Wednesday, January 27, 2010

PASTOR MIKE’S TEN BIGGEST HOWLERS ON EVOLUTION- Updated!

The meaning of "brainwashing" - Pastor Mikey style!

Even before his latest blog post on 'Brainwashing by Evolutionists', it was well known that my brother, “Pastor Mike”, had only a dim comprehension of the fundaments of evolutionary theory –especially natural selection. Now, with his latest blog, he confirms he’s as uneducated and ignorant as most of us suspected. But don’t take my word for it!

Let’s look first hand at his ten biggest howlers, and then ask – ‘WHO is really being brainwashed here?’ (Sounds to me like his disciples)

HOWLER 1- “Life did not start with a bolt of lightning striking a pond of water as claimed by evolutionists. That is pure childish fantasy

Of course this is gibberish and arrant rubbish since evolution says no such thing! As readers can see if they go to my previous article:

http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2010/01/why-anti-evolutionists-are-regularly.html


this falls under class (c) of the “stupidest mistakes” made by anti-evolutionists. Specifically,the concept of life possibly arising from non-life is the theory of noogenesis- NOT evolution! Evolution theory says NOTHING, nada, about any original or primitive situation (including with only a reducing atmosphere of methane and ammonia present) devoid of life. It doesn’t enter until there actually IS life in the form of diverse early simple cellular species.

HOWLER 2- “They are taught that if given enough time, a monkey at a typewriter could punch keys at random and eventually type President Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address. This is nonsense.”

No – this is nonsense! Again, the theory of evolution says no such thing! The example of the monkey at a typewriter is in no way the same as the working of natural selection because each monkey keystroke is totally RANDOM, and also independent of its predecessor. Hence, the probability of getting a Gettysburg address from even a billion monkeys is essentially nil. Zero. (Actually, around 10^-160 which comes almost to the same thing since it would need around a million cycles of the universe at 15 billion years for each)

By contrast, natural selection is a process that builds on existing fitness for a given species. Thus, natural selection itself is anything but random. We can see this simply by doing simple experiments, as with fruit flies, and examining the emergence of specific traits over generations – governed by gene frequency. It can be seen that over time there is a genetic "favoritism", as it were, for certain traits or characteristics to be passed on or selected out of a group of competing traits in the gene pool. Thus, what natural selection does is to consolidate particular random mutations into a more stable, adaptive adjustment – governed by deterministic factors and inputs.

A perfect example is the German cockroach Blattela Germanica which – by exposure to the pesticide dieldrin- can be shown to evolve in successive generations to a form that is resistant to it. Of course, this is why the strength of pesticides (as well as herbicides) must always be increased with repeated use – because so many species develop a resistance that is -in fact, an example of natural selection!

HOWLER 3- “As an example, a computer was programmed in an attempt to arrive at the simple 26-letter alphabet. After 35,000,000,000,000 (35 trillion) attempts it has only arrived at 14 letters correctly. What are the odds that a simple single cell organism could evolve given the complexity of more than 60,000 proteins of 100 different configurations all in the correct places?”

Again, this has nothing to do with the theory of evolution by natural selection. My irrepressible and serially combative bro is again attacking the theory of noogenesis –NOT evolution. It’s no wonder he resembles Don Quixote tilting at windmills in his febrile mind, since he can’t even get his targets focused! Evidently, repeating this a gazillion times doesn’t affect him since he never processes it the first time.

It may amaze him also to know that not all evolutionists believe or accept the first primitive life forms arose on Earth by lightning striking pond scum. Some of us place our trust in an alternative theory of panspermia – in which life bearing meteoroids impacts Earth and the cells embedded in then THEN began to evolve. This has received more reinforcement since Antrarctic meteoroids that have landed on Earth from Mars appear to show remnant fossilized primitive cells. (These findings are still being subjected to cross testing)

HOWLER 4- “Evolution is a Religion - it's a worship of a make-believe time-god by the atheists - and their partner-in -crime. . .SATAN !!

Here, as usual, he totally loses all mental ballast- if he even had any to begin with. Evolution can’t be a “religion” because it is based on observations, and open inquiry to arrive at its findings. Further, unlike Mike’s stupid KJV (shown to be a false transcription from an error -loaded mal-translation of a 12th century copy by scholar Bart Ehrman) and its codswallop – evolution employs tests for falsification! That means, it tests its own claims to attempt to show they are false, before publishing them in biology or other journals. This is something Mike’s religion will never do, well….because he believes it is absolutely true so requires no tests.

