"Where Did Life Come From?" A 13 Minute Primer For Creationists

[Subduction Zone]

I did 'speak of it again'!

If it's the paper I'm thinking of....it was from the view of YEC's, which of course is faulty!


I profess no such view. I don't get why the Noachian Flood is always linked to, and based on, Young Earth Creationism. ..I guess to give skeptics genuine grounds to dismiss it.

But the Earth was actually millions if not billions of years old when the Flood occurred.

You debaters constantly misrepresent my views! Can you honestly not remember?

Noah's flood fails because it relies on the same sort of nonsense that YEC's believe. One has to believe in an incompetent, immoral, and dishonest God to believe in the flood myth. Flood believers have to constantly believe in magic because the real world tells us that there was no flood.

Tell me, why do you believe that God lied?

 

[Jose Fly]

I did 'speak of it again'!

Not to me you didn't.

If it's the paper I'm thinking of....it was from the view of YEC's, which of course is faulty!

Nope. It wasn't a paper and it wasn't "from the view of YEC's". It was an article that described and quoted from the works of 19th century Christian geologists who had to acknowledge that the evidence they were seeing conflicted with the Biblical flood.

But the Earth was actually millions if not billions of years old when the Flood occurred.

Er......um........

You debaters constantly misrepresent my views! Can you honestly not remember?

The memory issues are yours.

Also, earlier in this thread after you said M. Behe was one of the people who are "searching for honest answers", I noted that he agrees with universal common ancestry (humans included) and asked if you agreed with that. I've brought that fact up to you before and you've ignored it each time, which gives a very strong impression that it's something you'd prefer to not have to think about. Is that accurate?

 

[tas8831]

LOL, dairy farms have those poop conveyor belts. Of course it has been over forty years since I have been in one. It changed over the years from a rather small trough with powered belt in it to this:

The ones that I remember arose from this simple trough that had a mechanized transport added:

Pretty sure they didn't have one of those in 900 year old Noah's day!

 

[Hockeycowboy]

Also, earlier in this thread after you said M. Behe was one of the people who are "searching for honest answers", I noted that he agrees with universal common ancestry (humans included) and asked if you agreed with that. I've brought that fact up to you before and you've ignored it each time, which gives a very strong impression that it's something you'd prefer to not have to think about. Is that accurate?

Yes, I remember.... Do you respect paleo ornithologist Dr. Alan Feduccia? Do you believe he’s genuinely honest in his outlook? (I do.) Do you agree w/ his stance on Dinosaurs Are Not Birds view? I doubt it.


You can accept and support some views of a person, and think highly of them, but that in no way means you accept everything they believe!

 

[Hockeycowboy]

Nope. It wasn't a paper and it wasn't "from the view of YEC's". It was an article that described and quoted from the works of 19th century Christian geologists who had to acknowledge that the evidence they were seeing conflicted with the Biblical flood.

No? Well then, could you link to it again, please?
Because most 19th-cent. Christians, were YEC’s and viewed the evidence through that POV.

 

[Skwim]

Yes, I remember.... Do you respect paleo ornithologist Dr. Alan Feduccia? Do you believe he’s genuinely honest in his outlook? (I do.) Do you agree w/ his stance on Dinosaurs Are Not Birds view? I doubt it.

And with good reason.

"Feduccia is at it again

Uh-oh, creationist-darling Alan Feduccia is at it again. In an new Proceedings of the Royal Society B paper entitled “A new Chinese specimen indicates that ‘protofeathers’ in the Early Cretaceous theropod dinosaur Sinosauropteryx are degraded collagen fibres“, Feduccia (along with Theagarten Lingham-Soliar and Xiaolin Wang) claim that the primitive feathers of the small dinosaur Sinosauropteryx are merely only degraded elements of the animal, and thus it did not have feathers. Reputable dinosaur experts vehemently disagree with Feduccia’s assertions however (and have for some time; Feduccia’s take on Sinosauropteryx is not new), and Kevin Padian succinctly put it this way;

“These people have been flogging the same horse for a long time… It is appalling that Proceedings B chose to publish this nonsense.”

