Christian Scientific Society AGM, Pittsburgh, April 7-8, 2017: Human Exceptionalism

Just to highlight what has already been said, exceptionalism does not refer to physical or biological or survival or even purely intellectual attributes of humans. Instead, humans are exceptional because of the capability of justice, responsibility - and praise for virtuous living or blame for sinful or immoral living. Humans are capable of growing towards the fullness of moral perfection and goodness. Humans are exceptional because we are capable of knowing ourselves, knowing something about reality and knowing what the term exceptional means and how to apply it.Silver Asiatic

January 31, 2017

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as to: "I’m quite happy with the idea that some (a very, very few) people are exceptional. The rest of us however fit into the extremely mediocre, as evidenced by our collective posts here; BA perhaps being the most ‘ordinary’ of all." 'Human exceptionalism' is not, as most of your post implied, referring to humans that are exceptional when compared to other 'ordinary' humans but is referring to the fact that humans are radically set apart from animals by the inherent 'image of God' that we have within ourselves that gives us a unique moral worth and dignity that is radically set apart from animals. If you have not noticed this radical difference between humans and animals perhaps you have not looked hard enough? For instance, when was the last time you saw monkeys building rockets to launch other monkeys into space? Even to the casual observer, that difference by itself should certainly suggest something radically out of the 'ordinary' is in play that sets humans uniquely apart from animals. Even Darwin's contemporary Alfred Wallace, who co-discovered natural selection, acknowledged this radical difference between humans and animals

"Nothing in evolution can account for the soul of man. The difference between man and the other animals is unbridgeable. Mathematics is alone sufficient to prove in man the possession of a faculty unexistent in other creatures. Then you have music and the artistic faculty. No, the soul was a separate creation." Alfred Russel Wallace - An interview by Harold Begbie printed on page four of The Daily Chronicle (London) issues of 3 November and 4 November 1910.

Verse:

Psalm 82:6-7 “I said, ‘You are “gods”; you are all sons of the Most High.’ But you will die like mere mortals; you will fall like every other ruler.”

Perhaps a more convincing evidence that we are made in the image of God could be if God Himself became a man, defeated death on a cross, and then rose from the dead to prove that He was indeed God. But who has ever heard of such overwhelming evidence as that?

Shroud of Turin: From discovery of Photographic Negative, to 3D Information, to Quantum Hologram – video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-TL4QOCiis&list=PLtAP1KN7ahia8hmDlCYEKifQ8n65oNpQ5&index=5

bornagain77

January 31, 2017

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I'm quite happy with the idea that some (a very, very few) people are exceptional. The rest of us however fit into the extremely mediocre, as evidenced by our collective posts here; BA perhaps being the most 'ordinary' of all. Genius, or human exceptionalism exists in the arts, painting, writing, music etc, in the sciences, and the understanding of the world; extremely limited human exceptionalism is easily seen. Now the rub; it is a rare quality, so rare indeed that the humans, Behe, Dawkins, Coyne, Dembski etc, fall way short of the 'exceptional' label; these people are 'gifted', not exceptional. Where does that leave you and I? Simple, in gob smacked awe of 'exceptionalism', and with a clear notion of its uniqueness. Does that mean you and I are worthless? Certainly not, we get to trip, stumble, fall, get up again, and do our best to appreciate, admire, and do our best to be exceptional in our own right, however much we fail. Exceptionalism is not a human right, as Christians, and other religions seem to suggest, we are not exceptional via a mere accident of birth, we are exceptional by our achivements. Unfortunately for all here, and on almost all internet sites, 'human mediocrity', is the norm. Please don't puff up with pride because you happen to be human, personally I think we have far more to be ashamed of. P.S. Humans 46 Chromosomes; Garden Snail 54; Silkworm 56; Guinea Pig 64; Goldfish 104: Exceptional?rvb8

January 31, 2017

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William J Murray @ 10

Perhaps what you mean to say is that many forms of exceptionalism have led to atrocities and one’s perspective on exceptionalism should be carefully examined to ensure it isn’t leading them into disastrous consequences.

I had hoped that it would be obvious from the examples I quoted that where one group of people claim to be exceptional it almost inevitably entails an implicit or even explicit assumption of superiority in most or all respects over all other groups. It is that assumption that underlay, for example, the often atrocious treatment of indigenous peoples by European colonial powers and the US. Albert Einstein was a an exceptional theoretical physicist, probably better in that field than all but a few people in the whole world. But set that exceptional ability aside and do we find a human being who is exceptional in all other respects? I would say, no, in other respects he was a pretty ordinary person. Human beings are exceptional for having a big brain and a powerful, versatile and creative intelligence. But, apart from that, aren't we just another rather unexceptional animal species? There are birds that have better eyesight, animals that can hear sounds we can't or detect smalls we can't or can run much faster than we can and so on. We have much we can be proud of but justifiable pride needs to be tempered with humility, a Christian virtue that, unfortunately, some seem to have forgotten.Seversky

January 30, 2017

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Folks, remember the OP highlights as key theme that people are different from animals -- thus, exceptional. This points to our responsible, rational, morally governed freedom. Without which, simply having a debate does not even make sense. The issue is to account for that, on pain of self-referential absurdity. KFkairosfocus

January 29, 2017

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PS: Heinie's prophetic anticipation of and rebuke to Nazism and its roots, in 1831 -- and yes he was a Christian of Jewish origin:

Christianity — and that is its greatest merit — has somewhat mitigated that brutal German love of war, but it could not destroy it. Should that subduing talisman, the cross, be shattered [--> the Swastika, visually, is a twisted, broken cross . . do not overlook the obvious], the frenzied madness of the ancient warriors, that insane Berserk rage of which Nordic bards have spoken and sung so often, will once more burst into flame [--> an irrational battle- and blood- lust]. … The old stone gods will then rise from long ruins and rub the dust of a thousand years from their eyes, and Thor will leap to life with his giant hammer and smash the Gothic cathedrals. … … Do not smile at my advice — the advice of a dreamer who warns you against Kantians, Fichteans, and philosophers of nature. Do not smile at the visionary who anticipates the same revolution in the realm of the visible as has taken place in the spiritual. Thought precedes action as lightning precedes thunder. German thunder … comes rolling somewhat slowly, but … its crash … will be unlike anything before in the history of the world. … At that uproar the eagles of the air will drop dead [--> cf. air warfare, symbol of the USA], and lions in farthest Africa [--> the lion is a key symbol of Britain, cf. also the North African campaigns] will draw in their tails and slink away. … A play will be performed in Germany which will make the French Revolution look like an innocent idyll. [Religion and Philosophy in Germany, 1831]

Seversky, ask your self what was it that he understood so deeply that you in your patent rage and disdain, despise? PPS: Have you paused to note that it was Mr Obama's administration that identified a list of hotbeds of terrorism [yes, six of seven states on the list were set by the previous US administration], that there has been a wave of global terrorism -- Jihad by bands is the proper phrase -- and that something has gone very wrong with border controls leading to easy and destructive infiltration. Including, under the cover of being refugees? As in, Paris and Brussels attacks. and this is before we get to the strange silence on the virtual absence of Christian refugees fleeing clear genocide. I only mention in passing the worst holocaust in history, 800+ million unborn children slaughtered in the womb since the 1970's, mounting at 1 million per week and enabled by the willful disregarding of their patent humanity under false colour of law. Something is very wrong with how issues are being discussed here. I do not endorse US Presidential candidates and have many serious concerns on the current US President, but it is an outrage for you to leap from vetting refugee candidates to the tactics used by Nazis to single out Jews for hate and slaughter.kairosfocus

January 29, 2017

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Seversky, in your first words you imply the OT is Christian. In fact it is a particular arrangement of the Hebrew -- Jewish -- scriptures. The critical flaw in ever so many over the top critiques then surfaces: would you be willing to upbraid an old Rabbi, with death camp number tattooed on his arm by Nazi neopagans and apostates following an antichrist, in the same tones you jump on Christians? Why or why not? KF PS: I suggest you read here, as a start: http://nicenesystheol.blogspot.com/2010/11/unit-9-sins-of-christendom.html#u9_introkairosfocus

January 29, 2017

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Seversky said:

Exceptionalism in all its forms is an evil that should be repudiated.

