2010 DC Brochure: The Origin of Life, 5 Questions Worth Asking (PDF)

by yknot 28 Replies latest members private

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  BurnTheShips

  
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  Black Sheep

  Page 25

  Henry Gee is the Senior Editor at Nature where they publish articles like this:

  Ecological interactions are evolutionarily conserved across the entire tree of life

  I wonder what he thinks of the WTs cut and paste of his words?
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  PrimateDave

  Thanks for the Google link Besty.

  http://www.texscience.org/reports/sboe-tree-life-2009feb7.htm

  

  Is it true that Darwin was wrong about the Tree of Life he proposed? Yes and no. Yes in a meaningless sense, not in the way implied by the very misleading NS cover, subtitle ("Cutting down the tree of life"), and article. Darwin's Tree of Life still very much exists, but in a different form than he knew or could know, since it has been revised by recent and dramatic increases in modern genetic knowledge. Is it true that a "significant challenge" has been made to Darwin's Tree of Life? Yes again, but this "challenge" is to the details of part of the tree brought about by discoveries of genetic information that Darwin did not have and could not possibly have known, so it's really quite irresponsible to claim that "Darwin was wrong" when he was essentially right and now new knowledge has changed our image of the tree of life. In addition, this challenge is old news: the traditional Tree of Life was revised almost a decade ago. A much better and scientifically-accurate article about this revision was published in 2000, and NS adds nothing new.

  Is it true that depictions of the Tree of Life are "wrong and misleading"? Yes and no. Darwin's original 1859 understanding of the Tree of Life was inaccurate, but not through any fault of his own; its traditional representations should not be used today. Modern depictions of the Tree of Life are neither wrong nor misleading (one still accurate representation was published in the 2000 paper).

  As we will see, for the most part the two news articles were sensationalistic and misleading. They were heavily criticized by evolutionary scientists within days of their publication in several ways. The scientists stated that the articles (1) were old news, probably being published to coincide with the upcoming 200th anniversary of Darwin's birth and 150th anniversary of the publication of the Origin of Species, (2) were unnecessarily sensationalistic, (3) gave Creationists an undeserved excuse to trumpet their common antipathy to common descent, and (4) were scientifically inaccurate when one analyzes some of the quoted statements they contain. Graham Lawton, the author of the New Scientist article, came in for especially heavy criticism since the original misleading article was his responsibility.
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  carla

  Well look on the bright side, it keeps them busy with this topic instead of shunning, everyone but us is evil, blood topic, and so forth. In fact I think they should spend the next year on this topic alone!
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  PrimateDave

  This brochure deserves a word by word disassembly to expose every logical fallacy and deception it contains. The Writing Department needs to be taken down a notch or three.
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  cantleave

  To read when I have time !
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  wobble

  Send a copy to Dawkins, he will go apesh*t !
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  teel

  Nah, Dawkins usually deals with arguments, this brochure contains none, just misreprentations, misquotes, and so on. They throw around the usual stupid arguments that were answered countless times: "the evolution is based on an infinitesimal chance, there are no fossils" etc. http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-misconceptions.html

  Thanks for the scan!
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  Caedes

  I have to say on my brief look at the brochure they seem to have been careful to point out (within the main text no less) that the scientists they have quoted (disclaimer : I haven't read the whole thing yet) don't support the WBTS view of creation.

  There seems to be little in there regarding the actual theory (they still fail to correctly define the word of course) of evolution other than to say it "collapses" because it doesn't explain abiogenesis! On that kind of logic we can disregard the laws of motions since they dont explain quantum mechanics.
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  Caedes

  They also seem to have a very convoluted argument regarding fossil evidence, they quote someone correctly explaining that the fossil record is not a complete record using an anology of a film where 99% is on the cutting room floor and we can only see one frame in a hundred.

  They then go on to argue that this means that 95% of fossils are not correct with regards to common descent and that scientists use the 5% of fossils that support their pre-concieved ideas about evolution. apart from being factually incorrect the argument just doesn't follow. The fact is that most animals that have died were never fossilised and even if they did manage to die in the right circumstances to become a fossil it is highly unlikely that we will be fortunate enough to find it since we only dig up a small proportion of all the fossils in the world. Science can only use the fossils we have, it simply isn't the case that the majority of fossils contradict the theory of common descent.