The majority of the National Geographic news story reporting the new paper, however, is devoted to the claims of Feduccia and other scientists who don’t believe birds evolved from dinosaurs at all, the whole article having an intelligent-design sort of vibe to it. Says Feduccia;

We are dealing here basically with a faith-based science where the contrarian view is silenced to a large extent by the popular press.

The article also hints at a rather interesting claim by Feduccia; that dinosaurs like Sinosauropteryx aren’t, in fact, dinosaurs at all;

When they become flightless, they superficially resemble small dinosaurs.

This stems from the logic that if Sinosauropteryx is a secondarily flightless descendant of birds, birds which evolved from a non-dinosaur ancestor, then Sinosauropteryx is really a paleontological red-herring, converging on the dinosaur body plan. As Ned Flanders would say, “Sounds like he’s strainin’ to do some explainin’.”

So if birds did not evolve from dinosaurs, what did they evolve from? Feduccia’s choice is Longisquama insignis, a lizard-like diapsid with a row of skin flaps on its back, which some believe are feathers or feather-like structures. Here’s a reconstruction (with and without the skin flaps) from Wikipedia;

Ironically, just as Feduccia doubts that dinosaurs had feathers, the structures on the back of Longisquama seem even more dubious; they’re not feathers, but they could be anything from skin-flaps to a fossilized fern on the same slab. Beyond the odd structures, however, there does not seem to be any compelling reason to believe Longisquama is a bird ancestor outside of preference; while a dinosaur-bird relationship seemed apparent very early in the study of dinosaurs, the view switched over to a thecodont origin for birds as outlined in Heilmann’s The Origin of Birds, the “dinosaur renaissance” fueled by the work of Ostrom and Bakker revitalizing the notion that birds are related and derived from dinosaurs. There are some who still cling to the old model however, and even Ernst Mayr briefly alluded to his affinity for a thecodont-bird relationship in his book What Evolution Is.

While the new fossils coming out of China require careful and meticulous study, there is no reason to believe that birds did not evolve from dinosaurs, and even if Feduccia’s analysis of the particular Sinosauropteryx fossil mentioned in his paper was correct it would not somehow demolish all we’ve come to understand about dinosaurs and birds. There are plenty of problems to be solved, that is certain, but the general ancestor/descendant relationship is clear.

I would be remiss, however, if I did not mention the new Feduccia paper itself. While There are plenty of pictures and analysis, the bottom line is this; Feduccia doesn’t accept dinosaurs are bird ancestors and the structures on the Sinosauropteryx have some resemblance to collagen fibres, therefore they can’t be feathers. This, of course, is extended to other fossils like Dilong as well;

As in Sinosauropteryx, proposals that integumental structures preserved in Sinornithosaurus (Xu et al. 2001) and tyrannosauroids (Xu et al. 2004) are the remains of protofeathers/feathers do not withstand scientific scrutiny (Lingham-Soliar in Feduccia et al. 2005).

Of further interest is this somewhat paradoxical claim from the paper’s introduction;

Sinosauropteryx. Clearly, the results on whether or not they [the “integumentary structures” on the fossil] are protofeathers will impact on the vital question of feather origins, dinosaur physiology and bird flight (Feduccia et al. 2005 and references therein); on the other hand, we emphasize, the wider question of whether or not birds originate from dinosaurs does not concern the present study.

This is especially intriguing in light of what Feduccia was quoted as saying in the National Geographic article;

“The existence of protofeathers in these dinosaurs was considered critical evidence that birds were derived from dinosaurs,” said study co-author Alan Feduccia, a bird evolution expert at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

“What we have shown is that there’s absolutely no evidence whatsoever that protofeathers existed in dinosaurs, period.”

So the study has nothing to do with dinosaur->bird evolution, except that it (in Feduccia’s view) disproves dinosaur->bird evolution. These are rather bold claims stemming from a paper that looks at two fossils and says that the structures present can’t be feathers because of pre-existing preferences to alternate hypotheses involving the origin of birds. It should be noted, however, that paleontologists aren’t going to be fooled by the new paper because they have heard the argument before; those who want to adhere to a non-dinosaurian bird origin will likely tout it as startling new evidence, the majority of paleontologists will see it for what it is."
source​

In other words:

​

And just to note, Feduccia and his views are old news, something like 35 - 40 years old, which have since fallen by the wayside.