He then went on to provide a long list of atrocities committed - supposedly - in the name of some sort of exceptionalism, including ideological exceptionalism. One wonders what definition of "exceptionalism" Seversky is referring to. One also wonders if seversky considers "anti-exceptionalism" an exceptional ideological perspective? It appears so, since he thinks all forms of exceptionalism should be repudiated. Hmm. What about racial and gender equality? Does seversky consider that an exceptional ideological perspective? Should we not consider the skills of any doctor, artist or any other worker in any job exceptional? Should we not consider a particular university or company exceptional? Should we not consider any values whatsoever "exceptional", including Seversky's claim that "exceptionalism in all its forms is an evil that should be repudiated"? Now one wonders if Seversky has spent any time whatsoever internally reflecting on these self-conflicting, progressive talking points before regurgitating them in public for open criticism? Has it ever occurred to you, Seversky, that the reason you argue for some things, and against others, is because you consider your perspective exceptional (at least in regard to the others here at this venue) in some way, or else there'd be no reason for you to make such arguments? Some values and principles are exceptional, such as the right of free speech, equality under the law, and the use of fact and reason to settle disputes. Perhaps what you mean to say is that many forms of exceptionalism have led to atrocities and one's perspective on exceptionalism should be carefully examined to ensure it isn't leading them into disastrous consequences.William J Murray

January 29, 2017

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Exceptionalism in all its forms is an evil that should be repudiated. Christian exceptionalism, as recorded in the Old Testament is what led to the atrocities committed against the other peoples in that area by God and his proxies. European exceptionalism is what allowed the practice of slavery on an industrial scale and the appalling treatment of indigenous peoples in Africa, the Americas, Australia and New Zealand. Islamic exceptionalism is what has permited past and present atrocities against apostates and infidels. Germanic and Japanese exceptionalism resulted in the bloodbaths of World Wars One and Two. Ideological exceptionalism led to the millions of deaths under Russian and Chinese communism. US exceptionalism led to the near genocide against the Native American peoples and the debacles in Korea, Vietnam and Iraq. It's also beginning to rear its ugly head again with the Mexican border wall and this temporary ban on immigration from seven Muslim countries. What's next, all Muslims being required to wear armbands with the Muslim crescent symbol or being sent to concentration camps like Japanese American citizens in WWII?Seversky

January 28, 2017

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It is hard to imagine a more convincing scientific proof that we are made ‘in the image of God’ than finding both the universe, and life itself, are both ‘information theoretic’ in their foundational basis, and that we, of all the creatures on earth, uniquely possess an ability to understand and create information, and, moreover, have come to ‘master the planet’ precisely because of our unique ability infuse information into material substrates. Perhaps a more convincing evidence that we are made in the image of God could be if God Himself became a man, defeated death on a cross, and then rose from the dead to prove that He was indeed God. But who has ever heard of such overwhelming evidence as that?

Resurrection of Jesus Christ as the ‘Theory of Everything’ – Centrality Concerns – video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8uHST2uFPQY&t=10s&index=4&list=PLtAP1KN7ahia8hmDlCYEKifQ8n65oNpQ5 Shroud of Turin: From discovery of Photographic Negative, to 3D Information, to Quantum Hologram – video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-TL4QOCiis&list=PLtAP1KN7ahia8hmDlCYEKifQ8n65oNpQ5&index=5 Astonishing discovery at Christ’s tomb supports Turin Shroud – NOV 26TH 2016 Excerpt: The first attempts made to reproduce the face on the Shroud by radiation, used a CO2 laser which produced an image on a linen fabric that is similar at a macroscopic level. However, microscopic analysis showed a coloring that is too deep and many charred linen threads, features that are incompatible with the Shroud image. Instead, the results of ENEA “show that a short and intense burst of VUV directional radiation can color a linen cloth so as to reproduce many of the peculiar characteristics of the body image on the Shroud of Turin, including shades of color, the surface color of the fibrils of the outer linen fabric, and the absence of fluorescence”. ‘However, Enea scientists warn, “it should be noted that the total power of VUV radiations required to instantly color the surface of linen that corresponds to a human of average height, body surface area equal to = 2000 MW/cm2 17000 cm2 = 34 thousand billion watts makes it impractical today to reproduce the entire Shroud image using a single laser excimer, since this power cannot be produced by any VUV light source built to date (the most powerful available on the market come to several billion watts )”. Comment The ENEA study of the Holy Shroud of Turin concluded that it would take 34 Thousand Billion Watts of VUV radiations to make the image on the shroud. This output of electromagnetic energy remains beyond human technology. https://www.ewtn.co.uk/news/latest/astonishing-discovery-at-christ-s-tomb-supports-turin-shroud

Verses and Music:

Genesis 1:26 And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. John 1:1-4 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by Him, and without Him was not anything made that was made. In Him was life, and that life was the Light of men. Colossians 1:15-20 The Son is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For in him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things have been created through him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together. And he is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning and the firstborn from among the dead, so that in everything he might have the supremacy. For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross.

bornagain77

January 28, 2017

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And although the purported evidence for human evolution is far more imaginary than most people realize, it is interesting to note exactly where leading Darwinists themselves honestly admit that they have no real clue how a particular trait in humans could have possibly evolved.

Leading Evolutionary Scientists Admit We Have No Evolutionary Explanation of Human Language - December 19, 2014 Excerpt: Understanding the evolution of language requires evidence regarding origins and processes that led to change. In the last 40 years, there has been an explosion of research on this problem as well as a sense that considerable progress has been made. We argue instead that the richness of ideas is accompanied by a poverty of evidence, with essentially no explanation of how and why our linguistic computations and representations evolved.,,, (Marc Hauser, Charles Yang, Robert Berwick, Ian Tattersall, Michael J. Ryan, Jeffrey Watumull, Noam Chomsky and Richard C. Lewontin, "The mystery of language evolution," Frontiers in Psychology, Vol 5:401 (May 7, 2014).) Casey Luskin added: “It's difficult to imagine much stronger words from a more prestigious collection of experts.” http://www.evolutionnews.org/2014/12/leading_evoluti092141.html

Best Selling author Tom Wolfe was so taken aback by this honest confession by leading Darwinists that he wrote a book on the subject.,,,

“Speech is not one of man’s several unique attributes — speech is the attribute of all attributes!” – Wolfe “Speech is 95 percent plus of what lifts man above animal! Physically, man is a sad case. His teeth, including his incisors, which he calls eyeteeth, are baby-size and can barely penetrate the skin of a too-green apple. His claws can’t do anything but scratch him where he itches. His stringy-ligament body makes him a weakling compared to all the animals his size. Animals his size? In hand-to-paw, hand-to-claw, or hand-to-incisor combat, any animal his size would have him for lunch. Yet man owns or controls them all, every animal that exists, thanks to his superpower: speech.” —Tom Wolfe, in the introduction to his book, The Kingdom of Speech

In other words, although humans are fairly defenseless creatures in the wild compared to other creatures, such as lions, bears, and sharks, etc.., nonetheless, humans have, completely contrary to Darwinian ‘survival of the fittest’ thinking, managed to become masters of the planet, not by brute force, but simply by our unique ability to communicate information and, more specifically, infuse information into material substrates in order to create, i.e. intelligently design, objects that are extremely useful for our defense, shelter, in procuring food, furtherance of our knowledge, and also for our pleasure. And although the ‘top-down’ infusion of immaterial information into material substrates, that allowed humans to become ‘masters of the planet’, was rather crude to begin with, (i.e. spears, arrows, and plows etc..), this top down infusion of immaterial information into material substrates has become much more impressive over the last half century or so. Specifically, the ‘top-down’ infusion of mathematical and/or logical information into material substrates lies at the very basis of many, if not all, of man’s most stunning, almost miraculous, technological advances in recent decades. Here are a couple of articles which clearly get this ‘top-down’ infusion of immaterial information point across:

