From January 6 2013
Which of these two statements has a higher information content?
1. Over the course of time, some of our remote ancestors evolved legs from fins; and later they evolved more sophisticated brains.
2. Over the course of time, some of our remote ancestors abracadabra’ed legs from fins; and later they presto’ed more sophisticated brains.
If you answered “Number One,” please think again. Both statements have exactly the same information content: Zilch.
Yesterday Patty and I enjoyed watching Walking With Monsters, which forms a trilogy with Walking With Dinosaurs and Walking With Beasts. The computer-generated creatures, which don’t look computer-generated at all, are a fantasy-writer’s dream come true. (When you read the climax of The Thunder King, you’ll see how these feats of the imagination have inspired some of my own.) Yes, they look real. They’re a treat to watch.
But the narrative text of these videos, alas, is Darwinist fairy-tales from beginning to end. We are asked to believe, for instance, that amphibians “evolved” hard-shelled eggs and scaly skins to free them from dependence on a water habitat. Who would’ve ever believed amphibians were smart enough to do that? Without even the benefit of a drawing-board! But of course the fairy-tale is that these important changes “just happened” by chance over millions of years. We can’t observe them for ourselves, we can’t in any way test the hypothesis, we can’t explain why horseshoe crabs are still horseshoe crabs after all these countless eons–but if you don’t believe the fairy-tale, somehow that makes you a narrow-minded nebbish. How dare you ask for evidence? Why, look at the fossils!
All right, I’m looking. In fact, I’ve been looking at the fossils all my life. And what they tell me is that at various times in the past, there were animals present on the earth who aren’t around today, and that some of them were mind-bogglingly different from any animals that live today.
The fossils don’t tell me that fins turned into legs. Dogmatic Darwinists tell me that. They can’t tell me why everybody’s fins didn’t “evolve” into legs, or why so many amphibians obstinately persist in laying squishy eggs without shells. But they can tell me “You’re fired!” if I’m a high school or college biology teacher who asks impertinent questions.
A “science” that disallows questions is no science at all. My fantasies are clearly labeled as such. I wish the Darwinists would do the same.
You are asking too much, Lee. To expect Darwinists to adhere to a little
honesty? Forget it.
At least I didn’t ask them for a lot of honesty.
As always, I love your mind, Lee. I am a retired science teacher who used to indoctrinate my students in evolutionary “theory” back in the 1970’s. Later, staying at home with my kids, I had the time to search other books for answers to troubling questions that science could not explain.
Come to find out from Stephen Hawking’s work, the scientific method is really one of DISPROOF. What you have alluded to regarding testing evolution actually “proves” your viewpoint: It does not happen now, therefore, it never happened. THAT is a principle of the natural sciences.
A valid theory makes predictions. Evolutionary theory predicts that living species will continue evolving. THEY DON’T. Instead, they DEvolve: genetic information is lost, species go extinct, and “genetic load” keeps on increasing in a species. Last I saw, mankind has over 3000 genetic defects causing disease.
Come to find out also, that Moses knew and wrote about Pangaea thousands of years before the geologists did! Hmmm…
And so on, and so on, and so on.
Press on, Star Trooper! Keep up your great work.
Wish to edit “therefore it never happened.” Should have written, “therefore it is not a reliable explanation of what has happened in the past.” Now, of course, there are necessary exclusions to this principle, such as, the origin of space, stars, energy, matter, life. What we can show scientifically is how these things did NOT originate: Not by any known natural cause.
I appreciate your encouragement. I believed in the evolution fairy-tale for most of my life. After all, no one ever questioned it. As soon as one starts asking question, the whole story falls apart.
Go get ’em, Lee!
Fairy tale is the right word for it.
I’ve watched some of these CGI nature shows and am frequently struck by the elaborate stories they tell. A few fossilized bones become an elaborate narrative told in great detail, but in the end, it’s just a made-up story.
Darwin hoped that the fossil record would yield new finds of transitional species, but that has never happened. They wish for proof, but that’s all it is, an empty wish, because there is nothing out there which collaborates their fairy tale.
I’ve always believed in a Creator, but must admit to having been taken in by some of the evolutionary narrative at one time. If you accept the evolutionary narrative and try to plug it in as a tool used by the Creator, you will end up with a divided notion of the Creator. Inserting all of the evolutionary claptrap into the Creation account weakens our sense of His power and binds Him to the laws of nature, as defined by atheistic scientists. In my case, it was probably more a matter of stellar/planetary evolution and not so much biological evolution, but the effect was still profound, a weakened faith.
I don’t claim to have all the answers and the Bible never claims to be a science textbook. It explains why the physical realm exists, but doesn’t go into detail about how creation was accomplished.
Psalm 33:
8 Let all the earth fear the Lord;
let all the inhabitants of the world stand in awe of him!
9 For he spoke, and it came to be;
he commanded, and it stood firm.
How this works is beyond me, but obviously, God’s will made all of this and I don’t need to quibble about the details.
I’m definitely no scientist, but I do have common sense and the God-given ability to think and reason. It seems to me the intricacies involved in running and maintaining humans, along with all of creation, is proof enough of a Creator, and could not possibly have happened by accident which is what their ‘theory’ depends upon.