.
.

 

[Subduction Zone]

Yes, I remember.... Do you respect paleo ornithologist Dr. Alan Feduccia? Do you believe he’s genuinely honest in his outlook? (I do.) Do you agree w/ his stance on Dinosaurs Are Not Birds view? I doubt it.


You can accept and support some views of a person, and think highly of them, but that in no way means you accept everything they believe!

Actually you are even wrong about Fedduccia. And you also appear to be totally ignorant of why his beliefs are not well accepted anyway. Grasping at straws is a losing strategy.

 

[Subduction Zone]

No? Well then, could you link to it again, please?
Because most 19th-cent. Christians, were YEC’s and viewed the evidence through that POV.

There is no real difference between YEC's and OEC's that believe the floor myth, except that the latter's arguments are even more ad hoc, even though that hardly seems possible.

 

[TagliatelliMonster]

I don't get why the Noachian Flood is always linked to, and based on, Young Earth Creationism.

So when do you think this flood supposedly occured?
I wager that you'll pretty much put it into the same period as YECs do.

..I guess to give skeptics genuine grounds to dismiss it.

No. How old the earth is, is actually not that relevant to wheter or not it completely flooded a couple thousand years ago.

The biblical flood is dismissed because of the complete lack of evidence in support of it AND because of the many many pieces of evidence that downright contradict it.

But the Earth was actually millions if not billions of years old when the Flood occurred.

How do you think to know that?

You debaters constantly misrepresent my views! Can you honestly not remember?

The fact remains.
Christians kickstarted geology by setting out trying to find evidence that at some point the world was flooded as described in the bible. Wheter these christians were YECs or not, is not relevant to that. They were trying to prove the flood, not the age of the earth.

They failed and acknowledged that what they did learn, was that no such flood ever occured. Not just in the expected timeperiod, but never.

 

[TagliatelliMonster]

Yes, I remember.... Do you respect paleo ornithologist Dr. Alan Feduccia? Do you believe he’s genuinely honest in his outlook? (I do.) Do you agree w/ his stance on Dinosaurs Are Not Birds view? I doubt it.


You can accept and support some views of a person, and think highly of them, but that in no way means you accept everything they believe!

Who claims that dinosaurs are birds?

 

[ImmortalFlame]

Yes, I remember.... Do you respect paleo ornithologist Dr. Alan Feduccia? Do you believe he’s genuinely honest in his outlook? (I do.) Do you agree w/ his stance on Dinosaurs Are Not Birds view? I doubt it.


You can accept and support some views of a person, and think highly of them, but that in no way means you accept everything they believe!

So if Behe is "searching for honest answers", how did they come to the conclusion of common ancestry? Are they just mistaken?

 

[Subduction Zone]

Who claims that dinosaurs are birds?

He has it a bit backwards, as usual. Birds are dinosaurs. His claim is on the same order as saying "dogs are French poodles" rather than saying "French poodles are dogs". It would have been correct if he gave the qualifier of "today". In other words "Today all dinosaurs are birds".

Dinosaur - Wikipedia

Oh, and he had it wrong about the scientist he cited. He does not deny that birds are descended from dinosaurs. Feduccia denies that birds are descended from theropod dinosaurs.

 

[tas8831]

Yes, I remember.... Do you respect paleo ornithologist Dr. Alan Feduccia? Do you believe he’s genuinely honest in his outlook? (I do.) Do you agree w/ his stance on Dinosaurs Are Not Birds view? I doubt it.

Do you?

If so, why?

If not, why?

You can accept and support some views of a person, and think highly of them, but that in no way means you accept everything they believe!

Right - just the things that provide comfort to your non-mainstream views.

 

[Jose Fly]

Yes, I remember.... Do you respect paleo ornithologist Dr. Alan Feduccia? Do you believe he’s genuinely honest in his outlook? (I do.)

Yes, I do respect his work and believe he's genuine.