Here is one by Peter Tyson Describing Nature With Math By Peter Tyson – Nov. 2011 Excerpt: Mathematics underlies virtually all of our technology today. James Maxwell’s four equations summarizing electromagnetism led directly to radio and all other forms of telecommunication. E = mc2 led directly to nuclear power and nuclear weapons. The equations of quantum mechanics made possible everything from transistors and semiconductors to electron microscopy and magnetic resonance imaging. Indeed, many of the technologies you and I enjoy every day simply would not work without mathematics. When you do a Google search, you’re relying on 19th-century algebra, on which the search engine’s algorithms are based. When you watch a movie, you may well be seeing mountains and other natural features that, while appearing as real as rock, arise entirely from mathematical models. When you play your iPod, you’re hearing a mathematical recreation of music that is stored digitally; your cell phone does the same in real time. “When you listen to a mobile phone, you’re not actually hearing the voice of the person speaking,” Devlin told me. “You’re hearing a mathematical recreation of that voice. That voice is reduced to mathematics.” http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/physics/describing-nature-math.html Recognising Top-Down Causation – George Ellis Excerpt: page 5: A: Causal Efficacy of Non Physical entities: Both the program and the data are non-physical entities, indeed so is all software. A program is not a physical thing you can point to, but by Definition 2 it certainly exists. You can point to a CD or flashdrive where it is stored, but that is not the thing in itself: it is a medium in which it is stored. The program itself is an abstract entity, shaped by abstract logic. Is the software “nothing but” its realisation through a specific set of stored electronic states in the computer memory banks? No it is not because it is the precise pattern in those states that matters: a higher level relation that is not apparent at the scale of the electrons themselves. It’s a relational thing (and if you get the relations between the symbols wrong, so you have a syntax error, it will all come to a grinding halt). This abstract nature of software is realised in the concept of virtual machines, which occur at every level in the computer hierarchy except the bottom one [17]. But this tower of virtual machines causes physical effects in the real world, for example when a computer controls a robot in an assembly line to create physical artefacts. Excerpt page 7: The assumption that causation is bottom up only is wrong in biology, in computers, and even in many cases in physics, ,,, The mind is not a physical entity, but it certainly is causally effective: proof is the existence of the computer on which you are reading this text. It could not exist if it had not been designed and manufactured according to someone’s plans, thereby proving the causal efficacy of thoughts, which like computer programs and data are not physical entities. http://fqxi.org/data/essay-contest-files/Ellis_FQXI_Essay_Ellis_2012.pdf

What is more interesting still, besides the fact that humans have a unique ability to understand and create information and have come to dominate the world through the ‘top-down’ infusion of information into material substrates, is the fact that, due to advances in science, both the universe and life itself are now found to be ‘information theoretic’ in their foundational basis. Renowned physicist John Wheeler stated “in short all matter and all things physical are information-theoretic in origin and this is a participatory universe”.

“it from bit” Every “it”— every particle, every field of force, even the space-time continuum itself derives its function, its meaning, its very existence entirely—even if in some contexts indirectly—from the apparatus-elicited answers to yes-or-no questions, binary choices, bits. “It from bit” symbolizes the idea that every item of the physical world has a bottom—a very deep bottom, in most instances, an immaterial source and explanation, that which we call reality arises in the last analysis from the posing of yes-no questions and the registering of equipment—evoked responses, in short all matter and all things physical are information-theoretic in origin and this is a participatory universe.” – Princeton University physicist John Wheeler (1911–2008) (Wheeler, John A. (1990), “Information, physics, quantum: The search for links”, in W. Zurek, Complexity, Entropy, and the Physics of Information (Redwood City, California: Addison-Wesley))

In the following article, Anton Zeilinger, a leading expert in quantum mechanics, stated that ‘it may very well be said that information is the irreducible kernel from which everything else flows.’

Why the Quantum? It from Bit? A Participatory Universe? Excerpt: In conclusion, it may very well be said that information is the irreducible kernel from which everything else flows. Thence the question why nature appears quantized is simply a consequence of the fact that information itself is quantized by necessity. It might even be fair to observe that the concept that information is fundamental is very old knowledge of humanity, witness for example the beginning of gospel according to John: “In the beginning was the Word.” Anton Zeilinger – a leading expert in quantum mechanics: http://www.metanexus.net/archive/ultimate_reality/zeilinger.pdf

In the following video at the 48:24 mark, Anton Zeilinger states that “It is operationally impossible to separate Reality and Information” and he goes on to note, at the 49:45 mark, the Theological significance of “In the Beginning was the Word” John 1:1

48:24 mark: “It is operationally impossible to separate Reality and Information” 49:45 mark: “In the Beginning was the Word” John 1:1 Prof Anton Zeilinger speaks on quantum physics. at UCT – video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s3ZPWW5NOrw

Vlatko Vedral, who is a Professor of Physics at the University of Oxford, and who is also a recognized leader in the field of quantum mechanics, states,

“The most fundamental definition of reality is not matter or energy, but information–and it is the processing of information that lies at the root of all physical, biological, economic, and social phenomena.” Vlatko Vedral – Professor of Physics at the University of Oxford, and CQT (Centre for Quantum Technologies) at the National University of Singapore, and a Fellow of Wolfson College – a recognized leader in the field of quantum mechanics.

Moreover, besides being foundational to physical reality, information, as Intelligent Design advocates are constantly pointing out to Darwinists, is also found to be ‘infused’ into biological life.

Information Enigma (Where did the information in life come from?) – – Stephen Meyer – Doug Axe – video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aA-FcnLsF1g Complex grammar of the genomic language – November 9, 2015 Excerpt: The ‘grammar’ of the human genetic code is more complex than that of even the most intricately constructed spoken languages in the world. The findings explain why the human genome is so difficult to decipher –,,, ,,, in their recent study in Nature, the Taipale team examines the binding preferences of pairs of transcription factors, and systematically maps the compound DNA words they bind to. Their analysis reveals that the grammar of the genetic code is much more complex than that of even the most complex human languages. Instead of simply joining two words together by deleting a space, the individual words that are joined together in compound DNA words are altered, leading to a large number of completely new words. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/11/151109140252.htm Biophysics – Information theory. Relation between information and entropy: – Setlow-Pollard, Ed. Addison Wesley Excerpt: Linschitz gave the figure 9.3 x 10^12 cal/deg or 9.3 x 10^12 x 4.2 joules/deg for the entropy of a bacterial cell. Using the relation H = S/(k In 2), we find that the information content is 4 x 10^12 bits. Morowitz’ deduction from the work of Bayne-Jones and Rhees gives the lower value of 5.6 x 10^11 bits, which is still in the neighborhood of 10^12 bits. Thus two quite different approaches give rather concordant figures. http://www.astroscu.unam.mx/~angel/tsb/molecular.htm “a one-celled bacterium, e. coli, is estimated to contain the equivalent of 100 million pages of Encyclopedia Britannica. Expressed in information in science jargon, this would be the same as 10^12 bits of information. In comparison, the total writings from classical Greek Civilization is only 10^9 bits, and the largest libraries in the world – The British Museum, Oxford Bodleian Library, New York Public Library, Harvard Widenier Library, and the Moscow Lenin Library – have about 10 million volumes or 10^12 bits.” – R. C. Wysong ‘The information content of a simple cell has been estimated as around 10^12 bits, comparable to about a hundred million pages of the Encyclopedia Britannica.” Carl Sagan, “Life” in Encyclopedia Britannica: Macropaedia (1974 ed.), pp. 893-894

bornagain77

January 28, 2017

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So if genes do not explain the differences between species what does? Not so surprising, it is the regulatory regions that control gene expression that are found to be very different between even to supposedly closely related species of humans and chimps. Specifically, alernative splicing is found to be 'species specific'

