Debunking Creationism

[uber frau]

No one's posted the "evolution's just a theory" chestnut yet :roll:

[icecreamycakeycake]

This was my husbands answer to a bunch of snarky creationists asking...

What came first, the chicken or the egg?

"First came the pool of primordial soup that spawned the simple cell-based life that mutated into distinct creatures that spread across the nutrient-rich earth and evolved (over millions of years) into the small flightless winged dinosaur that laid the first egg whose genetic mutations resulted in the bird that has evolved into what we know as the chicken."

[Austin]

An excellent book written by a layman for laymen/laywomen is Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything. I adore Bryson and recommend everything he's ever written, but this diverges from usual travel/humor stuff:

Per Wikipedia:

Bill Bryson wrote this book because he was dissatisfied with his scientific knowledge — that was, not much at all. He writes that science was a distant, unexplained subject at school. Textbooks and teachers alike did not ignite the passion for knowledge in him, mainly because they never delved in the whys, hows, and whens.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Short_Hi ... Everything

This thread is making me want to re-read it.

[Boogalou]

No one's posted the "evolution's just a theory" chestnut yet :roll:

EVILUTION'S :::: JUST :::: A THEORY!!!!!!! IRREDUCIBLE COMPLEXITY :::::::: EYES!1!!!!1!!!!eleventy!1

Fixed it!

[Kitty]

Maybe it's because my exposure to Creationism never went beyond Genesis and "dinosaur fossils were planted by Satan to FOOL PEEOPLE!!!11" but what exactly is irreducible complexity?

[Austin]

Maybe it's because my exposure to Creationism never went beyond Genesis and "dinosaur fossils were planted by Satan to FOOL PEEOPLE!!!11" but what exactly is irreducible complexity?

Those things, and the "great flood", pretty much.

[Boogalou]

Maybe it's because my exposure to Creationism never went beyond Genesis and "dinosaur fossils were planted by Satan to FOOL PEEOPLE!!!11" but what exactly is irreducible complexity?

It's like the original post about blood clotting and how if one of the mechanisms were not present blood wouldn't clot and we would all die. The idea is that everything has been made perfectly and if you take any element away we will all break down. So, nothing can be any less complex than it is or it would not function, hence irreducible complexity. Does this make sense (or as much sense as creationist/ID BS can make)?

[trebello]

Irreducible complexity is a term used by creationists (usually cloaked as Intelligent Designers) that says, more or less, that any biological system that has two or more parts that rely on each other in order to work can't have happened by evolution (or chance, or whatever term they are into that day), because all the parts *must* be exactly as they are today!!!1111!!!!. Or they won't work!!!1111!!! HEMOPHILIA!!!! They like to bring up mammalian eyes, blood clotting, and watches in these discussions.

Unfortunately for them, it is a whole load of biological waste secreted from the anus of a bovine. Even a cursory search exposes all of these so-called "irreducible complexities" as easily reducible. If anyone would like me (or the more qualified evolutionary biologists on this forum) to reduce a particular one, let me know. I'm a big fan of the whole complement system in blood, and the eye thing is even easier to debunk.

[emmiedahl]

Most of the irreducible complexities can be reduced, and we see them reduced in other organisms. When you look at complex organisms in their context (as the most complex of a varyingly complex group), there is a progression of less to more complex, and in these we can see a progression in things such as eyes. It would take me too long to go into the individual and unique situation of mammalian eyes, and my specialty is more in molecular biology (my major and my passion) but the answer is available in many places, and perhaps someone here can explain it in more understandable terms.

A good thing to remember about science is that even if you cannot understand it, even if no one currently on the globe can, it still probably has an explanation. People attribute anything that they cannot explain to God. We do it with life origins now; we did it with organic molecules about a century ago, and we did it even with weather one thousand years ago. When we look back at earlier cultures, we snicker that they did thought urea was made especially by God because it was in the human body, while we now know that it is a simple mix of chemicals. History is on the side of the scientist, not the creationist. And you don't have to choose between an all-knowing God and evolution. Many of us in the science community believe that a God who created evolution, with all its complexities and brilliance, is far preferable to one who simply made rabbits and lizards.

edited riffle

[thoughtful]

Also because it is often thought to be the case: "You can't believe in God creating the world and evolution at the same time. They are mutually exclusive."