Do you agree w/ his stance on Dinosaurs Are Not Birds view? I doubt it.

Well, since his view is a relatively minor nuance (basically, he thinks birds and theropods share a common ancestry, rather than birds descending from theropods), I don't see it as a big deal either way.

You can accept and support some views of a person, and think highly of them, but that in no way means you accept everything they believe!

But what do think explains Behe's acknowledgement of universal common ancestry? With other scientists you attribute it to them being under the influence of Satan. So is Behe also under the same Satanic influence?

No? Well then, could you link to it again, please?

https://www.asa3.org/ASA/PSCF/1990/PSCF3-90Armstrong.html

 

[Hockeycowboy]

Right - just the things that provide comfort to your non-mainstream views.

"Comfort"?

Lol.

If you understood my views, you'd find many that aren't comfortable...but I accept them, because they fit the empirical data.

And quite a few just happen to tie-in remarkably well with an accurate interpretation of the Scriptures.

 

[tas8831]

"Comfort"?

Lol.

If you understood my views, you'd find many that aren't comfortable...but I accept them, because they fit the empirical data.

Empirical data?

And quite a few just happen to tie-in remarkably well with an accurate interpretation of the Scriptures.

Only when spun appropriately.

Like you linking to that Zimmer article.

 

[Hockeycowboy]

But what do think explains Behe's acknowledgement of universal common ancestry? With other scientists you attribute it to them being under the influence of Satan. So is Behe also under the same Satanic influence?

That's a good question!
You see, I feel everyone believes things that are inaccurate.... somewhere along the line.
That includes me.

That's why I believe it's so important to examine all the evidences together, taking it all into account. I can't help but see a unity , an interaction between these fields of science, that ultimately allows for the success of life on this planet. A balance that reveals a wisdom, an intelligence required for this integration.

So does Dr. Michio Kaku...although I support an Intelligence that is ultimately interested in human life.

 

[Subduction Zone]

That's a good question!
You see, I feel everyone believes things that are inaccurate.... somewhere along the line.
That includes me.

That's why I believe it's so important to examine all the evidences together, taking it all into account. I can't help but see a unity , an interaction between these fields of science, that ultimately allows for the success of life on this planet. A balance that reveals a wisdom, an intelligence required for this integration.

So does Dr. Michio Kaku...although I support an Intelligence that is ultimately interested in human life.

Yes, we all have inaccurate beliefs. But some of us won't let go of beliefs that were shown to be wrong over 200 years ago. I do not think that would be very wise.

 

[Jose Fly]

That's a good question!
You see, I feel everyone believes things that are inaccurate.... somewhere along the line.
That includes me.

That's why I believe it's so important to examine all the evidences together, taking it all into account. I can't help but see a unity , an interaction between these fields of science, that ultimately allows for the success of life on this planet. A balance that reveals a wisdom, an intelligence required for this integration.

So does Dr. Michio Kaku...although I support an Intelligence that is ultimately interested in human life.

That's all well and good, but it doesn't really get at my point.

My understanding is that your explanation for the general agreement among the world's life scientists about universal common ancestry is that they have been influenced by Satan. But Michael Behe is, at least in terms of UCA itself even though he disagrees with the causes, part of that consensus.

So my question is.....do you believe Behe is also under the influence of Satan?

 

[Hockeycowboy]

That's all well and good, but it doesn't really get at my point.

My understanding is that your explanation for the general agreement among the world's life scientists about universal common ancestry is that they have been influenced by Satan. But Michael Behe is, at least in terms of UCA itself even though he disagrees with the causes, part of that consensus.

So my question is.....do you believe Behe is also under the influence of Satan?

Yes, I did....

You see, I feel everyone believes things that are inaccurate.... somewhere along the line.
That includes me.

Some are more influenced than others.

Especially through religion....one prime example, is thinking that by killing others, you can gain God's approval & get "72 virgins."

That's just sick!

Or that God "burns people in hell," another horrendous belief that alienates many from even wanting to learn about the Bible and it's Author, Jehovah.

This world is heavily influenced by "misleading" beliefs!
As foretold. Revelation 12 9