Evolution. Steven J Explains Blood Clotting

[debrand]

Okay, I've posted three threads about Ray Comfort. This will be the last one but Steven J's response to Ray made the geek in me so happy that I had to share.

I am putting Steven's answer in the next post so that this doesn't get to long.

RAY:

Platelets†play an important role in preventing the loss of blood by beginning a chain reaction that results in blood clotting. As blood begins to flow from a cut or scratch, platelets respond to help the blood clot and to stop the bleeding after a short time.

Platelets promote the clotting process by clumping together and forming a plug at the site of a wound and then releasing proteins called “clotting factors.†These proteins start a series of chemical reactions that are extremely complicated. Every step of the clotting must go smoothly if a clot is to form. If one of the clotting factors is missing or defective, the clotting process does not work. A serious genetic disorder known as “hemophilia†results from a defect in one of the clotting factor genes. Because they lack one of the clotting factors, hemophilia sufferers may bleed uncontrollably from even small cuts or scrapes.

To form a blood clot there must be twelve specific individual chemical reactions in our blood. If evolution is true, and if this 12-step process didn’t happen in the first generation (i.e., if any one of these specific reactions failed to operate in their exact reaction and order), no creatures would have survived. They all would have bled to death!

Edited: Because I can't come up with good thread titles

[debrand]

Do you gusy think that it woud be good to have a thread where we list all the arguments against evolution that we've ever heard or that have stumped us and the scientist in the free jinger community answer? It worries me that so many people accept biblical creationism as literal.

STEVENJ:

Ray, let's go over some basic elements of common descent with modification:

Many species are descended from a smaller number of earlier species.

New features arise as modifications of old features (as I recall, some blood-clotting enzymes are modifications of digestive enzymes -- indeed, the circulatory system is built by genes that are modified copies of genes that build the digestive tract: (if you already have a tube-building mechanism in place, it exists to be used for a second function)..

Evolutionary novelties, therefore, arise as improvements in organisms that are already functional without them. Over time, though, a population can evolve to become dependent on such a modification, so that what ancestors could benefit from but do without becomes absolutely essential to life (i.e. you have both gain of one ability and loss of another going hand in hand).

To the extent that they are not modified, old features are inherited unchanged by later species (i.e. there was no "first female dog;" division into male and female was inherited by all vertebrates (except those where it was secondarily lost) from the first vertebrates. We inherited blood from extremely primitive proto-fish.

The function of features (from the function of blood to the function to specific enzymes and other compounds in blood) can be and often are modified over time.

We, with our high blood pressure and multi-step clotting mechanisms, are descended from ancestors with much lower blood pressure (to whom the ability to form blot clots quickly was of much lesser importance). Ultimately, we're descended from invertebrate chordates and pre-chordates that had circulating fluids but not blood as vertebrates have it today. The "first generation" wouldn't need the entire system in place

[Sola]

StevenJ is pretty awesome at debunking whatever Comfort says.

[VodouDoll]

Steven J had the best comeback to Ray's "It's impossible that nothing created everything," blather.

Who created the painting Guernica? It was Pablo Picasso. Who created the Mona Lisa? That was Leonardo da Vinci. Who created both paintings? There was no such person. One could adduce examples to the point of tedium, but you get the picture: there are numerous causes, and some of them are even reasonably called "creators," but there is no single cause of all of them. Many things created something, but nothing created everything.

I love Steven J.

[Bookworm]

Do you guys think that it woud be good to have a thread where we list all the arguments against evolution that we've ever heard or that have stumped us and the scientist in the free jinger community answer?

It would be easier to just point them to talkorigins. I will say though that as a Creationist I had been to talkorigins and found it uncomfortable, but it was not what convinced me to look at evolution seriously - it was discovering that evolution can account very well for the development of morality. Most Creationists believe that evolution logically leads to nihilism, because then there is no God, and then there is no meaning to life, and then THE HORROR OF IT ALL. Basically, you have to address the fear first and then give the proofs.

Oh, and I totally adore Steven J. also!

[debrand]

It would be easier to just point them to talkorigins. I will say though that as a Creationist I had been to talkorigins and found it uncomfortable, but it was not what convinced me to look at evolution seriously - it was discovering that evolution can account very well for the development of morality. Most Creationists believe that evolution logically leads to nihilism, because then there is no God, and then there is no meaning to life, and then THE HORROR OF IT ALL. Basically, you have to address the fear first and then give the proofs.

Oh, and I totally adore Steven J. also!

I was a strange fundie because I never took Genesis as literal so forgive the stupidity of this question. Why would the theory evolution need to explain the origins of morality? I don't see how evolution leads to nihilism any more than any other scientific theory.

[Bookworm]

I was a strange fundie because I never took Genesis as literal so forgive the stupidity of this question. Why would the theory evolution need to explain the origins of morality? I don't see how evolution leads to nihilism any more than any other scientific theory.

I was raised on Ken Ham stuff. :angry-banghead: The way I learned it, God was the source not just of existence but meaning. And, if evolution was true then God was not, according to Ken Ham stuff - I can explain the reasoning more if you want.

If we had only these short lives on Earth, and nothing good would ever last forever, then one who faced reality would look at the vastness of the cosmos and how insignificant their life was, etc. etc., and sit around in a stupor of depression or casually off themselves - that is, if they did not just decide to go around being criminal because the universe does not care. I knew there were many good people who did not believe in God, but I thought that was because they were unconsciously living according to some parts of the character of God. I also thought that animals acting morally was something God gave them.

I honestly thought most people just never faced the reality of what their belief system meant and that if I ever became convinced of evolution I would fall into existential crisis and have to live by a hollow, empty set of ethics because I just liked them. Finding out the ways that morality could have and did evolve was incredibly freeing.

I cannot emphasize enough that what I said above is what MOST Creationists I know of believe. It is a very powerful belief and thus the fear related to morals and meaning have to be addressed or you are simply talking to a rock wall.