The Evolutionary Landscape of Alternative Splicing in Vertebrate Species - 2012 Excerpt: How species with similar repertoires of protein-coding genes differ so markedly at the phenotypic level is poorly understood. By comparing organ transcriptomes from vertebrate species spanning ~350 million years of evolution, we observed significant differences in alternative splicing complexity between vertebrate lineages, with the highest complexity in primates. Within 6 million years, the splicing profiles of physiologically equivalent organs diverged such that they are more strongly related to the identity of a species than they are to organ type.,,, http://science.sciencemag.org/content/338/6114/1587 Evolution by Splicing – Comparing gene transcripts from different species reveals surprising splicing diversity. – Ruth Williams – December 20, 2012 Excerpt: A major question in vertebrate evolutionary biology is “how do physical and behavioral differences arise if we have a very similar set of genes to that of the mouse, chicken, or frog?”,,, ,, “The alternative splicing patterns are very different even between humans and chimpanzees,” said Blencowe.,,, http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view%2FarticleNo%2F33782%2Ftitle%2FEvolution-by-Splicing%2F "Where (chimps and humans) really differ, and they differ by orders of magnitude, is in the genomic architecture outside the protein coding regions. They are vastly, vastly, different.,, The structural, the organization, the regulatory sequences, the hierarchy for how things are organized and used are vastly different between a chimpanzee and a human being in their genomes." Raymond Bohlin (per Richard Sternberg) - 9:29 minute mark of video The Extreme Complexity Of Genes - Dr. Raymond G. Bohlin http://www.metacafe.com/watch/8593991/

Although Darwinian evolution is based on a gene-centric view, alternative splicing 'can produce variant proteins and expression patterns as different as the products of different genes':

Frequent Alternative Splicing of Human Genes – 1999 Excerpt: Alternative splicing can produce variant proteins and expression patterns as different as the products of different genes. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC310997/

The diversity of unique proteins generated by alternative splicing is astonishing

What is Cancer Proteomics? Excerpt: One gene can encode more than one protein (even up to 1,000). The human genome contains about 21,000 protein-encoding genes, but the total number of proteins in human cells is estimated to be (via alternative splicing) between 250,000 to one million. https://proteomics.cancer.gov/whatisproteomics Widespread Expansion of Protein Interaction Capabilities by Alternative Splicing – 2016 In Brief Alternatively spliced isoforms of proteins exhibit strikingly different interaction profiles and thus, in the context of global interactome networks, appear to behave as if encoded by distinct genes rather than as minor variants of each other.,,, Page 806 excerpt: As many as 100,000 distinct isoform transcripts could be produced from the 20,000 human protein-coding genes (Pan et al., 2008), collectively leading to perhaps over a million distinct polypeptides obtained by post-translational modification of products of all possible transcript isoforms (Smith and Kelleher, 2013). http://iakouchevalab.ucsd.edu/publications/Yang_Cell_OMIM_2016.pdf

Besides humans having tens, to hundreds, of thousands of unique proteins that exhibit 'strikingly different interaction profiles' than chimps, humans are also far more different from Chimps in terms of anatomy, physiology, and behavior than Darwinists have falsely presupposed:

Comparing the human and chimpanzee genomes: Searching for needles in a haystack – Ajit Varki1 and Tasha K. Altheide – 2005 Excerpt: we have many characteristics that are uniquely human. Table 1 lists some of the definite and possible phenotypic traits that appear to differentiate us from chimpanzees and other “great apes”2. For the most part, we do not know which genetic features interact with the environment to generate these differences between the “phenomes”3 of our two species. The chimpanzee has also long been seen as a model for human diseases because of its close evolutionary relationship. This is indeed the case for a few disorders. Nevertheless, it is a striking paradox that chimpanzees are in fact not good models for many major human diseases/conditions (see Table 2) (Varki 2000; Olson and Varki 2003). http://genome.cshlp.org/content/15/12/1746.full.pdf+html Table 1. Some phenotypic traits of humans for comparison with those of great apes http://genome.cshlp.org/content/15/12/1746/T1.expansion.html

bornagain77

January 28, 2017

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Moreover, the genetic evidence is also far more discontinuous than it is imagined to be in the minds of Darwinists. Although Chimps do indeed share genetic similarity with humans, there are a few problems with the 99% genetic similarity myth that Darwinists often tout as their knock down proof that we must have evolved from chimps. First off the genetic similarity is not 99% but is closer to 92% or perhaps even as low as 80%

Are We 99% Chimps? - NOT SO FAST, BONZO - By John Stonestreet - January 24, 2017 Excerpt: Writing at Evolution News and Views, David Klinghoffer points out that the “99%” myth is based on hopelessly outdated research. But it got a shot in the arm after researchers at the Genome Consortium announced in 2005 they’d sequenced chimp DNA and compared it with our own. Newspapers the world over trumpeted the similarity between the two genomes as further proof of our close ancestry. What they neglected to mention was that the project only compared protein-coding segments of the genome, which in humans, account for just 2% of the total! The rest is what Francis Collins once termed “junk DNA.” Except, as scientists have since discovered and Collins has admitted, this “junk” serves regulatory roles that determine how other genes are expressed, particularly in the brain. In other words, “junk DNA,” which makes up the vast majority of our genome, is a vital part of what makes humans, human and chimps, chimps. Second, it turns out that the “99%” figure resulted from using a complete human genome as the template to sequence that of chimpanzees. That would be like assembling a jigsaw puzzle based on how another puzzle fit together! The comparison also selected for areas of greater similarity and discarded those that didn’t match. To put it very simply, the two genomes looked similar because researchers expected them to look similar. Based on what we now know, biologist and Senior Fellow at the Center for Science and Culture, Ann Gauger, estimates that humans and chimps share around 92% of our DNA. To put that in perspective, scientists tell us that we’re 90% identical to cats. Fake Science: "About 99% of Our DNA Is Identical to That of Chimpanzees" David Klinghoffer | evolutionnews.org | January 2, 2017 How Chimps and Humans are Different, Pt. 1: The Genome Discovery Institute | November 18, 2016 How Chimps and Humans are Different, Pt. 2: Human-specific Genes Discovery Institute | November 22, 2016 http://www.breakpoint.org/bpcommentaries/entry/13/30394 Complete Reanalysis of Chimpanzee and Human Genome-Wide DNA Similarity Using Nucmer and LASTZ by Jeffrey P. Tomkins on October 7, 2015 Excerpt: the LASTZ results which contained only unique alignments, produced an average overall genome similarity of only about 73% sequence identity. However, the LASTZ alignments also did not represent a comprehensive genome alignment survey due to the fact that the query sequences were sliced into 10,000 base fragments and a significant portion of unaligned sequence was not returned,,, In summary, it can be fairly well stated that the chimpanzee genome is not 98 to 99% similar to human, but at most no more than about 88% similar overall. However, there are several caveats that must be considered. First, the chimpanzee genomic sequence used in this study was assembled onto the human genome as a framework and thus does not stand on its own merits (Tomkins 2011b). And second, the majority of flow cytometry studies of chimpanzee nuclei along with the cytogenetic analysis of chromosomes indicate a genome size difference of about 8%, with the chimpanzee genome having a significantly larger amount of heterochromatic DNA compared to human (Formenti et al. 1983; Pellicciari et al. 1982, 1988, 1990a, 1990b; Seuanez et al. 1977). Thus, the actual genome similarity with human, even using the high end estimate of 88% for just the alignable regions, is realistically only about 80% or less when the cytogenetic data is taken into account. https://answersingenesis.org/genetics/dna-similarities/blastn-algorithm-anomaly/

Another problem with trying to use genetic similarity to try to establish common ancestry is that totally unrelated species are found to be surprisingly similar on the genetic level. Thus, if genetic similarity between the supposedly closely related species of humans and chimps is supposed proof for evolution, why is genetic similarity between supposedly distantly related species not taken to be proof against Darwinian evolution?

