From: <MccarrickAD@nswccd.navy.mil>
> Here I come again with another request for ideas.
> Poor Evolutionary evidences - "as found in your biology book"
>
> 1. Peppered moths
> 2. Piltdown man/Nebraska man
> 3. Haekel's (sp.) embryos
> 4. National Geographic's bird/dino fossil
[From a YEC]
1. Darwin's semi-Lamarkian ideas. (Cows having larger udders due to increased use, etc)
2. Embryological recapitulation, AKA the "biogenetic law"
2a.Haeckel's embryo drawings (see "Embryology and Evolution" by Wayne Frair, Creation Research Society Quarterly, Vol. 36, Sept. 1999, pp 62-67)
3. Haeckel's description of ape-men, complete with illustration -- without any fossils
4. Haeckel's and Huxley's proto-life (illustrated again) and their "discovery" of it that turned out to be sludge.
5. Piltdown Man
6. Neanderthal and even Cro-Magnon man depicted as pelisse and savage ancestors leading up to modern man.
7. Nebraska Man and accompanying illustration.
8. a,b,c...?(possible other problems with Ascent of Man examples -- I believe "Zinjanthropous" would be one example, and others can be found in Lubenow's book on the subject)
9. The Peppered Moth -- population shift taken as proof of macroevolution, set-up photos of behavior not observed in the wild.
10. The Mesonychid ancestry of whales via the "Walking Whales" -- just the way those stories were originally presented is something of note.
11. The Great Dino-Bird Kangaroo Court -- in which Dino-bird discoveries get top billing and serious objections are hardly reported outside of technical journals.
12. The horse "series" not a series
13. Darwin's finches -- even the latest research still shows more than anything else that they're all still finches and are not likely to have descendants that are anything else.
14. Misrepresentation of Scopes Trial.
15. Martian meteor life.
16. Extra-solar planets -- being touted as supporting the idea of life being common, while their sizes and orbits make earth-type planets unlikely around their suns and were totally outside the predictions of planetary formation theory. And that's if the skimpy data actually represent real planets.
17. Eugenics
18. Social Darwinism
19. Removal of healthy appendices and tonsils in the belief they were "vestigial" and other active and even more important organs being described as vestigial.
20. Viewing modern humans as primitive, animal-like. (examples include Darwin's assessment of Tierra del Fuegan natives, hunting of Tasmanians and Australians, displaying their remains in museums, Haeckel describing 12 human "species".)
21. Using "homology" as evidence when supposed homologous features have differing developmental sequences controlled by different genes.
22. "Hopeful monsters" -- misguided attempt to explain missing transitions
23. Archaeoraptor -- announcement rushed to press, apparently a fraud.
24. Devonian Drought -- Scientists once thought the Devonian was subject to severe droughts, which forced fish to crawl out of pools in search of more water, thus fostering the evolution of tetrapods
25. "Brontosaurus" with the wrong skull.
26. Coelurosauravus -- identified by miner as a flying reptile, a professional scientist proceeded to scrape off the "wing" bones in the mistaken belief that they must have come from a fish!
With help from several folks:
Subject: Top 10 Bonehead Arguments of Evolutionists
1. Argument by definition: "Creation is outside of science."
1a. Change the definition to validate what you are trying to prove. (Speciation: an isolated, breeding population. Macroevolution: speciation. Therefore evolution can be seen...)
2. Argument by appeal to authority or intellectual snobbery: "All those scientists can't be wrong!"
3. Argument by lining up ducks in a row (homology). (Use illustration of space travelers in year 3000 finding cars in a junkyard).
4. If you can't explain it, give it a scientific name (evolutionist fairy dust).
5. Arguing that if you have described a process, you have explained its origin.
6. Assuming what you want to prove (tautology). (dating methods).
7. Mistaking devolution for evolution.
8. Selection (eliminating features) produces new features.
9. If an evolutionist can come up with an ad-hoc argument that seems to explain something, it refutes a corresponding creationist explanation.
10 . Punk-eek.
> Poor YEC evidences - "as taught by your Sunday School teacher"
>
> 1. the plesiosaur and the Japanese trawler
[Comments from a YEC] That corpse was a basking shark, we can be pretty certain. And even if it wasn't, we can be even more certain it was not a plesiosaur - the # of vertebrae, etc. is all wrong. But basically I'm convinced it is a basking shark. I didn't like it, but that's what the evidence demands.
AiG [Answers in Genesis] put up an article some time ago with this evidence:
http://www.answersingenesis.org/docs/4216cen_m1999.asp
> 2. moon dust - NASA worries about sinking Apollo astronauts
> 3. dating fossils by geologic column and the geologic column by the fossils
[from a YEC] Here is what Derek V. Ager (1973) stated in "The Nature of the Stratigraphical Record."
"Dating rock by its fossils and dating the fossils by the rock is an impossible circular argument, yet we are always on dangerous ground if we accept other lines of evidence. . . The history of the earth consists of long periods of boredom and short periods of terror."
Who was Ager? Probably the world's leading authority on the strata of the earth, and a totally committed evolutionist. Note the "long periods of boredom." These are, we may assume, some billions of years of erosion-free time in order to be faithful to the 4.6
billion year old earth. Ager was brutally criticized by his fellow evolutionists for "the short periods of terror," because this sounded too much like Noah's Flood.
> 4. earth's dying magnetic field
[From a YEC] A number of creation-based books discuss the decay of the earth's magnetic field. John Morris's "The Young Earth" is a good one. Of course, there are also a number of articles on it by both Humphreys and Barnes in the CRSQ.
A good reference book from an evolutionary perspective is "The Magnetic Field of the Earth", by Merrill, McElhinney, and McFadden. This is not a Creationary book, but it also gives figures showing the measured decay of the earth's magnetic field. They do not attribute it to free-decay, as we do, but to a normal oscillation in intensity.
The decay in earth's magnetic field is real and "predicted" by the free induction model rather accurately, considering the uncertainties in the parameters. On the other hand, the dynamo theory is unable to predict the current decay rate. That in itself speaks volumes. I would not say that this is a "poor" evidence of a young earth. On the contrary, the model, when expanded a la Humphreys, to include local reversals and predict the magnetic fields of other planets and moons, is far and away superior to anything that the dynamo theorists can come up with.
I am not responsible for all the ideas presented here. :)
Allen Roy
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