense that it would get the same attention as everything else. There are plenty of crackpot scientists who have tried to get their work published in scientific journals and it was rejected because their work or their premise was flawed, they just couldn't see it. It's not the fault of the greater body of science that some people are delusional.
If I wrote a scientific paper attempting to deliver my findings on how and why Prometheus delivered fire to humanity after stealing it from Zeus, you would laugh in my face. My inability to see the flaw in my study would not be your fault, would it? It wouldn't be a conspiracy against Hellenistic Polytheism, would it? You would reject that paper because it would have been founded on a foolish and biased premise. However, if the content of that study somehow definitively proved that Prometheus was a factual being, and that Zeus was real and that he kept fire from people for a long time, and that a gift was once give to someone and that's how man forever had light, then we could begin to talk about the vast conspiracy of science to cover up the truth... But that's not at all what's happening, is it?
The purpose of peer-review is to try and find flaws in someone else's work. It's to hold people and their findings accountable. It's to week out bad information and keep only the good. It's a built-in corrective tool. It's actually
better for science as a while when people are wrong. Being wrong means we've eliminated a variable when trying to solve a
huge equation.
Do you not find it odd that all of the creationist peer reviews conveniently agree with each other? Does that really not signal any red flags for you?