Frogs and humans are kissing cousins - 2010 Excerpt: What's the difference between a frog, a chicken, a mouse and a human? Not as much as you'd think, according to an analysis of the first sequenced amphibian genome. The genome of the western clawed frog, Xenopus tropicalis, has now been analysed by an international consortium of scientists from 24 institutions, and joins a list of sequenced model organisms including the mouse, zebrafish, nematode and fruit fly. What's most surprising, researchers say, is how closely the amphibian's genome resembles that of the mouse and the human, with large swathes of frog DNA on several chromosomes having genes arranged in the same order as in these mammals. The results of the analysis are published in Science this week1. "There are megabases of sequence where gene order has changed very little,,,” http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100429/full/news.2010.211.html Dolphin DNA very close to human, - 2010 Excerpt: They’re closer to us than cows, horses, or pigs, despite the fact that they live in the water.,,, “The extent of the genetic similarity came as a real surprise to us,” ,,, “Dolphins are marine mammals that swim in the ocean and it was astonishing to learn that we had more in common with the dolphin than with land mammals,” says geneticist Horst Hameister.,,, “We started looking at these and it became very obvious to us that every human chromosome had a corollary chromosome in the dolphin,” Busbee said. “We’ve found that the dolphin genome and the human genome basically are the same. It’s just that there’s a few chromosomal rearrangements that have changed the way the genetic material is put together.” http://www.reefrelieffounders.com/science/2010/10/21/articlesafari-dolphin-dna-very-close-to-human/ Kolber, J., 2010, Dolphin DNA very close to human, viewed 18th March 2012, Kumar, S., 2010, Human genes closer to dolphin’s than any land animal, Discovery Channel Online, Kangaroo genes close to humans Excerpt: Australia's kangaroos are genetically similar to humans,,, "There are a few differences, we have a few more of this, a few less of that, but they are the same genes and a lot of them are in the same order," ,,,"We thought they'd be completely scrambled, but they're not. There is great chunks of the human genome which is sitting right there in the kangaroo genome," http://www.reuters.com/article/science%20News/idUSTRE4AH1P020081118 Shark and human proteins “stunningly similar”; shark closer to human than to zebrafish – December 9, 2013 Excerpt: “We were very surprised to find, that for many categories of proteins, sharks share more similarities with humans than zebrafish,” Stanhope said. “Although sharks and bony fishes are not closely related, they are nonetheless both fish … while mammals have very different anatomies and physiologies. https://uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/shark-and-human-proteins-stunningly-similar-shark-closer-to-human-than-to-zebrafish/ Research shows that corals share many of the genes in the human genome - June 1, 2016 Excerpt: UH M?noa scientists,,, have published new research showing that corals share many of the genes humans possess, especially those that can sense temperature and acidity, both of which are important to keeping both coral and humans healthy.,, "it was surprising to find that corals share many of the genes we possess," said Dr. Stokes. http://phys.org/news/2016-06-corals-genes-human-genome.html Efforts to make and apply humanized yeast – Oct. 13, 2015 Excerpt: A large proportion of yeast protein-coding genes that have been tested can be replaced with their human orthologs. http://bfg.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2015/10/13/bfgp.elv041.full.pdf+html Genetic Evolution Falsified - May 23, 2015 Excerpt: To study this effect systematically, Kachroo et al. replaced over 400 essential yeast genes with their human orthologs. Roughly half of the human genes could functionally replace their yeast counterparts. Genes being in the same pathway was as important as sequence or expression similarity in determining replaceability. ,,, If prediction is a measure of scientific validity of a theory, this amounts to a falsification. This “certainly” was not what the evolutionists expected. http://crev.info/2015/05/genetic-evolution-falsified/

bornagain77

January 28, 2017

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DeWitt’s digital manipulation of skull 1470 (Homo Rudolfensis)- August 13, 2012 Excerpt: The skull as presented in the news websites has some significant issues that suggests that the facial reconstruction is seriously off. https://uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/dewitts-reconstruction-of-skull-1470/ A Big Bang Theory of Homo - Casey Luskin - August 2012 Excerpt: To the contrary, she explains, [homo] habilis "displays much stronger similarities to African ape limb proportions" than even Lucy. She called these results "unexpected in view of previous accounts of Homo habilis as a link between australopithecines and humans." Without habilis as an intermediate, it is difficult to find fossil hominins to serve as direct transitional forms between the australopithecines and Homo. Rather, the fossil record shows dramatic and abrupt changes that correspond to the appearance of Homo. http://www.evolutionnews.org/2012/08/a_big_bang_theo063141.html As a Taxonomic Group, "Homo habilis" Is Challenged in the Journal Science - Casey Luskin - September 9, 2015 Excerpt: in a recent article in Science, "Defining the genus Homo," Jeffrey H. Schwartz and Ian Tattersall explain that Homo habilis (literally, "handy man") was originally placed within Homo because researchers wanted an old species that apparently made tools: In 1964, Leakey and colleagues attributed the newly discovered ~1.8-million-year-old partial mandible, skullcap and hand (OH7) and foot (OH8), plus other materials from Olduvai Gorge, to the new species Homo habilis. This species replaced the very roughly contemporaneous South African australopiths in Mayr's transformationist scenario, although there was scant morphological justification for including any of this very ancient material in Homo. Indeed, the main motivation appears to have been Leakey's desire to identify this hominid as the maker of the simple stone tools found in the lower layers of the Gorge, following the dictum of Man the Toolmaker. This association has subsequently proven highly dubious. The inclusion in Homo of the H. habilis fossils so broadened the morphology of the genus that further hominids from other sites could be shoehorned into it almost without regard to their physical appearance. As a result, the largely unexamined definition of Homo became even murkier. http://www.evolutionnews.org/2015/09/as_a_taxonomic_099181.html The changing face of genus Homo - Wood; Collard Excerpt: the current criteria for identifying species of Homo are difficult, if not impossible, to operate using paleoanthropological evidence. We discuss alternative, verifiable, criteria, and show that when these new criteria are applied to Homo, two species, Homo habilis and Homo rudolfensis, fail to meet them. http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/68503570/abstract Hominids, Homonyms, and Homo sapiens - 05/27/2009 - Creation Safaris: Excerpt: Homo erectus is particularly controversial, because it is such a broad classification. Tattersall and Schwartz find no clear connection between the Asian, European and African specimens lumped into this class. “In his 1950 review, Ernst Mayr placed all of these forms firmly within the species Homo erectus,” they explained. “Subsequently, Homo erectus became the standard-issue ‘hominid in the middle,’ expanding to include not only the fossils just mentioned, but others of the same general period....”. They discussed the arbitrariness of this classification: "Put together, all these fossils (which span almost 2 myr) make a very heterogeneous assortment indeed; and placing them all together in the same species only makes any conceivable sense in the context of the ecumenical view of Homo erectus as the middle stage of the single hypervariable hominid lineage envisioned by Mayr (on the basis of a much slenderer record). Viewed from the morphological angle, however, the practice of cramming all of this material into a single Old World-wide species is highly questionable. Indeed, the stuffing process has only been rendered possible by a sort of ratchet effect, in which fossils allocated to Homo erectus almost regardless of their morphology have subsequently been cited as proof of just how variable the species can be." By “ratchet effect,” they appear to mean something like a self-fulfilling prophecy: i.e., “Let’s put everything from this 2-million-year period into one class that we will call Homo erectus.” Someone complains, “But this fossil from Singapore is very different from the others.” The first responds, “That just shows how variable the species Homo erectus can be.” http://creationsafaris.com/crev200905.htm#20090527a

The actual evidence for human evolution is far more discontinuous than it is imagined to be in the minds of Darwinists:

(Homo Erectus) Skull "Rewrites" Story of Human Evolution -- Again - Casey Luskin - October 22, 2013 Excerpt: "There is a big gap in the fossil record," Zollikofer told NBC News. "I would put a question mark there. Of course it would be nice to say this was the last common ancestor of Neanderthals and us, but we simply don't know." http://www.evolutionnews.org/2013/10/skull_rewrites_078221.html "A number of hominid crania are known from sites in eastern and southern Africa in the 400- to 200-thousand-year range, but none of them looks like a close antecedent of the anatomically distinctive Homo sapiens…Even allowing for the poor record we have of our close extinct kin, Homo sapiens appears as distinctive and unprecedented…there is certainly no evidence to support the notion that we gradually became who we inherently are over an extended period, in either the physical or the intellectual sense." Dr. Ian Tattersall: - paleoanthropologist - emeritus curator of the American Museum of Natural History - (Masters of the Planet, 2012) Human/Ape Common Ancestry: Following the Evidence - Casey Luskin - June 2011 Excerpt: So the researchers constructed an evolutionary tree based on 129 skull and tooth measurements for living hominoids, including gorillas, chimpanzees, orangutans and humans, and did the same with 62 measurements recorded on Old World monkeys, including baboons, mangabeys and macaques. They also drew upon published molecular phylogenies. At the outset, Wood and Collard assumed the molecular evidence was correct. “There were so many different lines of genetic evidence pointing in one direction,” Collard explains. But no matter how the computer analysis was run, the molecular and morphological trees could not be made to match15 (see figure, below). Collard says this casts grave doubt on the reliability of using morphological evidence to determine the fine details of evolutionary trees for higher primates. “It is saying it is positively misleading,” he says. The abstract of the pair’s paper stated provocatively that “existing phylogenetic hypotheses about human evolution are unlikely to be reliable”.[10] http://www.evolutionnews.org/2011/06/following_the_evidence_where_i047161.html#comment-9266481 No Known Hominin Is Common Ancestor of Neanderthals and Modern Humans, Study Suggests - Oct. 21, 2013 Excerpt: The article, "No known hominin species matches the expected dental morphology of the last common ancestor of Neanderthals and modern humans," relies on fossils of approximately 1,200 molars and premolars from 13 species or types of hominins -- humans and human relatives and ancestors. Fossils from the well-known Atapuerca sites have a crucial role in this research, accounting for more than 15 percent of the complete studied fossil collection.,,, They conclude with high statistical confidence that none of the hominins usually proposed as a common ancestor, such as Homo heidelbergensis, H. erectus and H. antecessor, is a satisfactory match. "None of the species that have been previously suggested as the last common ancestor of Neanderthals and modern humans has a dental morphology that is fully compatible with the expected morphology of this ancestor," Gómez-Robles said. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/10/131021153202.htm

