Week 2: The Evolution Debate

Transcription

1 Week 2: The Evolution Debate 1. Questions of origins: where did we come from? Questions of meaning: what is the purpose of life? Questions of morality: what is right and wrong? Questions of destination: where am I going after death? a. Is the universe infinite or did it have a beginning? And, if it does have a beginning, how does this serve as evidence for the existence of God? i. This conclusion [that the past must be finite] has been confirmed by remarkable discoveries in astronomy and astrophysics. In one of the most startling developments of modern science, we now have pretty strong evidence that the universe is not eternal in the past but had an absolute beginning about 13 billion years ago in a cataclysmic event known as the Big Bang. What makes the Big Bang so startling is that it represents the origin of the universe from literally nothing. For all matter and energy, even physical space and time themselves, came into being at the Big Bang. As the physicist P. C. W. Davies explains 1 "the coming into being of the universe, as discussed in modern science... is not just a matter of imposing some sort of organization... upon a previous incoherent state, but literally the coming-into-being of all physical things from nothing. 2 ii. It is said that an argument is what convinces reasonable men and a proof is what it takes to convince even an unreasonable man. With the proof now in place, cosmologists can no longer hide behind the possibility of a pasteternal universe. There is no escape, they have to face the problem of a cosmic beginning. [2] b. Could an infinite universe be possible? i. Since an infinite path would involve an actually infinite number of events, then the past simply can t be infinite. William Lane Craig[3] ii. The infinite is nowhere to be found in reality. It neither exists in nature nor provides a legitimate basis for rational thought. The role that remains for the infinite to play is solely that of an idea. [4]David Hilbert (One of the greatest mathematicians of the 20 th century) 2. The Kalam Cosmological Argument a. Whatever begins has to have a cause. b. The universe began to exist. c. Therefore, the universe has a cause. i. What further arguments can we draw from the Kalam cosmological argument? 1 ABC Science Online, "The Big Questions: In the Beginning," Interview of Paul Davies by Philip Adams, Apologetics Page 1

2 1. The argument is consistent with the description given to the Creator in classical theism. 2. This Being is fully transcendent in that it stands apart of this world as a timeless being. 3. This Being is personal and mindful of His creation. 4. The creation of the universe out of nothing (ex nihilo) implies incredible and unimaginable intelligence and power. 5. The Kalam argument sets the stage for further inquiry into this transcendent being. 6. [The Cause] must also be personal. For how else could a timeless cause give rise to a temporal effect like the universe? If the cause were a mechanically operating set of necessary and sufficient conditions, then the cause could never exist without the effect. For example, the cause of water's freezing is the temperature's being below 0 Centigrade. If the temperature were below 0 from eternity past, then any water that was around would be frozen from eternity. It would be impossible for the water to begin to freeze just a finite time ago. So if the cause is permanently present, then the effect should be permanently present as well. The only way for the cause to be timeless and the effect to begin in time is for the cause to be a personal agent who freely chooses to create an effect in time without any prior determining conditions. For example, a man sitting from eternity could freely will to stand up. Thus, we are brought, not merely to a transcendent cause of the universe, but to its personal Creator. William Lane Craig3 3. If there is a beginning what are who caused it? What are our choices? a. An intelligent designer b. Random processes leading to evolution 4. Evolution a. Microevolution (natural selection) i. Process by which genetic mutations become and remain more common in successive generations in a given population. ii. Diversity in life springs forth once we have complex living organisms b. Macroevolution i. Initial life and the initiation of new species ii. Transspecific evolution is nothing but an extrapolation and magnification of the events that take place within populations and species - Ernst Mayr 3 Apologetics Page 2