As for “Satan” – that is the stuff of infantile minds and childish nightmares. Only a puerile mind or brain accepts such nonsense. Amazingly, Mike finds it easier to believe this crap than to accept even one evolutionary FACT: to wit, that the two ape chromosomes: 2p and 2q- underwent telomeric fusion to become the gene ‘2’ in humans.(Thereby also explaining why the ape chromosome pairs number 24 and the human, 23)

HOWLER 5- "You see , people who believe in evolution have been brainwashed. Their main problem is not the arguments for and against evolution and creation. Their problem is they can't bring themselves to reject evolution, because they have already rejected God”

More utter nonsense! In fact, as I noted in my two-part entry on ‘Truth, Existence Claims and God Talk’ – G-O-D isn't even a coherent concept. Most religionists like Mikey can’t even offer the most basic definition though they run off at the mouth about it all the time.

Thus, saying we (atheists) “have already rejected God” is tantamount to saying we have already rejected the flying spaghetti monster, or the Mighty Supreme Pumpkin. Thus, we do not reject anything but a childish, outmoded and incomprehensible nonsense word that the believers can’t even define, far less provide necessary or sufficient conditions for.

By contrast, we don’t reject evolution because we are intelligent and educated enough to see that it has met all its tests for falsification and has unique and considerable evidence. For example, humans and chimpanzees have the exact same cytochrome -c protein sequence. In the absence of common (evolutionary) descent, the chance of this occurrence is conservatively less than 1 in 10^93. That is, 1 in 10 to the 93rd power, or 10 followed by 93 zeros.

Thus, the high degree of similarity in these proteins is a spectacular corroboration of the theory of common descent. But believers are too dumb or too uneducated to grasp this.


HOWLER 6- “The body and soul of Charles Darwin's Theory of Evolution was his idea that evolution was made possible through natural selection. This concept is based on the suggestion that those members of a species that are a little stronger, a little larger, or run a little faster will live longer to procreate offspring with these superior adaptations. Darwin's theory suggests that millions of generations later the changes will result in new species. These adaptations are called links or intermediates between the old species and the new.”


This one made me howl so much with laughter I nearly split a gut. Seems the pastor has been going overboard copying and pasting text for his blog rants from imbeciles (Duane Gish?) the content of which he doesn’t get. In fact, if anyone has ever done any experiments with fruit flies one can see natural selection manifesting within less than 50 generations. With the right initial conditions one can see the fly generations change to end up with different eye colors, wing shapes, as well as thorax dimensions.

HOWLER 7- “One of the best examples of evolution nonsense is the thought that a wingless bird began to evolve a wing. Why this would occur is not answered by evolutionists. The wing stub did not make the bird more adaptable to his environment. The first wing stubs would be much too small for the bird to fly. Why would a bird evolve wing stubs that are useless?”

Here Mikey demonstrates he hasn’t even done basic reading or research on bird evolution. If he had, he would have read or seen the evidence that birds originated from dinosaurs. Thus, the specialized scales of certain specific dinosaurs later adapted to become feathers. Some of the earliest flying dinos show the future adaptation very well, especially Archaeopteryx. A “wingless” bird seen in context, therefore, would simply have arisen from a dinosaur with few specialized scales.

One other point that appears to elude him is that evolution is an algorithmic process. Breaking this down into words he can understand, that means that many variations are attempted but most are dead ends. Evolution doesn’t promise that ALL species have ALL members move on and prosper! It merely says that those species that can best adapt to their environments will be the optimal survivors!

If one is educated enough, and reads enough, one can find hundreds of thousands of dead end species. None of these disproves natural selection (which Mike assumes must work positively at all times) but rather PROVES it. It proves that the less adaptable or specialized will die out, ensured if they can’t function as their competitors can. Such would be a “wingless bird” (by which Mike probably surmises is the dodo. But then as we know, the dodo went extinct, while millions of the flying bird species remain)

Another example of a dead end species was Neandertal man. Died out nearly 50,000 years ago. Lacked the adaptive capacity to survive, unlike Cro-Magnon Man.

HOWLER 8 – “The Theory of Evolution is based on natural selection of the most adaptable member of a species, not the weakest. A bird with a useless wing is at a severe disadvantage. This is the opposite of natural selection. According to natural selection, the members of the bird species with the smallest useless wing would be the most adaptable and most likely to survive in the largest numbers”

Again, Mikey has it ass backwards! It is the flying birds which are the most adaptable, not the non-flying. All flying birds have at least one more option than non-fliers to escape predators on the ground: fly away! The most adaptable bird species are easily seen then to be the FLIERS. A bird with a useless wing, or a primitive proto-wing, is likely a mutation that is destined to die out – like the dodo. What Mike is doing is taking evolution backwards (to the first winged dinosaurs that couldn’t fly) to try to make the specious case that natural selection doesn’t work.