bornagain77

January 28, 2017

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As to Darwinists misleading the public with imaginary restorations, one can see that ‘artistic license’, instead of science, for human evolution being played out on the following site.

10 Transitional Ancestors of Human Evolution by Tyler G., March 18, 2013 http://listverse.com/2013/03/18/10-transitional-ancestors-of-human-evolution/

Please note, on the preceding site, how the sclera (white of the eye), a uniquely human characteristic, was brought in very early on, in the artists’ reconstructions, to make the fossils appear human-like, even though the artists making the reconstructions clearly have no possible clue what the colors of the eyes, of these supposedly transitional fossils, actually were.

Evolution of human eye as a device for communication – Hiromi Kobayashi – Kyoto University, Japan Excerpt: The uniqueness of human eye morphology among primates illustrates the remarkable difference between human and other primates in the ability to communicate using gaze signals. http://www.saga-jp.org/coe_abst/kobayashi.htm

'Artistic license' also played out heavily in how (some) Darwinists apparently lined up skulls, in a severely misleading photo, so as to (purposely?) mislead the public:

Contemplating Bill Nye’s 51 skulls slide - February 10, 2014 - with video Excerpt: David A. DeWitt, Biology & Chemistry chair at Liberty, knows a thing or two about skulls, and writes to say, "This afternoon and evening I tracked down 46 of the 51 skulls that were on the slide Nye showed in the Ken Ham debate (at about 1:05 on the Youtube video). This was a challenge because some of them are not very well analyzed, partial skulls, etc. While some of them are well known, others are rarely discussed. I believe only a well-trained anthropologist would have been able to address that slide in the very brief time that it was visible. It was especially confusing because the skulls are in different orientations (including one that is viewed from the bottom and one that is just a jaw). They were not shown with the same scale so the relative sizes are wrong, and they are not grouped or lined up in any clear order. They are mixed up by type of skull and by date, and the only label is the name of the individual skull. I suspect that this was deliberate.,,," "I can only conclude that the sole purpose of showing such a slide was to confuse and obfuscate, not educate.” https://uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/from-david-dewitt-at-liberty-u-contemplating-bill-nyes-51-skulls-slide/

So powerful is the unrestrained imagination, over actual empirical evidence, in Darwinian thought that a palaeontologist actually altered a reconstruction of the hip bone of 'Lucy', on a public TV show no less, in order to give the hip bone the supposed proper anatomical configuration so as to enable her to walk upright as he, the palaeontologist, imagined she must have done. The thought that 'Lucy' might not have walked upright apparently never entered his mind.

Lucy – The Powersaw Incident – a humorous video showing how biased evolutionists can be with the evidence – 32:08 mark of video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FI4ADhPVpA0&feature=player_detailpage#t=1928

Other 'Lucy' fossils have been found since the 'powersaw incident' that show that Lucy could not have possibly walked upright.

Lucy Makeover Shouts a Dangerously Deceptive Message About Our Supposed Ancestors by Dr. Elizabeth Mitchell on October 5, 2013 Excerpt: Australopithecus afarensis is extinct. Its bones suggest it was not identical to living apes, but it did have much in common with them. Many have assessed the skeletal pieces of the various afarensis and possible afarensis fossils that have been found. Overall, these skeletal parts reveal an animal well-adapted to arboreal life. Its wrist bones also suggest it was a knuckle-walker. Reconstructions of its pelvis demonstrate its so-called “bipedal” gait was nothing like a human being’s upright gait. In fact, it is only the evolutionary wish to impute a bipedal gait to this animal that marches its fossils upright across the pages of the evolutionary story. https://answersingenesis.org/human-evolution/lucy/lucy-makeover-shouts-a-dangerously-deceptive-message-about-our-supposed-ancestors/ A Look at Lucy’s Legacy by Dr. David Menton and Dr. Elizabeth Mitchell on June 6, 2012 Excerpt: Other analyses taking advantage of modern technology, such as those by Christine Berge published in 1994-25 and 2010-26 in the Journal of Human Evolution, offer a different reconstruction allowing for a unique sort of locomotion. Berge writes, “The results clearly indicate that australopithecine bipedalism differs from that of humans. (1) The extended lower limb of australopithecines would have lacked stabilization during walking;,,, Lucy’s bones show the features used to lock the wrist for secure knuckle-walking seen in modern knuckle-walkers. https://answersingenesis.org/human-evolution/lucy/a-look-at-lucys-legacy/ "these australopith specimens can be accommodated with the range of intraspecific variation of African apes" Nature 443 (9/2006), p.296

Here is an anatomically correct reconstruction of Lucy based on the evidence instead of the unrestrained imagination of Darwinists

Lucy - a correct reconstruction - picture https://cdn-assets.answersingenesis.org/img/articles/campaigns/lucy-exhibit.jpg

Besides 'Lucy', early homo designations are based on as much unrestrained imagination, instead of empirical evidence, as 'Lucy' was:

"One famous fossil skull, discovered in 1972 in northern Kenya, changed its appearance dramatically depending on how the upper jaw was connected to the rest of the cranium. Roger Lewin recounts an occasion when paleoanthropologists Alan Walker, Michael Day, and Richard Leakey were studying the two sections of skull 1470 [Homo rudolfensis]. According to Lewin, Walker said: You could hold the [upper jaw] forward, and give it a long face, or you could tuck it in, making the face short…. How you held it really depended on your preconceptions. It was very interesting watching what people did with it. Lewin reports that Leakey recalled the incident, too: Yes. If you held it one way, it looked like one thing; if you held it another, it looked like something else." Roger Lewin, Bones of Contention, Second Edition (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1997), p 160 https://uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/human-evolution-skull-1470-it-turns-out-has-a-multiple-personality-disorder/ Man's Earliest Direct Ancestors Looked More Apelike Than Previously Believed - March 27, 2007 Excerpt: "Dr. Leakey produced an intrinsically biased reconstruction (of 1470/ Homo Rudolfensis) based on erroneous preconceived expectations of early human appearance that violated principles of craniofacial development,",,, "Because he did not employ biological principles, Dr. Leakey produced a reconstruction that could not have existed in real life,"  - Dr. Timothy Bromage https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/03/070324133018.htm

bornagain77

January 28, 2017

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,,, Darwinian evolution, since it has no empirical evidence that it is remotely feasible, is heavily reliant on imaginary just so stories.