3 5. Icons of Evolution [3, 5] a. The 1953 Stanley Miller Experiment In this famous experiment, methane and ammonia, along with water vapor were circulated in a closed system for one week of continuous operation in a very hydrogen rich atmosphere. Organic molecules and amino acids were formed 2% of the carbon had formed amino acids (13 of the 22). Science confirmed in 1995 that the early atmosphere looked nothing like the atmosphere used in this famous experiment, as there all of the hydrogen would have escaped from the atmosphere. Urey_experiment i. Miller-Levine text book Biology (2000) Miller s original guesses about the Earth s early atmosphere were probably incorrect, but using other mixtures also have produced organic compounds. ii. Put a sterile, balanced salt solution in a test tube. Then put in a single living cell and poke a hole in it so that its contents leak into the solution. Now the test tube has all the molecules you would need to create a living cell, right? You would already have accomplished far more than what the Miller experiment ever could you ve got all the components you need for life. The problem is you can t make a living cell The problem of assembling the right parts in the right way at the right time and at the right place, while keeping out the wrong material, is simply insurmountable. Frankly, the idea that we re on the verge of explaining the origin of life naturalistically is just silly to me. Jonathan Wells, Ph.D., Ph.D. (Molecular and Cell Biologist, and Religious Studies) iii. Why is this still published in textbooks? It s becoming clearer and clearer to me that this is materialistic philosophy masquerading as empirical science. The attitude is that life had to have developed in this way because there s no other materialistic explanation. And if you try to invoke another explanation for instance, intelligent design then the evolutionists claim you re not a scientist. Jonathan Wells, Ph.D., Ph.D. Apologetics Page 3

4 b. Darwin s Tree of Life i. Major divisions (phyla) appear at once during the Cambrian period (540 million years ago) referred to as the Biological Big Bang. ii. Abrupt appearance of the major divisions actually turns Darwin s tree on its head. iii. LONG BEFORE THE READER HAS ARRIVED AT THIS PART OF MY WORK, A CROWD OF DIFFICULTIES WILL HAVE OCCURRED TO HIM. SOME OF THEM ARE SO SERIOUS THAT TO THIS DAY I CAN HARDLY REFLECT ON THEM WITHOUT BEING IN SOME DEGREE STAGGERED WHY, IF SPECIES HAVE DESCENDED FROM OTHER SPECIES BY FINE GRADUATIONS, DO NOT WE EVERYWHERE SEE INNUMERABLE TRANSITIONAL FORMS?... WHY THEN IS NOT EVERY GEOLOGICAL FORMATION AND EVERY STRATUM FULL OF SUCH INTERMEDIATE LINKS? GEOLOGY ASSUREDLY DOES NOT REVEAL ANY SUCH FINELY GRADUATED CHAINS, AND THIS PERHAPS, IS THE MOST OBVIOUS AND SERIOUS OBJECTION WHICH CAN BE ARGUED AGAINST THE THEORY. CHARLES DARWIN ORIGIN OF SPECIES iv. I count myself among the evolutionists who argue for a jerky, or episodic, rather than a smoothly gradual, pace of change. In 1972 my colleague Niles Eldredge and I developed the theory of punctuated equilibrium. We argued that two outstanding facts of the fossil record -- geologically "sudden" origin of new species and failure to change thereafter (stasis) -- reflect the predictions of evolutionary theory, not the imperfections of the fossil record. In most theories, small isolated populations are the source of new species, and the process of speciation takes thousands or tens of thousands of years. This amount of time, so long when measured against our lives, is a geological microsecond... [6] - Stephen Jay Gould c. The problem with homology: i. Homology - (1): a similarity often attributable to common origin (2a) : likeness in structure between parts of different organisms (as the wing of a bat and the human arm) due to evolutionary differentiation from a corresponding part in a common ancestor -- compare ANALOGY (2b) : Apologetics Page 4