My answer would be to show them Inherit the Wind.

http://www.imdb.com/video/amazon/vi1218420505/

[Lainey]

My creationist friend claims that Carbon-14 dating isn't reliable. I know she's out to lunch, but I don't understand the dating methods well enough to debunk her. I do know that she got this belief from her dad and also some sort of creationist magazine. Also something about tree rings not being reliable.

[tehgoobster]

My creationist friend claims that Carbon-14 dating isn't reliable. I know she's out to lunch, but I don't understand the dating methods well enough to debunk her. I do know that she got this belief from her dad and also some sort of creationist magazine. Also something about tree rings not being reliable.

Carbon isn't the only thing measured; other elements are measured as well (uranium-lead, potassium-argon, etc.). They all point to the earth being about 4.5 billion years old. Check out these links for more info:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiometric_dating

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/dating.html

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-age-of-earth.html

[emmiedahl]

Carbon dating is very reliable. This article http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/hovind/howgood-c14.html talks about carbon-14 and tree rings. I didn't realize that dating methods were disputed until I hearrd JimBob talking about it. He sounded like an idiot because he obviously had no fucking idea what it is even based on.

[Lainey]

Carbon dating is very reliable. This article http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/hovind/howgood-c14.html talks about carbon-14 and tree rings. I didn't realize that dating methods were disputed until I hearrd JimBob talking about it. He sounded like an idiot because he obviously had no fucking idea what it is even based on.

She said something about these "scientists" went to some village or something where they dated a tree at millions of years old, but the people in the village remembered it being planted within their lifetimes.

It's hard to argue against flat-out lies, particularly when the person who believes them also believes that Christians don't lie.

[uber frau]

The argument against C-14 dating has to do with the limitations on it's accuracy. Basically, since the half life is only about 5700years, it is only accurate for dating items younger than 60, 000 years old. Additionally there are things that don't contain C-14, since it's a byproduct of life, so it's useless for dating some rocks.

Fundies conveniently forget (or are too undereducated to realise) that there is more to radioisotopes than C-14, but they are perfectly happy to use the theories around rates of change when it comes to other things, pharmacology reports, for example, or even dating artifacts that fit on their timeline of world history.

If they want to be intellectually honest, they should at least use the 'God created an old world/Adam had a navel" argument.

[Sola]

Pharyngula has a really good and simple explanation of how radiometric dating works.

http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/ ... ar-emma-b/

He also completely owns Ken Ham in the process...

[Boltingmadonna]

About the wacky idea that if we'd descended from a primate ancestor, we'd have lost too much of our genetic information to function--via wikipedia:

Human and chimpanzee chromosomes are very similar. The primary difference is that humans have one fewer pair of chromosomes than do other great apes. Humans have 23 pairs of chromosomes and other great apes have 24 pairs of chromosomes. In the human evolutionary lineage, two ancestral ape chromosomes fused at their telomeres producing human chromosome 2.[1] There are nine other major chromosomal differences between chimpanzees and humans: chromosome segment inversions on human chromosomes 1, 4, 5, 9, 12, 15, 16, 17, and 18. After the completion of the Human genome project, a Common Chimpanzee genome project was initiated. In December 2003, a preliminary analysis of 7600 genes shared between the two genomes confirmed that certain genes such as the forkhead-box P2 transcription factor, which is involved in speech development, are different in the human lineage. Several genes involved in hearing were also found to have changed during human evolution, suggesting selection involving human language-related behavior. Differences between individual humans and Common Chimpanzees are estimated to be about 10 times the typical difference between pairs of humans.

So, behold, we have one less chromosome pair than chimpanzees. And we may differ from our common primate ancestor, as well. But we're still here.

[Boltingmadonna]

And posting this separately to avoid eyes glazing over from tl;dr . . . .

Re "how did men reproduce before women evolved"? (Made me snort my morning cup of tea!) Yeah, the arrogance--men OBVIOUSLY arrived on the scene first! I guess he hasn't heard of asexual reproduction, which is how everything reproduced before sexual differentiation and sexual reproduction came along. Wikipedia has an interesting article on the many different forms of reproduction--though maybe fundies can't read that because hearing about sporogenesis would be defrauding! (Spore porn?)

