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Evidences Class
Getting to the Heart of Evolution
Rule #1: Understand Evolution
Rule #2: Watch out for religious
presuppositions
Rule #1: Understand Evolution
The millions of diverse living species we
find around us in the modern world are all
descended from a common ancestor that
lived in the remote past. The processes
that have brought this diversity about are
collectively called evolution.
Stephen Jay Gould*
Natural Selection or Survival of
the Fittest
The process whereby organisms best
adapted to local environments leave more
surviving offspring and spread their
favored traits through populations.
Stephen Jay Gould*
 Bacterial
resistance to
antibiotics
 Insect pests
become resistant
to pesticides
From the PBS
Evolution Website
The Simple Mousetrap
Irreducible Complexity
Evolution cannot think ahead
Evolution cannot think ahead
Nose
Change
Change
Change
1. Small Change
2. Improvement
3. More Survivors – S.O.F.
Trunk
Nature Designed (or Created) …
Natural
Selection?
“Defy your genetics; nature designed you to hold as little
muscle and as much fat as possible” (internet ad quote)
The Icon of Intelligent Design
100,000 RPM
5% Vision is not 5% of an Eye
Vision that is 5 percent as good as yours
or mine is very much worth having in
comparison with no vision at all. So is one
percent vision better than total blindness.
And 6 percent is better than 5, 7 percent
better than 6, and so on up the gradual,
continuous series.
Richard Dawkins
Rule #1: Understand Evolution
Rule #2: Watch out for religious
arguments
Creation Science
Henry Morris
Ken Ham – The Creation Museum
Problem #1 – Some Bad Science
Finite Element Model of the Ark???
What’s the point???
Problem #2 – Questionable
Bible Interpretation
Therefore, just as sin came
into the world through one
man, and death through
sin, and so death spread to
all men because all sinned.
(Romans 5:12 ESV)
T-Rex was a plant eater???
However ….
He drove out the man, and at the east of the garden of Eden
he placed the cherubim and a flaming sword that turned every
way to guard the way to the tree of life. (Genesis 3:24 ESV)
And God blessed them. And God said to them, "Be fruitful and
multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion
over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and
over every living thing that moves on the earth." (Genesis 1:28
ESV)
Now the serpent was more crafty than any other beast of the
field that the LORD God had made. He said to the woman,
"Did God actually say, 'You shall not eat of any tree in the
garden'?" (Genesis 3:1 ESV)
Religious presuppositions are
not limited to the creation
scientists.
Ultimately, evolution is not
about the scientific details.
Ultimately, evolution is about
God. (Cornelius Hunter)
Proof of Evolution????
In mammals, for instance, the
recurrent laryngeal nerve does
not go directly from the cranium
to the larynx, the way any
competent engineer would have
arranged it. Instead, it extends
down the neck to the chest, loops
around a lung ligament and then
runs back up the neck to the
larynx. In a giraffe, that means a
20-foot length of nerve where 1
foot would have done. If this is
evidence of design, it would seem
to be of the unintelligent variety.
(NYT)
More from the New York Times
Consider how humans and other
animals are intermittently tortured
by pain throughout their lives,
especially near the end. Our pain
mechanism may have been designed
to serve as a warning signal to
protect our bodies from damage, but
in the majority of diseases -- cancer,
for instance, or coronary thrombosis
-- the signal comes too late to do
much good, and the horrible
suffering that ensues is completely
useless. (NYT)
More from the New York Times
And why should the human reproductive system be
so shoddily designed? Fewer than one-third of
conceptions culminate in live births. The rest end
prematurely, either in early gestation or by
miscarriage. Nature appears to be an avid
abortionist, which ought to trouble Christians who
believe in both original sin and the doctrine that a
human being equipped with a soul comes into
existence at conception. Souls bearing the stain of
original sin, we are told, do not merit salvation. That
is why, according to traditional theology, unbaptized
babies have to languish in limbo for all eternity.
Owing to faulty reproductive design, it would seem
that the population of limbo must be at least twice
that of heaven and hell combined. (NYT)
The Humpback Whale’s Legs???
http://www.edwardtbabinski.us
Darwinist #1 – Douglas Futuyma
Do the creation scientists really suppose
their Creator saw fit to create a bird that
couldn’t reproduce without six feet of
bulky feathers that make it easy prey for
leapards?
Darwinist #2 – Stephen Jay Gould
Orchids manufacture their intricate devices from the
common components of ordinary flowers, parts usually
fitted for very different functions. If God had
designed a beautiful machine to reflect his wisdom and
power, surely he would not have used a collection of
parts generally fashioned for other purposes. Orchids
were not made by an ideal engineer; they are jury-rigged
from a limited set of available components. Thus, they
must have evolved from ordinary flowers.
Darwinist #3 – Steve Jones
The feeblest of designers could improve it.
(Complex organs) are not the work of some
great composer but of an insensible drudge: an
instrument, like all others, built by a tinkerer
rather than a trained engineer.
Darwinist #4 – Michael Ruse
Given an all-wise God, just why is it
that different forms appear in
similar climates, whereas the same
forms appear in different climates?
It is all pointless without evolution.
Darwinists #5 – Dodson and Dodson
Had all species been created in the
places where they now exist, then
amphibian and terrestrial mammals
should be as frequent on oceanic
islands as on comparable continental
areas. Certainly, terrestrial mammals
should have been created on these
islands as frequently as were bats.
Darwinist #6 – J. B. S. Haldane
The Creator has an inordinate
fondness for beetles to have created
over 250,000 different species.
Darwinist #7 – Ken Miller
[Pseudogenes reveal a designer who]
“made serious errors, wasting millions
of bases of DNA on a blueprint full of
junk and scribbles.”
Darwinist #8 – Charles Darwin
Why should the brain be enclosed in a box
of such extraordinary shaped pieces of
bone representing vertebrate? … Why
should similar bones have been created to
form the wing and leg of a bat, used as
they are for such totally different
purposes, namely flying and walking?
Darwinist #9 – Richard Dawkins
All the great religions have a place for awe, for ecstatic
transport at the wonder and beauty of creation. And it's
exactly this feeling of spine-shivering, breath-catching
awe — almost worship — this flooding of the chest with
ecstatic wonder, that modern science can provide. And it
does so beyond the wildest dreams of saints and mystics.
The fact that the supernatural has no place in our
explanations, in our understanding of so much about the
universe and life, doesn't diminish the awe. Quite the
contrary. The merest glance through a microscope at the
brain of an ant or through a telescope at a long-ago
galaxy of a billion worlds is enough to render poky and
parochial the very psalms of praise.
Could Ethiopian skull be missing link?
Scientists believe find could link homo erectus and
modern man (cnn.com on March 25, 2006)
The hominid cranium -- found in two pieces and believed to be between
500,000 and 250,000 years old -- "comes from a very significant period
and is very close to the appearance of the anatomically modern human,"
said Sileshi Semaw, director of the Gona Paleoanthropological Research
Project in Ethiopia.
"The Gawis cranium provides us with the opportunity to look
at the face of one of our ancestors," the archaeology project
said in a statement.
Delson said the fossil found in Ethiopia "might
represent a population broadly ancestral to modern
humans or it might prove to be one of several side
branches which died out without living descendants."