Sociobiology: The Art of Story Telling – Stephen Jay Gould – 1978 – New Scientist Excerpt: Rudyard Kipling asked how the leopard got its spots, the rhino its wrinkled skin. He called his answers “Just So stories”. When evolutionists study individual adaptations, when they try to explain form and behaviour by reconstructing history and assessing current utility, they also tell just so stories – and the [fictitious] agent is natural selection. Virtuosity in invention replaces testability as the criterion for acceptance. https://books.google.com/books?id=tRj7EyRFVqYC&pg=PA530 EVOLUTIONARY JUST-SO STORIES Excerpt: ,,,The term “just-so story” was popularized by Rudyard Kipling’s 1902 book by that title which contained fictional stories for children. Kipling says the camel got his hump as a punishment for refusing to work, the leopard’s spots were painted on him by an Ethiopian, and the kangaroo got its powerful hind legs after being chased all day by a dingo. Kipling’s just-so stories are as scientific as the Darwinian accounts of how the amoeba became a man. Lacking real scientific evidence for their theory, evolutionists have used the just-so story to great effect. Backed by impressive scientific credentials, the Darwinian just-so story has the aura of respectability. Biologist Michael Behe observes: “Some evolutionary biologists--like Richard Dawkins--have fertile imaginations. Given a starting point, they almost always can spin a story to get to any biological structure you wish” (Michael Behe - Darwin’s Black Box).,,, http://www.wayoflife.org/database/evolutionary_just_so_stories.html “Evolutionary biology, in contrast with physics and chemistry, is a historical science — the evolutionist attempts to explain events and processes that have already taken place. Laws and experiments are inappropriate techniques for the explication of such events and processes. Instead one constructs a historical narrative, consisting of a tentative reconstruction of the particular scenario that led to the events one is trying to explain.” Ernst Mayr – Darwin’s Influence on Modern Thought – Nov. 2009 – Originally published July 2000 “No fossil is buried with its birth certificate. That, and the scarcity of fossils, means that it is effectively impossible to link fossils into chains of cause and effect in any valid way… To take a line of fossils and claim that they represent a lineage is not a scientific hypothesis that can be tested, but an assertion that carries the same validity as a bedtime story—amusing, perhaps even instructive, but not scientific.” – Henry Gee, In Search of Deep Time: Beyond the Fossil Record to a New History of Life "Certainly, my own research with antibiotics during World War II received no guidance from insights provided by Darwinian evolution. Nor did Alexander Fleming's discovery of bacterial inhibition by penicillin. I recently asked more than 70 eminent researchers if they would have done their work differently if they had thought Darwin's theory was wrong. The responses were all the same: No. I also examined the outstanding biodiscoveries of the past century: the discovery of the double helix; the characterization of the ribosome; the mapping of genomes; research on medications and drug reactions; improvements in food production and sanitation; the development of new surgeries; and others. I even queried biologists working in areas where one would expect the Darwinian paradigm to have most benefited research, such as the emergence of resistance to antibiotics and pesticides. Here, as elsewhere, I found that Darwin's theory had provided no discernible guidance, but was brought in, after the breakthroughs, as an interesting narrative gloss. In the peer-reviewed literature, the word "evolution" often occurs as a sort of coda to academic papers in experimental biology. Is the term integral or superfluous to the substance of these papers? To find out, I substituted for "evolution" some other word – "Buddhism," "Aztec cosmology," or even "creationism." I found that the substitution never touched the paper's core. This did not surprise me. From my conversations with leading researchers it had became clear that modern experimental biology gains its strength from the availability of new instruments and methodologies, not from an immersion in historical biology.,,, Darwinian evolution – whatever its other virtues – does not provide a fruitful heuristic in experimental biology." Philip S. Skell - (the late) Emeritus Evan Pugh Professor at Pennsylvania State University, and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. - Why Do We Invoke Darwin? - 2005 http://www.discovery.org/a/2816 Rewriting Biology Without Spin By Ann Gauger - Jan. 12, 2014 Excerpt: It’s a funny thing—scientific papers often have evolutionary language layered on top of the data like icing on a cake. In most papers, the icing (evolutionary language) sits atop and separate from the cake (the actual experimental data). Even in papers where the evolutionary language is mixed in with the data like chocolate and vanilla in a marble cake, I can still tell one from the other. I have noticed that this dichotomy creates a kind of double vision. I know what the data underlying evolutionary arguments are. By setting aside the premise that evolution is true, I can read what’s on the page and at the same time see how that paper would read if neutral, fact-based language were substituted for evolutionary language. Let me give you an example.,,, http://www.biologicinstitute.org/post/107965814309/rewriting-biology-without-spin Why Evolutionary “Just So” Stories Fail - September 28, 2016 Excerpt: it was during this study that I began to understand the concept of a “just-so” story, and it has stuck with me ever since. Essentially, to save the Darwinian paradigm, Darwinists sometimes come up with logically possible, but evidentially unsubstantiated stories to account for some recalcitrant feature in the natural world,,, In his excellent book The Experience of God, David Bentley Hart offers a helpful illustration for how naturalist just-so stories fail to explain key features in reality, such as consciousness: "If I should visit you at your home and discover that, rather than living in a house, you instead shelter under a large roof that simply hovers above the ground, apparently neither supported by nor suspended from anything else, and should ask you how this is possible, I should not feel at all satisfied if you were to answer, ‘It’s to keep the rain out’—not even if you were then helpfully elaborate upon this by observing that keeping the rain out is evolutionary advantageous.”[i]" Hart is exactly right. Offering a positive benefit of why a hovering house protects from rain does not explain how such a feature originated. Similarly, explaining how consciousness benefits mankind does not to explain how consciousness first emerged. An explanation that merely explains why such a feature is beneficial leaves the mystery unexplained. All evolutionary “just-so” stories are certainly not equal. Some are much more believable, natural, and evidentially supported than others. But many are simply outlandish. The key point is that, for Darwinism to be considered a successful worldview with explanatory power, it needs to explain some of the big features of reality, such as the origin of morality, consciousness, personhood, and free will. Unless it can successfully explain these features, Darwinism itself is merely a “just-so” story. - Sean McDowell, Ph.D. http://crossexamined.org/evolutionary-just-stories-fail/

No where is Darwinian evolution more reliant on imaginary just so stories than it is in its myth of how humans supposedly evolved from apes.

"The earliest fossils of Homo, Homo rudolfensis and Homo erectus, are separated from Australopithecus by a large, unbridged gap. How can we explain this seeming saltation? Not having any fossils that can serve as missing links, we have to fall back on the time-honored method of historical science, the construction of a historical narrative." Ernst Mayr - What Makes Biology Unique?, p. 198 (2004). “most hominid fossils, even though they serve as basis of endless speculation and elaborate storytelling, are fragments of of jaws and scraps of skulls” Stephen Jay Gould “We have all seen the canonical parade of apes, each one becoming more human. We know that, as a depiction of evolution, this line-up is tosh (i.e. nonsense). Yet we cling to it. Ideas of what human evolution ought to have been like still colour our debates.” Henry Gee, editor of Nature (478, 6 October 2011, page 34, doi:10.1038/478034a)

As to the fraudulent ‘march of man’ cartoon drawings,

“National Geographic magazine commissioned four artists to reconstruct a female figure from casts of seven fossil bones thought to be from the same species as skull 1470. One artist drew a creature whose forehead is missing and whose jaws look vaguely like those of a beaked dinosaur. Another artist drew a rather good-looking modern African-American woman with unusually long arms. A third drew a somewhat scrawny female with arms like a gorilla and a face like a Hollywood werewolf. And a fourth drew a figure covered with body hair and climbing a tree, with beady eyes that glare out from under a heavy, gorilla-like brow.” “Behind the Scenes,” National Geographic 197 (March, 2000): 140 picture – these artists “independently” produced the 4 very “different” ancestors you see here http://www.omniology.com/JackalopianArtists.html Paleoanthropology Excerpt: Dr. Pilbeam also wrote the following regarding the theory of evolution and paleoanthropology: "I am also aware of the fact that, at least in my own subject of paleoanthropology, "theory" - heavily influenced by implicit ideas almost always dominates "data". ....Ideas that are totally unrelated to actual fossils have dominated theory building, which in turn strongly influence the way fossils are interpreted",,, In regards to the pictures of the supposed ancestors of man featured in science journals and the news media Boyce Rensberger wrote in the journal Science the following regarding their highly speculative nature: “Unfortunately, the vast majority of artist’s conceptions are based more on imagination than on evidence. But a handful of expert natural-history artists begin with the fossil bones of a hominid and work from there…. Much of the reconstruction, however, is guesswork. Bones say nothing about the fleshy parts of the nose, lips, or ears (or eyes). Artists must create something between an ape and a human being; the older the specimen is said to be, the more apelike they make it…. Hairiness is a matter of pure conjecture.” http://conservapedia.com/Evolution#Paleoanthropology New York Times Inherits the Spin, Republishes Darwinists’ Error-Filled “Answers” to Jonathan Wells’ – 2008 Excerpt: And all three of these textbooks include fanciful drawings of ape-like humans that help to convince students we are no exception to the rule of purposelessness. Some biology textbooks use other kinds of illustrations ,,, http://www.evolutionnews.org/2008/08/new_york_times_inherits010581.html The Fragmented Field of Paleoanthropology – July 2012 Excerpt: “alleged restoration of ancient types of man have very little, if any, scientific value and are likely only to mislead the public” Earnest A. Hooton – physical anthropologist – Harvard University http://www.evolutionnews.org/2012/07/the_fragmented_062101.html

