Evolution Misconceptions....

It has come to my recent attention that there have been many misconceptions about evolution. Not only here at ATS, but in everyday conversation.

I did some researching and managed to find an interesting article published in Scientific America.

I want to know what everyone thinks on this matter.

Click Here for the full aritcle, but basically in a nutshell this is what it states as nonsense:

1. Evolution is only a theory. It is not a fact or a scientific law.

2. Natural selection is based on circular reasoning: the fittest are those who survive, and those who survive are deemed fittest.

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.

4. Increasingly, scientists doubt the truth of evolution.

5. The disagreements among even evolutionary biologists show how little solid science supports evolution.

6. If humans descended from monkeys, why are there still monkeys?

7. Evolution cannot explain how life first appeared on earth.

8. Mathematically, it is inconceivable that anything as complex as a protein, let alone a living cell or a human, could spring up by chance.

9. The Second Law of Thermodynamics says that systems must become more disordered over time. Living cells therefore could not have evolved from inanimate chemicals, and multicellular life could not have evolved
from protozoa.

10. Mutations are essential to evolution theory, but mutations can only eliminate traits. They cannot produce new features.

11. Natural selection might explain microevolution, but it cannot explain the origin of new species and higher orders of life.

12. Nobody has ever seen a new species evolve.

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

14. Living things have fantastically intricate features—at the anatomical, cellular and molecular levels—that could not function if they were any less complex or sophisticated. The only prudent conclusion is that they are the products of intelligent design, not evolution.

15. Recent discoveries prove that even at the microscopic level, life has a quality of complexity that could not have come about through evolution.

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: www.answersingenesis.org...

The same things can be said about Creationism. No one saw the Universe created. Why is it that the Universe can not be created without God, but God could be created without God?

You are rite Ludachris.

Those Christians spread a lot of misconceptions about evolution. Like your article points out, they say that mutation doesn't make better traits, when everyboddy knows about the moths that got darker as England got covered in coal dust during the industreal revolution.

One of their methods to succeed is to paint evolution as something it is not in the hopes of confusing people.

Evolution is as certain as any fact we have. It is the best explanation of why the body is put together like it is. Things like the appendix that don't really work any more but did in our descendents.

ok...

lets put this thread to death right now...

you (anyone) cannot prove or diss-prove God or His teachings in any way...

stop trying and just have this thing called "faith"...

it is hard and some people call it ignorance but it can help you...

Originally posted by they see ALL
ok...

lets put this thread to death right now...

you (anyone) cannot prove or diss-prove God or His teachings in any way...

stop trying and just have this thing called "faith"...

it is hard and some people call it ignorance but it can help you...

Hold on a sec.....unless ur being sarcastic, i totally disagree with wat you have to say.

First off, who are u to tell me what "I" need to help myself. And second of all you clearly didnt understand what i was trying to say in the thread. I am not trying to convince anyone to beleive in evolution or try to turn someone off of their religion. I was simply trying to get across that many people have misconceptions about evolution. I just wanted people to finally understand, or at least come closer to understanding what evolution is. Denying ignorance: isnt that why we are here??...

Whether people want to beleive what i have posted above is now a personal choice. I was merely trying to critically analyze the common conceptions(misconceptions rather) of evolution, nothing else.

Originally posted by LuDaCrIs

Hold on a sec.....unless ur being sarcastic, i totally disagree with wat you have to say.

First off, who are u to tell me what "I" need to help myself. And second of all you clearly didnt understand what i was trying to say in the thread. I am not trying to convince anyone to beleive in evolution or try to turn someone off of their religion. I was simply trying to get across that many people have misconceptions about evolution. I just wanted people to finally understand, or at least come closer to understanding what evolution is. Denying ignorance: isnt that why we are here??...

Whether people want to beleive what i have posted above is now a personal choice. I was merely trying to critically analyze the common conceptions(misconceptions rather) of evolution, nothing else.

no, it was not sarcasim...

i am a christian telling you to have faith...

my first post was for wiggy and every other person because this thread IS going to get "religious" and people are going to say: "but the Bible says this and that and etc..." and this thread is GOING to get killed because it is GOING to get out of hand because of the strong Bible believers and the strong anti-Bible people...

i just wanted to kill this thread before OTHERS and spare the new ATS server

if this did not answer your questions just type...

6. If humans descended from monkeys, why are there still monkeys?

Why are cockroaches still around, single celled organisms....just because something evolved from something does not mean the base from which it evolved is not still in existance

Evolution has a lot of problems, some of your points I agree wholeheartedly with but I think the second law of thermodynamics argument has always been flawed since the sun's energy is always pouring upon the earth, so order on the Earth can always be more than offset by growing disorder in the sun. Good post!

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.

Originally posted by they see ALL
ok...

lets put this thread to death right now...

you (anyone) cannot prove or diss-prove God or His teachings in any way...

stop trying and just have this thing called "faith"...

it is hard and some people call it ignorance but it can help you...

And you cannot disprove Muhammed.
You cannot disprove Jupiter
You cannot disprove Osiris.

In fact, you cannot disprove anything, save to offer up the words within your Bible which you cannot even prove are correct.