5 ii. iii. correspondence in structure between a series of parts (as vertebrae) in the same individual Ernst Haeckel ( ), an influential German scientist published his drawings in 1874 and is credited with the biogenetic law, often quoted as ontongeny recapitulates phylogeny or translated, development repeats the evolutionary history of the organism. Not only did Haeckel add or omit features, Richardson and his colleagues report, but he also fudged the scale to exaggerate similarities among species, even when Haeckel s first stage there were 10-fold differences in size. Haeckel further blurred differences by neglecting to name the species Actual embryo appearance in most cases, as if one representat ive was accurate Generations of biology students may have been misled by a famous set of drawings of embryos published 123 years ago by the German biologist Ernst Haeckel. They show vertebrate embryos of different animals passing through identical stages of development. But the impression they give, that the embryos are exactly alike, is wrong, says Michael Richardson, an embryologist at St. George's Hospital Medical School in London. He hopes once and for all to discredit Haeckel's work, first found to be flawed more than a century ago. [1] Apologetics Page 5

6 iv. for an entire group of animals. In reality, Richardson and his colleagues note, even closely related embryos such as those of fish vary quite a bit in their appearance and developmental pathway. It looks like it's turning out to be one of the most famous fakes in biology, Richardson concludes. [1] We should... not be surprised that Haeckel's drawings entered nineteenthcentury textbooks. But we do, I think, have the right to be both astonished and ashamed by the century of mindless recycling that has led to the persistence of these drawings in a large number, if not a majority, of modern textbooks! Steven Jay Gould [7] v. Berra s Blunder as coined by Philip E. Johnson: If you compare a 1953 and a 1954 corvette, side by side, then a 1954 model, and so on, the descent with modification is overwhelmingly obvious. This is what [paleontologists] do with fossils, and the evidence is so solid and comprehensive that it cannot be denied by reasonable people. [8] (emphasis in the original) Tim Berra vi. These successive models of the Corvette [ 53, 54, 55] are based on plans drawn up by engineers, so there s intelligence at work to guide and implement the process. If you wanted to demonstrate that the similar features resulted from a Darwinian process, you would have to show that once you somehow got an automobile, the natural forces of rust, wind, water, and gravity would turn one model into its successor. [3] Jonathan Wells 6. Comparison of Human and Chimp genome: a. Our closest living relatives share perfect identity with 96 percent of our DNA sequence. and The DNA sequence that can be directly compared between the two genomes is almost 99 percent identical. NIH, 2005 [9] b. Genome Stats Assembly: GRCh37.p8, Feb 2009 CHIMP2.1.4, Feb 2011 Genebuild: Ensembl, Jul 2012 Ensembl, Dec 2011 Database version: Known genes: 21,224 16,810 Novel genes: Pseudogenes: 14, RNA genes: 15,592 8,657 Gene exons: 679, ,608 Gene transcripts: 194,015 29,123 Variants (indels, mutations, 52,126,039 1,580,730 SNPs): Base Pairs: 3,300,551,249 2,995,900,563 Apologetics Page 6

7 c. 304,650,686 bp differences in the genomes how can we account for these (not to mention the extra set of chromosomes in the chimp!)? d. It turns out that the 99 percent figure arises by using a number of restrictions [10]: i. ignore repetitive portions ii. compare only sequences that can be aligned naturally with one another iii. consider only base-pair substitutions, not indels e. f. Aligned sequence: i. Human G C C G A T A A G G A C ii. Chimp G C C G A T A A G G A C g. Substitution i. Human G C C G A T A A G G A C ii. Chimp G C C G A G A A G G A C h. indel (insertion/deletion) i. Human G C C G A T G C T G T A A A G C A C ii. Chimp G C C G A T A A G C A C i. for 7% of the chimpanzee sequences, no region with similarity could be detected in the human genome. [11] j. Science must interpret the data, but in what framework? If there is no God or no purpose, gradualism is virtually the only option, and adherents may cling to it uncritically. [12] k. The most striking genetic similarities between humans and chimps lie in many of the protein coding regions within the DNA. That is understandable from the standpoint of design, because proteins are the backbone of chemical machinery inside a cell. Cells have to have machinery for metabolism, for cell division, for translating DNA into proteins, for dealing with toxins, and for responding to the environment. The machinery has to accomplish many of the same things in cells Apologetics Page 7