Check out this story from NPR: "As Y Chromosome Shrinks, End of Men Pondered."

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4225769

The Y chromosome actually has been shrinking, and now contains a mere 80 genes compared to 1,000 on the X chromosome. Which makes it look as if males are probably a mutation from females--NOT the other way around. Another fail for the Genesis account.

[Constance Vigilance]

So, behold, we have one less chromosome pair than chimpanzees. And we may differ from our common primate ancestor, as well. But we're still here.

Just pointing out that, as your quote said, humans haven't actually lost the material on those extra chromosomes, it just that two have fused to become one. A lot of that changing and rearranging happens as species evolve -- part of what creates the differences between them.

Carry on.

[emmiedahl]

About the shrinking male chromosome: the main thing that the Y chromosome codes for is maleness, so there are not a lot of necessary genes. The default sex is female, and then shit happens to make you male if that is the gamete that your father donated during conception. I know a lot of you already know this, but there are members of the board who received a poor science education so I thought I would put it out there.

About the evolution of sex, bacteria can have sex, and it involves a "male" sex pilus (penis that grows when the bacterium needs it) that injects plasmid DNA into the "female". This gives the receiving bacteria a huge advantage because it is then meroploid and has two copies of several genes. Sexual reprouction is another area in which the "irreducible complexity" is highly reducible.

I just realized that I am using way too many big words, let me know if it is Too Much. I am used to being around science nerds, so I am not sure what the typical science lexicon includes.

[emmiedahl]

Just pointing out that, as your quote said, humans haven't actually lost the material on those extra chromosomes, it just that two have fused to become one. A lot of that changing and rearranging happens as species evolve -- part of what creates the differences between them.

Carry on.

According to the article I was reading yesterday, humans and chimps have roughly the same amount of nucleotides in their genome, which totally supports what you are saying CV. Human chromosomes are BIG.

[genericJname]

Ooh, I was just remembering this creation class series we had in junior high sunday school:

-Reptiles continue to grow throughout their lives.

-Back in the pre-flood days, there was an extra atmosphere ("God made sky between the waters") that caused a more tropical climate, which is why old bible guys lived to their 900s.

-Therefore, dinosaurs were just really large lizards that just don't live long enough anymore to get that big.

Also, in that same class, we did some sort of hands on activity with formaldehyde soaked fetal pigs. :? I'm not sure what the point was. Sanctity of pig life?

[Kitty]

It's like the original post about blood clotting and how if one of the mechanisms were not present blood wouldn't clot and we would all die. The idea is that everything has been made perfectly and if you take any element away we will all break down. So, nothing can be any less complex than it is or it would not function, hence irreducible complexity. Does this make sense (or as much sense as creationist/ID BS can make)?

Yes, this makes sense. Well, about as much sense as ID bullshit can make.

I mean, in a specific organism, one mechanism malfunctioning would fuck things up for than organism. But there are other organisms who do just fine using simpler mechanisms, or not even using those mechanisms at all. I'm not even a bio major and I can see that irreducible complexity is a load of shit. Or maybe it's because I did pretty well in biology in high school.

[Boltingmadonna]

According to the article I was reading yesterday, humans and chimps have roughly the same amount of nucleotides in their genome, which totally supports what you are saying CV.

Yes, good points, Constance Vigilance and emmiedahl. Science nerds rule! :D

[debrand]

About the shrinking male chromosome: the main thing that the Y chromosome codes for is maleness, so there are not a lot of necessary genes. The default sex is female, and then shit happens to make you male if that is the gamete that your father donated during conception. I know a lot of you already know this, but there are members of the board who received a poor science education so I thought I would put it out there.

About the evolution of sex, bacteria can have sex, and it involves a "male" sex pilus (penis that grows when the bacterium needs it) that injects plasmid DNA into the "female". This gives the receiving bacteria a huge advantage because it is then meroploid and has two copies of several genes. Sexual reprouction is another area in which the "irreducible complexity" is highly reducible.

I just realized that I am using way too many big words, let me know if it is Too Much. I am used to being around science nerds, so I am not sure what the typical science lexicon includes.

You explained that very well. I understood and I am not a science nerd :)