As usual Mike has a one trick mind or mentality. He can’t grasp the essence of the theory of natural selection, so he projects that deficiency onto the theory! Then he calls the theory “nonsense”. In truth it is Mike who manufactures his own nonsense since he never grasps the theory in the first place!

HOWLER 9- “The problem can be found in all species in one way or another. Take fish for example. We are told by evolutionists that a fish wiggled out of the sea onto dry land and became a land creature. So let's examine this idea. OK, a fish wiggles out of the sea and onto the land, but he can't breathe air. This could happen. Fish do stupid things at times”

And so do “pastors” – like when they write of things they don’t understand! I guess however, that Mike has never heard of walking catfish – which are quite comfortable out of the water, traipsing around land. Readers can learn more here.

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

Note that the locomotion method used is via its pectoral fins. Note also it can remain out of water walking on its fins so long as it stays moist – maybe by dipping into a pool every now and then. IN the evolutionary setting, it is clearly nowhere near the big deal the pastor makes it out to be. In that setting, and over time, one could easily see how the pectoral fins could have adapted and altered to become rudimentary limbs, then legs.

A whole panorama of this sort of change can be seen when one observes tadpoles growing into frogs. The tadpoles effectively replicate what happened in evolution - they don't "prove evolution" - as we see them slowly sprout little tiny nubs, then legs. When I use the term "replicate" I mean that the metamorphosis of the tadpole is akin to a "playback" film of what likely happened in the course of evolution when fish adapted to become amphibians - not that it IS evolution, or a proof of it! Of course, this nuance is missed by hard heads like my semi-literate bro.


When a kid, this was one of the things I’d perennially enjoy – but it seems Mike never did, or if he did, it never made a dent.


HOWLER 10- “The fossil record shows no intermediate or transitional species. Where are the millions of years of fossils showing the transitional forms for dinosaurs ? They do not not exist, because the dinosaurs did not evolve !"


One wonders if Mike can possibly be this unconscious, dense or illiterate and uneducated. (Newsflash: where there are some missing transitionals it is likely the same geological locations where the Earth's tectonic plates have either crushed them out of existence, or buried them) Mayhap he needs to check his facts here- as opposed to Duane Gish's Creation Science Circus of Clowns:

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-transitional/part1b.html

Addendum HOWLER:

I see Mikey again remains as clueless as ever about the second law of thermodynamics- as when he huffs:

"the second law of thermodynamics proves that organization cannot flow from chaos. Complex live organisms cannot rearrange themselves into an organism of a higher form as claimed by evolutionists. This is scientifically backwards according to the second law of thermodynamics, which has never been proven wrong."

Now, I have to really wonder if he is stone dumb, or just thinks his 'followers' are plain old stupid that because he flashes some fancy two dollar words around they'll swallow his hog swill. But as I already noted (previously link article on anti-evolutionists' errors):

"This is directly a result of misinterpretation of the 2nd law, something I often see from those who've never taken a serious physics course - even in high school. Strictly speaking the law states:Entropy (the state of disorder) will tend to increase over time in any closed system.The last part is very crucial but it is exactly the part that the creationist-ID crowd omits, which renders their question a non-starter.The reason is that neither the Earth nor its biological systems are "closed" systems, hence do not exhibit constantly increasing disorder.The Earth, for example, is open to the radiant energy of the Sun and receives some 1360 watts per square meter. Plants on the Earth are likewise OPEN to solar energy, and receive it and then use it in the process of photo-synthesis.

Other organisms eat the plants and thereby incorporate that energy into themselves. Thus, the path is cleared for higher organizational development and speciation. We do not see a constant wind-down because all these systems are OPEN, not closed."

--
THUS, the "chaos" Mikey is petrified of can't occur because Earth is not a closed thermodynamic system but an OPEN one. What this shows is my brother has NO physics background, can't grasp the most basic physics principles and is lost at sea in trying to use them to advance his silly biblical superstititions.

Again this shows Isaac Asimov was correct when he asserted it's impossible to debate irrationalists. Because their ignorance and mis-education knows no bounds - they'll always twist any known scientific principles to their own ends, as well as misapply logic, to show their superstitious crap has some kernel of truth. But it has no more than believing in tooth fairies, perpetual motion machines, or "free vacuum energy".

On that note, I believe Mike needs to leave evolution theory to real scientists and researchers, and stick to his bible full of children’s fables. At least when he writes about them he makes it sound half-convincing: to children!

If he is serious, and does wish to be taken seriously as a critic of evolution and natural selection- as opposed to a loud, oafish clown- I suggest he go to his library, get Darwin's Origin of Species - and read it. Instead of going to hucksters of holiness sites like Duane Gish's.

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