8 of many kinds, so it should not be surprising that there are similarities among proteins not only between man and chimpanzee but throughout the world of living things. [10] l. Junk DNA Only 1.2% of the genome is coding. What about the rest? i. Noncoding DNA was interpreted as giving us a record of broken evolutionary pieces that no longer had a function it was junk DNA. [13] ii. The National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) launched a public research consortium named ENCODE, the Encyclopedia Of DNA Elements, in September 2003, to carry out a project to identify all functional elements in the human genome sequence. [14] iii. Presenting ENCODE, published in Nature in 2012: Collectively, the papers describe 1,640 data sets generated across 147 different cell types. Among the many important results there is one that stands out above them all: more than 80% of the human genome's components have now been assigned at least one biochemical function. [15] 7. Is Darwinism in trouble? much of present-day biological knowledge is ideological. A key symptom of ideological thinking is the explanation that has no implications and cannot be tested. I call such logical dead ends antitheories because they have exactly the opposite effect of real theories: they stop thinking rather than stimulate it. Evolution by natural selection, for instance, which Charles Darwin originally conceived as a great theory, has lately come to function more as an antitheory, called upon to cover up embarrassing experimental shortcomings and legitimize findings that are at best questionable and at worst not even wrong. Nobel Laureate, Robert B. Laughlin [16] 8. How are we to understand the war between science and Christianity? a. Genesis 1 In the beginning God created b. John 1:1-2 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. c. Colossians 1:16-17 For by him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things were created by him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together. d. "...far from science having buried God, not only do the results of science point towards his existence, but the scientific enterprise itself is validated by his existence. Inevitably, of course, not only those of us who do science, but all of us, have to choose THE PRESUPPOSITION WITH WHICH WE START. There are not many options - essentially just two. Either human intelligence ultimately owes its origin to mindless matter; or there is a Creator. It is strange that some people claim that it is their intelligence that leads them to prefer the first to the second."[12] John Lennox, Has Science Buried God Next week: Christianity vs. Science Apologetics Page 8

9 References Cited: 1. Pennisi, E., Haeckel's embryos: fraud rediscovered. Science, (5331): p Valenkin, A., Many Worlds in One: The Search for Other Universes. 2006, New York, NY: Hill and Wang. 3. Strobel, L., Case for the Creator: A Journalist Investigates Scientific Evidence That Points Toward God. 2005, Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan. 4. Hilbert, D., Philosophy of Mathematics. On the Infinite. 1964, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. 5. Wells, J., Icons of evolution : science or myth? : why much of what we teach about evolution is wrong. 2000, Washington, DC and Lanham, MD: Regnery Pub. 6. Gould, S.J., Hen's teeth and horse's toes. Norton paperback. 1984, New York: Norton. 413 p. 7. Gould, S.J., Abscheulich!(Atrocious!). NATURAL HISTORY, : p Berra, T.M., Evolution and the myth of creationism : a basic guide to the facts in the evolution debate. 1990, Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press. xvii, 198 p. 9. New Genome Comparison Finds Chimps, Humans Very Similar at the DNA Level [cited July ]; Available from: Poythress, V.S. A biblical and scientific Adam [cited 2013 July 27]; Available from: Ebersberger, I., et al., Genomewide comparison of DNA sequences between humans and chimpanzees. American journal of human genetics, (6): p Lennox, J., God's Undertaker: Has Science Buried God? 2009, Oxford, England: Lion Hudson, PLC. 13. Wells, J., The Myth of Junk DNA. 2011, Seattle, WA: Discovery Institute Press. 14. The ENCODE Project: ENCyclopedia Of DNA Elements. [cited July ]; Available from: Skipper, M., R. Dhand, and P. Campbell, Presenting ENCODE. Nature, (7414): p Laughlin, R.B., Different Universe: Reinventing Physics from the Bottom Down. 2006, New York, NY: Basic Books. Apologetics Page 9