| email - October 2018 |
Jonathan makes hit-and-run accusations.
After a long dry spell, we got some hate mail! It came from Jonathan on September 30. I think he might have written to us many years ago, but I could not find anything from him in our inadequate email archive. Here’s what he wrote:
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Subject: Are you still around? If so, why is this website still up? Surely, if you've actually done any research at all, you know by now that most of what you say on "science against evolution" consists of flat-out lies. You deliberately omitted countless facts to invent nonsensical arguments against the existence of a highly observable process. |
We gleefully replied,
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Yes, we are still around, and are just about to start our 23rd year! We are still at http://scienceagainstevolution.info/index.shtml . Please send us some examples of “flat-out lies” from our website. |
Jonathan promptly replied,
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Everything. Every single thing you have claimed to be evidence against evolution is a conscious lie on your part. You misrepresent the laws of matter and energy, you claim that evolution is supposed to be "just random chance" as if animals magically "decided or realized" they could take certain forms. You know that isn't how it works. You know that it's a predictable pattern of genetic adaptation, no different from the selective breeding we ourselves use to alter animals and plants to our needs. |
“Everything” is always the answer whenever we ask a critic for a specific example of any factual error we have ever printed. Since Jonathan can’t give even one specific example of a flat-out lie, we suspect he has never even read a single one of our newsletters. He probably has been so brainwashed by evolutionists that he really believes our newsletters are nothing but flat-out lies, and hasn’t bothered to read any of them. The only other possibility is that he has read them, but was not able to find a single lie in even one of our 264 past newsletters.
We again tried to get a factual response from him by writing,
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Please give us a specific quote that is factually incorrect from one of our newsletters. We do not believe, and have never said anything remotely similar to, “evolution is supposed to be ‘just random chance’” or “animals magically ‘decided or realized’ they could take certain forms”. Are those conscious lies on your part? or do you have us confused with some other organization? Have you ever read any of our articles? Please read at least one article and point out any factual errors in it. |
As expected, we did not receive a reply. If Jonathan had bothered to read our newsletters he would have seen how wrong his characterization of our position is. We will address his false accusations anyway.
There are many different definitions of evolution. The most basic definition is, “any kind of change.” Of course, we believe things change. Automobiles certainly have evolved since the first Model-T Ford rolled off the assembly line. Babies become boys, who become teenagers, who become men, who become curmudgeons, but that change is not evolution—it is maturity.
We clearly defined the kind of evolution we are talking about at the top of the home page of our website.
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When we talk about "evolution," we don't mean, "any kind of change." Nor do we mean minor variations that result from natural selection. We use the term "evolution" to mean, “The doctrine that unguided natural forces caused chemicals to combine in such a way that life resulted; and that all living things have descended from that common ancestral form of life.” |
Our website uses the users’ default fonts and sizes; but our definition of evolution is written using the tag “FONT SIZE=+2” to make sure the definition appears two font sizes larger than normal. There is no mention of chance, magic, or volition in our definition.
Darwin believed that diet, exercise, and climate caused inheritable variations which were filtered by natural selection to produce new species. His observations that some physical characteristics can be modified by diet, exercise, and exposure to extreme climates were correct; but his presumption that these changes could be inherited was incorrect. Working out, or being a couch potato, will affect your body; but it will not affect the physique of any children you have.
The realization that diet, exercise, and climate cannot cause the inheritable variation necessary for evolution to take place caused evolutionists to replace Darwinian evolution with neo-Darwinian evolution, in which random mutations caused inheritable differences.
Jonathan’s criticism of random chance is applicable to neo-Darwinian evolution, which seems to be falling out of favor among evolutionists. We have to be cautious here because we don’t have any statistical data upon which to make that statement. We can only say that, it appears to us as we read the technical literature that neo-Darwinian evolution seems no longer to be the consensus opinion.
We honestly don’t know what the consensus replacement for neo-Darwinian evolution is these days. In August, 2013, we published Michelle Teague’s review of the eight leading theories proposed by evolutionists to replace neo-Darwinian Evolution. 1
More recently, we have seen some speculation by evolutionists that hybridization, or some kind of gene transfer between species is somehow responsible for the variation necessary for evolution. That seems to be the latest straw grasped by evolutionists. The obvious problem with this theory is that taking genetic information from a different species doesn’t really explain the origin of new genetic information in the first place. It simply moves the problem to a different species. How did genetic information originate in that other species? Did it get the genetic information from yet another species? If so, where did that other species get the information? ad infinitum
Regardless of how the variation originated, there is some question among evolutionists as to whether or not natural selection is strong enough to cause a superior variation to drive the inferior variation to extinction. Is “survival of the fittest” really more powerful than “survival of the luckiest?” It isn’t necessarily the slowest gazelle that wanders too close to the lion crouching in the tall grass.
Furthermore, it was Darwin’s contention that small variations could accumulate without limit over time. We claim the data from the Kentucky Derby disproves Darwin’s belief. 2
It is absolutely foolish to believe animals magically decided or realized they could take certain forms. We have never said that knowledgeable evolutionists believe this.
Some uninformed evolutionists (Jonathan, for example) might misunderstand Lamarckian evolution and think Lamarck believed that.
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He [Lamarck] gave as an imagined illustration the idea that when giraffes stretch their necks to reach leaves high in trees, they would strengthen and gradually lengthen their necks. These giraffes would then have offspring with slightly longer necks. … In essence, a change in the environment brings about change in "needs" (besoins), resulting in change in behavior, bringing change in organ usage and development, bringing change in form over time—and thus the gradual transmutation of the species. However, as historians of science such as Ghiselin and Gould have pointed out, these ideas were not original to Lamarck. 3 |
This misunderstanding is understandable because if I say, “J’ai besoin de …“ (literally, “I have need of …“) most French interpreters would translate my words as, “I want …”.
Lamarck didn’t really believe the giraffe “wants” to be able to eat the leaves higher up on the tree, and wills his neck to get longer by stretching it; but the translation from French to English could be misconstrued.
Of course, plants don’t have brains, so it is silly to think plants wanted their flowers to be more attractive to bees, and modified their shape or color accordingly.
We have never claimed evolutionists make these stupid claims. (But uninformed critics, like Jonathan, might want to believe we have.)
Jonathan said we “claim that evolution is supposed to be ‘just random chance’ as if animals magically ‘decided or realized’ they could take certain forms.” No, we don’t.
We claim that evolutionists believe some unknown and unspecified natural process (perhaps, but not necessarily random chance) causes variations in individuals. Then, some unknown and unspecified natural process (perhaps, but not necessarily natural selection) causes a new trait to establish itself in a new population. We do not claim that evolutionists believe magic or conscious desires have anything to do with the process.
We also claim that the belief that unknown and unspecified natural forces caused life to evolve is not scientific, and that the preponderance of scientific evidence contradicts all the various theories of evolution.
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Footnotes:
1
Disclosure, August 2013, “In Search of ‘Evolution 3.0’”, http://scienceagainstevolution.info/v17i11f.htm
2
Disclosure, June 1999, “The Kentucky Derby Limit”, http://scienceagainstevolution.info/v3i9f.htm
3
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamarckism