The Lies of AiG

I believe you’re talking about adaptation and ring species. If not, correct me before I go on. If you have some proof of evolution beyond kinds, and not by loss of genetic information, I would love to see it.

Could not be? That would be proving a negative. How can you prove that they were produced by mutation and not by common design? This is the disconnect in how evolutionists treat the past. You expect YECs to prove their side while you accept that evolution is theory and cannot be proven. You pick what you believe.

Have you ever watched nature shows on mating rituals? Some animals have very complex rituals that the male must perform before a female will choose them. Pheromones are a key trigger for some. If a male doesn’t smell right, the female will not accept him.

The following article explains it pretty well, except for advantage #3, where they try to play both sides. Mutations passed down one generation may be taken out the next at random. There is no guarantee that anything positive will ever be fixed in a population.

Through sexual reproduction, those survivors pass on their traits to their offspring, which allows the species to begin to evolve on micro-levels, and potentially on macro-levels as well.

Even if evolution does not occur, sexual reproduction does offer the chance to screen out undesirable traits or genetics from a species.

One thing that would be important for someone who holds to ‘common design’ is to state precisely what kinds of differences one would expect say between genomes. How different or similar should genomes be from one another if common design is true? How much should Alu insertions or ERVs line up with each other? What kinds of single nucleotide differences should exist between humans and say chimpanzees?

The problem is that that are specific, measurable pieces of evidence for common ancestry but common design doesn’t exactly have any predictions of what we should find. In particular, common design can explain everything that we ever see because you can always use the explanation “well it was just made that way.” We go ahead and measure some nested hierchies of Alu insertions… well obviously God just made it to look as if common ancestry is true.

So comparing the two explanations we have common ancestry which has specific testable predictions and common design which has no predictions nor does it generate any new research. All that common design does is just explain everything away since that’s just how God did it.

I think it could be helpful to really try to stop reading scientific misinformation and try to really really come to understand and learn how it is that scientists who are far more skeptical and spend far more time studying these things all arrive on the same conclusion, many of who are Christian. It looks as if you are guilty of the lie that many people believe, that evolution is uniquely inherently atheistic:

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I definitely agree that in my experience those that reject scientific consensus now days on theories like evolution seems to majorly be based on their belief in misinformation. Almost every time I get into a debate centered around this kind of discussion the ones trying to preach a young earth full of completely created animals their arguments are not based on anything concrete.

Like I always hear Noah was able to fit 2 of everything and 7 of some because there was less species. But that’s not true, the further back we go the more species we keep adding to the list. I hear things like , well there was just two wolves and from them came all wolves, coyotes, and dogs snd ect… but then they can’t generate a list of all animals that ever existed in those clades or explain how they diversified so fast into so many. To many gaping holes in their baskets.

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And a totally random process like evolution does predict something? What, other than extinction?

And where do you see this in nature today, not just far, far in a distant era?

How many species of dogs are less than 100 years old? How many types of horses, cows, or any type of domesticated animals? It doesn’t take very long for breeds or species to form.

Kinds, not species. There has never been a consensus on how many types, kinds or species of animals are on earth, just estimates.

There were probably more types than the originally created animals due to adaptation, but only about 7-8 thousand kinds (including dinosaurs) that had to be brought aboard the ark. There was more than enough room for them and for food for all for the time they were aboard the ark. Have you ever crunched the numbers or looked up just how large the ark was? It didn’t look like this:

So the ark was quite a bit smaller than the titanic. You could not fit 8,000 animals, and their food on the titanic for over half a year. How did you pick up that number? There is currently around 120+ living families of mammals and around 20 orders. There are about 6,000 species though.

So you’re arguing that the ones brought in the ark concerning mammals was what? Two of each order, two of each family? Two of each genera.

Let’s just focus on felines at the moment. Was there two tigers and two lions and two African wild cats or was there some cat species that that all of these came from such as the Proailurus or could we even go back further to the Miacoidea?

Did sabertooth cats appear before the ark and was brought in or was they brought in afterwards?

Now you mentioned how many kinds of dogs have been bred in the last century or so. So we see those same numbers for all other species in the last century or is it just domesticated animals? How many types of zebras appeared in the last century?

