Evolution Misconceptions...., page 1

Originally posted by sntx
It is true that many people on both sides of the argument have many misconceptions about evolution. Ignorance abounds when people do not take the time to fully understand the concepts involved and their implications.

Here is a link to Answersingenesis.org's response to the Scientific American article

AIG response to point clarification of misconception 1
A dinosaur turning into a bird 150 Ma (million years ago) is neither observable in real time, directly or indirectly, nor repeatable.

This is meaningless, since species are observed to evolve in the wild and in the lab.

2 [tautological]
Why should we argue this, since tautology is quite common in science

Not onyl that, but just because something is tautological hardly means its incorrect. Fitness is as fitness does, no? And yet, some would argue that fitness does exist. That which survives, ipso facto, is more fit, that which produces more offspring is, by definition, more fit. Similarly, a fast car is one which travels with high speed. This is tautological, redundant. But true.

3. Evolution is unscientific, because it is not testable or falsifiable. It makes claims about events that were not observed and can never be re-created
It’s evolutionary propagandists who generally conflate them (see this discussed in What is evolution?). Many define evolution as ‘change in gene frequency with time’ or ‘descent with modification’, or other such ‘microevolution’ words, and then go on to useDarwin’s finches and industrial melanism in the peppered moths (faked photos and all) as clinching proof of ‘evolution’ in the ‘macro’ sense and disproof of creationism!

To start, when people look to darwin's finches, they aren't concerned generally with disproving creationism. Nothing can disprove creationism, it states its correct, and that is sufficient for it. There is no known mechanism or reason to think that the trends in population biology that are observed in things like darwin's finches, which, to epitomize, are small populations that adapt to their enviroment and have morphology that is not present in the parental population, for some reason don't apply to larger populations.

4. Increasingly, scientists doubt the truth of evolution
creationists are hardly likely to want to blow their cover and risk the discriminationepitomized by Scientific American

An appeal to a conspiracy is not a particularly good arguement, and, more importantly, if the research is being done, has been done, but is not being submited, well, why the heck doesn't AIG try to do some serious research on the subject. And how can AIG criticise SI? AIG requires members to make a profession of faith and beleif and won't allow them to work on anything contrary to their faith.

5. The disagreements among even evolutionary biologists show how little solid science supports evolution.
For example, with the origin of birds, there are two main theories: that birds evolved ‘ground up’ from running dinosaurs (the cursorial theory), and that they evolved ‘trees-down’ from small reptiles (the arboreal theory

No resolution on that particular evolutionary path is going to result in the abandonment of evolutionary theory. The only people actually researching the topic are evolutionists. IOW, there is controversy about the origin of birds from either dinosaurs or slightly more primitive archosaurs. This is not an arguement against evolution itself, and certainly no arguement in favour of creationism.

misconception 8
But the raw material on which natural selection acts is random copying errors (mutations). If evolution from goo to you were true, we should expect to find countless information-adding mutations. But we have not even found one

AIG apparently uses a useless defintion of 'information', so the point is moot.

misconception 9
The proverbial bull in a china shop produces disorder, but if the same bull was harnessed to a generator, this energy could be directed into useful work

Order does not require useful work being done. The whole logic of Natural Selection is that order can come out of this, the logic upon which darwin based Natural Selection is strong and sound and this specious arguement about breaking dishes is irrelevant to it.

misconception 10
The issue is not new traits, but new genetic information. In no known case is antibiotic resistance the result of new information

This is why the AIG usage of information isn't helpful. Does anyone here actually think that anti-biotic resistance is not an adaptation because of 'loss of genetic information'?

misconception 11

Actually they don't address this at all, at least not in any sensible way. They seem to be saying that speciation resulted in the different races of man, which is unusual, becuase I know Ken Ham is associated with AIG, and he tends to promote Creationism as anti-racist.

misconception 12
But creationists following the Biblical Creation-Fall-Flood-Migration model would expect such rapid non-evolutive speciation

Indeed, and then this magically super rapid proliferation of species 'within kinds' just as magically stops for us poor moderns.

13. Evolutionists cannot point to any transitional fossils—creatures that are half reptile and half bird, for instance.

They respond to this with typcially dishonest misquotes of Gould and ludicrously present charles darwin as supportive of there being no transitionals, and then go on to disucss archaeopteryx, which wasn't even discovered until after publication of Origin. The simple fact is that there are fossil organisms that cross the so-called 'kind barrier'. Archaeopteryx, with its reptilian and avian features, is the sin qua non of this.

just look at their handling of it here

One of the most famous fossils of all time is Archaeopteryx, which combines feathers and skeletal structures peculiar to birds with features of dinosaurs.

This hardly qualifies for a fossil ‘intermediate in form’;

If having transitional characters that are not contained in teh kinds today doesn't make a specimin 'transitional', then by definition nothing can be transitional.

14 [the eye]
If the evolutionary history of eyes has been tracked though comparative genetics how is it that eyes have supposedly evolved independently? Actually, evolutionists recognize that eyes must have arisen independently at least 30 times because there is no evolutionary pattern to explain the origin of eyes from a common ancestor.

Another flubbering non answer. The whole 'the eye is too complex' arguement is founded on the idea that there are no less complex eyes that are functional. its entirely untrue. And moreso than that, the history of the development of some of the different types of eyes that are out there in the world has been studied and at least in part figured out. This was done with evolutionary theory, not 'god did it'ism.

15[irreducible complexity]
Actually, what Behe says he means by irreducible complexity is that the flagellum could not work without about 40 protein components all organized in the right way.

Indeed, no machine can work when smashed to peices, just like no crystal is a crystal when dissolved in acid. This is not proof of design, or at least not proof of an 'intelligent designer'. Basically what is had here is that there isn't a step by step forumula thats been discovered for phylogenetic assembly of the bacterial flagellum. This is hardly a foundation that can support the weight of an all powerful omnipotent supernatural creator.