Re: Fishy Teeth

Hey Brandon,

It appears that I’m not getting my ideas across very well.  I was trying to point out that evolutionary theory is irrelevant to making new discoveries, by italicizing words that showed evolutionary biologists were merely hypothesizing about something that supposedly happened in the past.   The questions about future research and applications could have been asked w/o these hypotheses.  I see nothing particularly predictive about  the work of the evolutionary biologists.  (Evolutionary biologists could easily pose whatever hypotheses they want in a way that would ‘predict’ present observations. That doesn’t make those hypotheses true, however.)  Any biologist can observe a network of dental genes in cichlids, and can observe the many variations in number and location of teeth in different types of animals in the present; and the questions asked in this paper, such as “Is tooth number regulated similarly across the pharyngeal and oral jaws?”  and “What are the relationships between genotypes and phenotypes?” could be asked by any scientist because they are based on observations in the present.  A scientist working from a creationist perspective would observe all these things and would still ask the  questions asked in this paper.  He would be prompted to ask them because he knows that God is intelligent, logical, and creative, and might be expected to use similar patterns for similar items (teeth in this case) in a variety of different kinds of animals. This is the same type of question the Christian chemist asked when he noticed that pattern of known elements and hypothesized the existence of not-yet-discovered elements, and then went on to search for, find, and identify some of those elements.  

What good was the evolutionary perspective when scientists, using evolutionary thinking, deduced that the appendix, thymus, and tonsils were useless evolutionary remnants?  How did that lead to scientific breakthroughs?

If the evolutionary biologist didn't actually help the geneticist in any useful way, do you think he would let them put their name on his paper? But he did.

This brings me to one of my pet peeves.  In general, there doesn’t appear to be much true openness to differing ideas in academia.  In the field of biological sciences, Darwinian evolution is the prevailing PC way of thinking, and scientists tend to couch everything in terms of it.  Students (at least for the last 40-50 years) are taught throughout school that Darwinian evolution is the only acceptable way of thinking about origins and science in general—most have little exposure to intelligent design or young earth creationism.  Evolutionary scientists would naturally tend to reinforce each other in maintaining that PC worldview.  (After all, they’re much more likely to get funding if they toe the so-called ‘party line’.)  Those who think differently—such as those who believe in intelligent design or young earth creationism—are denounced as not being good scientists, simply because they don’t hold to the prevailing PC worldview.  On top of that, evolutionists often criticize creation scientists for not having published many works, yet it is difficult for creation scientists to get their research published because it varies from the prevailing evolutionary thinking.  To me, that sort of narrow-mindedness will slow scientific advances, as it tends to keep people from thinking outside the PC box.  A scientist working from a creationist perspective might very well be totally ignored if he posed the same exact questions as were in the article, simply because the basis of his questions didn’t align with the prevailing evolutionary perspective.
 

As for specified complexity, surely it exists. But it is not part of the theory of evolution. And it is unnecessary when explaining biological form and function

Are you saying the specified complexity only exists in non-biological spheres, such as the designing and building of machinery, factories, and various kinds of modern transportation, where intelligent beings—humans—design the parts and specify how they are to be put together?   How about the specified complexity of language?  People are able to communicate because they can put letters (26 in our alphabet) into words, words into sentences, and sentences into books, creating works with very specific and precise meanings.  Letters never arrange themselves into anything meaningful.  Specified complexity isn’t part of the Darwinian theory of evolution because the proponents of the theory don’t want it there—after all, as you said, you’d have to believe in intelligent design in order to believe in specified complexity.  So, its absence in the theory doesn’t necessarily mean it doesn’t exist in the biological world—it just means that proponents of Darwinian evolution don’t want it to exist.

Dawkins’ explanations for why specified complexity doesn’t exist in nature are illogical and ignore what is already known in the fields of genetics and chemistry.  He ignores the problem of handedness—no mention of it in the chapter named Canterbury in The Ancestor’s Tale; he talks about Haldane’s “soup” of amino acids, yet never acknowledges that these weren’t truly living organic amino acids, but simply a mixture of artificially created amino acids of mixed isomers which could not possibly form into living RNA or DNA.  He asserted that a scientist’s experiment (Spiegelman’s test-tube world) demonstrates that things can artificially order themselves and replicate—yet this experiment was designed by an intelligent being, the scientist had to seed his test-tube world with pre-existing RNA  from another source (the RNA didn’t create itself in the test-tube), and the resulting strand of RNA kept getting shorter with each generation (a  good example of entropy or loss of information—quite the opposite of Dawkins’ idea of evolution).  Dawkins asserts that the appearance of design does not mean that there is a designer, even though in every other circumstance, any intelligent person would logically conclude that the presence of design does indicate there was an intelligent designer—especially since such a person would have observed things being created and have created things himself.  Dawkins acknowledges that DNA contains information (specific instructions for cellular function) in a language built from a 4-letter alphabet (p.20-21, Ancestor’s Tale), but never explains how language came to exist in the first place.  In the field of genetics, it’s known that DNA is self-correcting—there are mechanisms present which can repair much of the damage done by negative mutations,and Dawkins discusses it in the Ancestor’s Tale (p. 575)—yet Dawkins still asserts that cumulative mutations, supposedly present in ‘junk’ DNA, are a major factor in the evolutionary process.   Considering the many layers of complexity within even the smallest amoeba, the many parts that must coordinate perfectly with each other in order for the amoeba to live, what would be the mathematical probability that such a huge number of parts and functions would randomly develop themselves and combine into a living organism without any outside input?  I doubt that even billions of years would be sufficient.

It doesn’t help any that he makes such statements as “Evolution is now universally accepted as a fact by thinking people.” (p.308, Ancestor’s Tale)  And, “The first replicator worked de novo, ab initio, without precedent, and without help other than from the ordinary laws of chemistry.” (p.563, Tale)  The first statement assumes that only unthinking people accept creationism and that he knows what all people are thinking.  The second statement requires a great deal of faith (a religious concept), as neither Dawkins nor any other human was around when this first replicator supposedly appeared.  Dawkins simply created this idea in his mind, then believed it.  At least young earth creationists have the Bible, God’s message to mankind, on which to base their beliefs.

Enough for this letter... :)

Susan