I’m also curious , since you mentioned number crunching, what type of Tethytheria was brought on baked? Was that the predecessor for the elephants or was there a Proboscidea and a Plesielephantiformes? So was it a baby mammoth or a baby elephant?

How many pounds of food a day does one baby elephant eat? How many pounds of food does a baby lion eat? How many prey animals would that be for a baby lion?

How many hours a day would it take to feed these animals and clean up their waste? Let’s say it took just 1 minute a day for 1/3 of the 6,000. That’s 3,000 minutes, or 50 hours in a day, which is impossible. So they would need like 20 seconds to feed and water all the animals , and clean up their waste, a day for one meal? That seems unlikely. Takes me longer than that to just feed and water and clean up after my two cats.

I’m curious have you crunched the numbers?

None.

There is nothing in scripture to suggest that the progeny of “kinds” is anything other than the commonly observed cows giving birth to cows, lions to lions, house cats to house cats. There is no biblical Felidae or Bovidae kind, nor does that teaching appear in the first two millennia of church history.

I am not sure you quite understand what I was asking. For example, I mentioned Alu insertions which are these little parasitic elements that insert themselves into genomes randomly. Common ancestry obviously wouldn’t predict which repetitive elements appear and where in the genome, but it would predict (before we even had genome sequencing data) and explain the patterns of Alu insertions that we see in closely or more distantly related species. The same thing is true with the pattern of random mutations. Obviously you don’t predict which ones occur, but you can make predictions of how many differences you should see and even what kinds of differences should exist (e.g. the ratio of A<->T or whatnot) based upon fossil evidence or you can make predictions of what kinds of pseudogenes you should be able to find with common ancestry. Here is one example of the latter:

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But what did they eat when they left the ark? The surface of the earth had been scoured by the global flood and deep deposits made that would have destroyed all plant life. There was no top soil left to support new plant growth. What did the herbivores eat until the plant life returned? Who did the carnivores eat?

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Do you realize that the kind of speciation events the Creation Museum is advocating require evolution on a time scale no scientists agree is possible? Yes, people have crunched the numbers. It’s still science fiction:

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Then perhaps you shouldn’t base your argument on a negative. You are saying that we can’t change DNA to the point that we get humans and chimps from a common ancestor. Well, we know what the differences are between the genomes, so please tell us which differences go beyond this claimed limit you keep talking about. If mutations are always harmful, how can humans and chimps survive with so many differences between their genomes?

None of this requires us to assume common descent. If naturally occurring mutations can not change genomes beyond a certain point then neither could directly changing the bases in a genome. It’s not as if the same mutation has a different effect if God causes it or if it occurs naturally.

No top soil? Ever seen what’s left after a local flood? Some areas would be scrubbed clean. Others would be deep in sediment. How long does it take for plant life to take hold again after a flood or fire? Weeks, beginning with flowers and grasses and berries. Trees begin to grow within a few months. After the water was low enough for the ark to rest on the mountain, it took another 5 months before Noah opened the top of the ark and saw that the waters had receded. In another month, the ground was dry and he let the animals go.

As for carnivores, there would have been plenty of carrion after the flood, and it doesn’t take long for small animals, like mice, rats, squirrels and rabbits to breed, so there would have been food available.

This is all, “I can imagine a scenario,” not analyzing the evidence that is actually in the earth, or finding what one would expect if there actually had been a global flood. Just because you can imagine a scenario doesn’t mean anything like that actually happened or even could happen.

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Talk about ironic. That is exactly what I see in evolution, especially when dealing with fossils and major changes. Just because someone can imagine how an eye could evolve doesn’t mean anything like that actually happened or even could happen. In fact, DNA pretty much ensures it couldn’t happen.

Besides, as I said, we see the results of floods and fires on a fairly regular basis. It’s easy to check the results.

Except that biologists have been busy finding real stuff (including DNA) that actually fits into and confirms that narrative (and sometimes refines it). Whereas their detractors have been spinning a pure narrative that explains so little … indeed less and less as the data accumulates.

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True. And they don’t check out and support a global flood.

Then please post something on that without any ‘could be,’ ‘might be,’ ‘maybe’ or ‘we think’ as a major part of the conclusions. I rarely see anything like that on science sites, just the apologetics sites.