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January 28, 2017

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Humans are far more 'exceptional' than is believed by Darwinists Darwinian evolution, since it has no empirical evidence that it is remotely feasible,,, (John Sanford, D. Axe, M. Behe),,,,

The waiting time problem in a model hominin population - 2015 Sep 17 John Sanford, Wesley Brewer, Franzine Smith, and John Baumgardner Excerpt: The program Mendel’s Accountant realistically simulates the mutation/selection process,,, Given optimal settings, what is the longest nucleotide string that can arise within a reasonable waiting time within a hominin population of 10,000? Arguably, the waiting time for the fixation of a “string-of-one” is by itself problematic (Table 2). Waiting a minimum of 1.5 million years (realistically, much longer), for a single point mutation is not timely adaptation in the face of any type of pressing evolutionary challenge. This is especially problematic when we consider that it is estimated that it only took six million years for the chimp and human genomes to diverge by over 5 % [1]. This represents at least 75 million nucleotide changes in the human lineage, many of which must encode new information. While fixing one point mutation is problematic, our simulations show that the fixation of two co-dependent mutations is extremely problematic – requiring at least 84 million years (Table 2). This is ten-fold longer than the estimated time required for ape-to-man evolution. In this light, we suggest that a string of two specific mutations is a reasonable upper limit, in terms of the longest string length that is likely to evolve within a hominin population (at least in a way that is either timely or meaningful). Certainly the creation and fixation of a string of three (requiring at least 380 million years) would be extremely untimely (and trivial in effect), in terms of the evolution of modern man. It is widely thought that a larger population size can eliminate the waiting time problem. If that were true, then the waiting time problem would only be meaningful within small populations. While our simulations show that larger populations do help reduce waiting time, we see that the benefit of larger population size produces rapidly diminishing returns (Table 4 and Fig. 4). When we increase the hominin population from 10,000 to 1 million (our current upper limit for these types of experiments), the waiting time for creating a string of five is only reduced from two billion to 482 million years. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4573302/ The Origin of Man and the "Waiting Time" Problem - John Sanford - August 10, 2016 Excerpt: My colleagues and I recently published a paper in Theoretical Biology and Medical Modeling, "The Waiting Time Problem in a Model Hominin Population." It is one of the journal's "highly accessed" articles. A pre-human hominin population of roughly 10,000 individuals is thought to have evolved into modern man, during a period of less than six million years. This would have required the establishment of a great deal of new biological information. That means, minimally, millions of specific beneficial mutations, and a large number of specific beneficial sets of mutations, selectively fixed in this very short period of time. We show that there is simply not enough time for this type of evolution to have occurred in the population from which we supposedly arose. Historically, Darwin-defenders have argued that time is on their side. They have claimed that given enough time, any evolutionary scenario is feasible. They have consistently argued that given millions of years, very large amounts of new biologically meaningful information can arise by the Darwinian process of mutation/selection. However, careful analysis of what is required to establish even a single genetic "word" (a short functional string of genetic letters) within a hominin genome shows just the opposite. Even given tens of millions of years, there is not enough time to generate the genetic equivalent of the simplest "word" (two or more nucleotides). Even in a hundred billion years, much longer than the age of the universe, there is not enough time to establish the genetic equivalent of a very simple "sentence" (ten or more nucleotides). This problem is so fundamental that it justifies a complete re-assessment of the basic Darwinian mechanism. http://www.evolutionnews.org/2016/08/the_origin_of_m103062.html About a Bike Lock: Responding to Richard Dawkins – Stephen C. Meyer – March 25, 2016 Excerpt: Moreover, given the empirically based estimates of the rarity (of protein folds) (conservatively estimated by Axe3 at 1 in 10^77 and within a similar range by others4) the analysis that I presented in Toronto does pose a formidable challenge to those who claim the mutation-natural selection mechanism provides an adequate means for the generation of novel genetic information — at least, again, in amounts sufficient to generate novel protein folds.5 Why a formidable challenge? Because random mutations alone must produce (or “search for”) exceedingly rare functional sequences among a vast combinatorial sea of possible sequences before natural selection can play any significant role. Moreover, as I discussed in Toronto, and show in more detail in Darwin’s Doubt,6 every replication event in the entire multi-billion year history of life on Earth would not generate or “search” but a miniscule fraction (one ten trillion, trillion trillionth, to be exact) of the total number of possible nucleotide base or amino-acid sequences corresponding to a single functional gene or protein fold. The number of trials available to the evolutionary process (corresponding to the total number of organisms — 10^40 — that have ever existed on earth), thus, turns out to be incredibly small in relation to the number of possible sequences that need to be searched. The threshold of selectable function exceeds what is reasonable to expect a random search to be able to accomplish given the number of trials available to the search even assuming evolutionary deep time. ——- (3) Axe, Douglas. “Estimating the Prevalence of Protein Sequences Adopting Functional Enzyme Folds.” Journal of Molecular Biology 341 (2004): 1295-1315. (4) Reidhaar-Olson, John, and Robert Sauer. “Functionally Acceptable Solutions in Two Alpha-Helical Regions of Lambda Repressor.” Proteins: Structure, Function, and Genetics 7 (1990): 306-16; Yockey, Hubert P. “A Calculation of the Probability of Spontaneous Biogenesis by Information Theory,” Journal of Theoretical Biology 67 (1977c): 377-98; Yockey, Hubert. “On the Information Content of Cytochrome C,” Journal of Theoretical Biology 67 (1977b) 345-376. http://www.evolutionnews.org/2016/03/about_a_bike_lo102722.html “Shared Evolutionary History or Shared Design?” – Ann Gauger – January 1, 2015 Excerpt: The waiting time required to achieve four mutations is 10^15 years. That’s longer than the age of the universe. The real waiting time is likely to be much greater, since the two most likely candidate enzymes failed to be coopted by double mutations. http://www.evolutionnews.org/2015/01/happy_new_year092291.html When Theory and Experiment Collide — April 16th, 2011 by Douglas Axe Excerpt: Based on our experimental observations and on calculations we made using a published population model [3], we estimated that Darwin’s mechanism would need a truly staggering amount of time—a trillion trillion years or more—to accomplish the seemingly subtle change in enzyme function that we studied. http://biologicinstitute.org/2011/04/16/when-theory-and-experiment-collide/ Waiting Longer for Two Mutations – Michael J. Behe Excerpt: Citing malaria literature sources (White 2004) I had noted that the de novo appearance of chloroquine resistance in Plasmodium falciparum was an event of probability of 1 in 10^20. I then wrote that ‘for humans to achieve a mutation like this by chance, we would have to wait 100 million times 10 million years’ (1 quadrillion years)(Behe 2007) (because that is the extrapolated time that it would take to produce 10^20 humans). Durrett and Schmidt (2008, p. 1507) retort that my number ‘is 5 million times larger than the calculation we have just given’ using their model (which nonetheless “using their model” gives a prohibitively long waiting time of 216 million years). Their criticism compares apples to oranges. My figure of 10^20 is an empirical statistic from the literature; it is not, as their calculation is, a theoretical estimate from a population genetics model. http://www.discovery.org/a/9461 Michael Behe - Empirically Observed (1 in 10^20) Edge of Evolution - video - Lecture delivered in April 2015 at Colorado School of Mines 25:56 minute quote - "This is not an argument anymore that Darwinism cannot make complex functional systems; it is an observation that it does not." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9svV8wNUqvA

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