Even when I still believed in evolution (having been properly brainwashed in school), I could never understand why all the unevolved species survived in their unevolved state, especially if the evolved characteristics were necessary for survival. (Chesterton used to point out that “survival of the fittest” simply meant “survival of the survivors.”)
And I still have those moments when I wonder why no one ever seems to ask “how do you know that?” when they’re shown a fully detailed picture of some extinct animal, or told reams of information about its hunting and breeding habits, all derived from two teeth and a femur. I still remember goggling over the beginning of “Jurassic Park,” when the hero was telling the small boy about how the velociraptors used to hunt in packs, surround their prey, and so on. Afterward, I asked the friend I was with (also former military), “How did he know that? Did some Raptor von Clausewitz leave behind a book on strategy?”
The main evidence for this, what little there is, comes from a fossil of an herbivorous dinosaur apparently killed by raptors, because detached raptor teeth were found with it–sort of a fossilized crime scene. Because the prey was so much bigger than the predator, it is theorized that it would have had to require several raptors to do the deed. It’s not an unreasonable finding, but of course it could be wrong.
The rest is entirely conjecture, based on the physical remains of raptors.
Indeed, von Raptorwitz left his book, printed on an Epson 9 pin printer. That’s all they had in the Jurassic era. 🙂
I watched and enjoyed that movie, but I took it about as seriously as I would a Godzilla flick. In fact, it reduces to exactly that, a Godzilla flick with a fanciful, high-tech backstory.
The velociraptors in the movie were depicted as moving in packs, almost like a flock of ground-bound birds. But that was (and still may be) the fashionable theory. In a sense, that was the start, CGI creatures can be made to behave in any manner and suddenly, theoretical behavior is being played out before your eyes. Which is just fine, as long as everyone remembers that it isn’t a depiction of reality.
“Politics is war carried out by other means” –von Raptorwitz
So you’ve read the book? 🙂
He retrieved the manuscript on 5.25″ floppies, which were all they had in the Jurassic era, along with those 9-pin printers. 🙂
🙂
We had it in ROTC (Raptor Officers’ Training Corps).
The answer may have been right in front of us all the while: Could this be an example of evolution? lol –
https://fellowshipoftheminds.com/2017/07/26/man-who-underwent-gender-reassignment-surgery-to-foil-detectives-sentenced-to-life-for-three-spokane-area-slayings/
That is amazing.
Maybe ancient amphibians underwent species reassignment surgery to become reptiles.
You might be onto something. 🙂
In line with Phoebe’s earlier comments if species evolved to enhance their chances for survival, why do these older species still exist? A friend, who practices no organized religion, probably said it best; if we evolved from Monkeys, why do monkeys still exist? But they do still exist. During the lockdown, a coworker in India had a portable antenna outside the place he was staying for his Internet connection, but when humans weren’t going outside, the monkeys quickly took over, including “monkeying” with his Internet antenna.
God made all of his life with amazing adaptability. I have seen videos of a Leopard and a Cheetah, both of whom live in cold Russian climates, and seem to be doing fine. Besides our DNA, there is something known as epigenetics which can basically switch certain genes on or off, very rapidly. It doesn’t take numerous generations for this to happen. But this is variety within a species, and not the development of a new species.
Humans have bred animals to enhance various traits, and this can be quite profound and successful, but the developed strains are still inter-fertile with other strains. Actually, inter-fertility reaches up to roughly the “Family” level of taxonomy, which scientists whom believe in the God of the Bible believe corresponds to the “kinds” or “baramins” of scriptures.
So there is amazing variety in the animal world, and there is a degree of relationship between members of the same family. Felidae describes pretty much everything we would think of as a cat, Housecat, to Tiger. The subfamily Felinae are the Lesser Cats, everything from Cougars down to housecats, and a number of smaller wild cat species, such as Caracals, Ocelots, Lynx, etc. and the Cheetah is part of this group.
The genus Panthera are the big cats, Tigers, Lions, Leopards, Jaguars and Snow Leopards. Interestingly, the Puma Concolor, which we call Mountain Lions, Panthers and Cougars, Catamounts, etc. is not of the genus Panthera, so it is neither a Panther or a Lion of any sort, but the can actually be larger than some of the Greater Cats, Pantheras.
The point here is that families of animals can have exceptional variety, but still be variations of a single genetic family. In many cases, the species within these families are interfertile and can produce viable offspring, such as Ligers, Tigons, etc. It does not require evolution to explain it all.
Yes, evolution is not required.
The one thing evolution cannot explain is the information required in order for a new organ, or new feature to come into being. If there was a primitive creature with no olfactory sense was going to evolve into a creature that had the advantage of being able to detect scent, this would require cells that could detect scent, and a neural path from these sensors to the brain, and the brain would have to have an area to receive and process these signals. Just writing that last sentence required planning and information, and for that to happen in a living creature, a LOT more information and organization would be required.
Anyone who has ever managed any sort of project can tell you that it requires constant attention. Projects seem to want to spiral into disorder, and it becomes like herding recalcitrant animals. Even on the simplest projects, I’ve never seen things improve on their own. Sometimes an idea will come along that improves, or simplifies a project, but an idea is information. Evolution, mutations and natural selection do not add information.
You always must stay on top of a project to keep it from going “pear shaped” as the English say.
It’s almost as if the project itself is trying to escapes its restraints.
Yes it does.