So allow me to help you. The computer would not have been created if those who did not believe in the concept ruled, those like you. Nor would the nuclear bomb, nor would the telephone, nor would aircraft, nor would breaking the sound barrier, nor would flight to the moon, nor would the correct alignment of the solar system's planets and their circumnavigation of the sun, nor the charting of the oblate spheroid upon which you live be but indisputable facts today.

Voices such as Copernicus, Galileo, Bruno, Einstein, Mme Curie, Bell, Banting, Wrights brothers, Bohr, Hahn, Meitner and Oppenheimer would be reverberating off of their prison walls for want of being heard because those like you would have suppressed and imprisioned their minds.

Well, come to think of it, maybe Bohr, Oppenheimer and Einstein should have been subject to the rack for the cruelty they invented. I'll even toss in Paul the pagan, and his fellow devil possessed pontiff, Paul no 6. And What say you?

Originally posted by LuDaCrIs
6. If humans descended from monkeys, why are there still monkeys?

This statement truly shows the ignorance of the whole article.. who ever wrote it obviously does not fully understand the concept of evolution.
Evolution does not suggest we evolved from monkeys.. but rather that we share a common ancestor. How many times does this have to be said?! Also.. their DNA is proof that we share a common lineage. I have yet to hear an adequate explanation for this other than 'must be co-incidence'.

10. Mutations are essential to evolution theory, but mutations can only eliminate traits. They cannot produce new features.

Some people are born with extra fingers.. sometimes tails. I'm sure there are many examples in the animal kindom.. like when some flies grow and extra set of wings.

14. Living things have fantastically intricate features—at the anatomical, cellular and molecular levels—that could not function if they were any less complex or sophisticated. The only prudent conclusion is that they are the products of intelligent design, not evolution.

That would be a creationalist's 'idealic' conclusion.. not a prudent [and unbiased] scientific one.

I really sorry for confusing everyone with what i said in my first post. I wasnt clear enough, and i understand how people have taken my thread the wrong way.

THose 15 points i listed were arguements made by creationists to challenge the evolutionary theory. I was trying to say that these 15 points are complete nonsense and that creationists use these in everyday life and on ATS to try and discourage evolution.

Please read the full article to understand further....

Originally posted by LuDaCrIs
I really sorry for confusing everyone with what i said in my first post. I wasnt clear enough, and i understand how people have taken my thread the wrong way.

Gottya.. my PC wouldn't load it properly before [still won't] and I got the impression it was creationalist propoganda. It must be frustrationg for scientists to continually have the religion gag put on them all the time.. wake me up when the middle ages are over.

Originally posted by tovenar
Those Christians spread a lot of misconceptions about evolution. Like your article points out, they say that mutation doesn't make better traits, when everyboddy knows about the moths that got darker as England got covered in coal dust during the industreal revolution.

That wasn't mutation. That was natural selection. The moths came in two shades, lighter and darker. At the time, the darker moths survived and were able to mate because birds couldn't see them on the trees whereas the lighter moths stood out like a sore thumb. Therefore the lighter genes didn't get passed along. Later, when the trees got lighter, the exact opposite happened. There was no mutation involved, this was survival of the fittest and passing those genes onto their offspring.

Originally posted by junglejake
That wasn't mutation. That was natural selection. The moths came in two shades, lighter and darker. At the time, the darker moths survived and were able to mate because birds couldn't see them on the trees whereas the lighter moths stood out like a sore thumb. Therefore the lighter genes didn't get passed along. Later, when the trees got lighter, the exact opposite happened. There was no mutation involved, this was survival of the fittest and passing those genes onto their offspring.

I agree and disagree, some moths have very bright patterns that simulate 'eyes' on thier wings that would scare off birds. So now that we have shade pigment ruled out, the point still stands valid.

I have a question about human evolution. The 1st post mentioned asking why there are still monkeys along with humans. My question is why there is no other species close to humans, that is existing alongside us?

Originally posted by babloyi
I have a question about human evolution. The 1st post mentioned asking why there are still monkeys along with humans. My question is why there is no other species close to humans, that is existing alongside us?

Please read the thread thouroghly.

And to answer your question, I think apes, chimps, monkeys are a very close species living alongside us. No?.....

Originally posted by Linux
I agree and disagree, some moths have very bright patterns that simulate 'eyes' on thier wings that would scare off birds. So now that we have shade pigment ruled out, the point still stands valid.

I was actually refering to that specific example. So far as I'm aware, evolution has never been observed to the point where a moth species with no eye spots on it's wings developed them. How, after all, would that evolve? The wings aren't smart and DNA doesn't have a brain. What would cause a Spiney Oakworm Moth to develop a wing pattern similar to a Cecropia silkmoth? That's something that I find difficult to wrap my brain around. How did mutation and evolution manage to put eye spots on the wings of moths where they would serve no purpose while they developed until they were complete. Unless there was one moth with no eyespots who gave birth to a moth with fully developed eye spots. Evolution is a slow process...

Say, babloyi raises an interesting point. We have fossils from several stages of human development far beyond that of a chimp. Why, then, are chimps still around but none of our closer anscestors are?