Unable to reply to any of the comments about me that were still being posted to the guest book,
the only thing I could reply to was another email from Dr. Luke Randall,
and all he sent in answer to all that I wrote were a handful of contrived quotes that I once again posted to Talk.Origins.
After three days squabbling with the "Was Darwin Right?" group, where I repeatedly demanded some means to quantify functional complexity" and "genetic information" in order to confirm their claim to having observed reductions in that, this is the whole and sole response to all those demands thus far: A slough of irrelevant quotes with no original text from my opponent, who supposedly holds a Ph.D. in microbiology.
Thoughts from a few scientists whose work is peer reviewed
ABIOGENESIS ETC
"To produce this miracle of molecular construction all the cell need do is to string together the amino acids (which make up the polypeptide chain) in the correct order. This is a complicated biochemical process, a molecular assembly line, using instructions in the form of a nucleic acid tape (the so-called messenger RNA). Here we need only ask, how many possible proteins are there? If a particular amino acid sequence was selected by chance, how rare of an event would that be? This is an easy exercise in combinatorials. Suppose the chain is about two hundred amino acids long; this is, if anything, rather less than the average length of proteins of all types. Since we have just twenty possibilities at each place, the number of possibilities is twenty multiplied by itself some two hundred times. This is conveniently written 20200, that is a one followed by 260 zeros! This number is quite beyond our everyday comprehension. For comparison, consider the number of fundamental particles (atoms, speaking loosely) in the entire visible universe, not just in our own galaxy with its 1011 stars, but in all the billions of galaxies, out to the limits of observable space. This number, which is estimated to be 1080, is quite paltry by comparison to 10260. Moreover, we have only considered a polypeptide chain of a rather modest length. Had we considered longer ones as well, the figure would have been even more immense." Francis Crick, [Crick received a Nobel Prize for discovering the structure of DNA.] Life Itself, Its Origin and Nature (1981), p. 88. pp 51-52.
"Even with DNA sequence data, we have no direct access to the processes of evolution, so objective reconstruction of the vanished past can be achieved only by creative imagination." --N. Takahata,
A General Perspective on the Origin & History of Humans, Annual Reviews of Ecology & Systematics, 1995.
"Most biological reactions are chain reactions. To interact in a chain, these precisely built molecules must fit together most precisely, as the cog wheels of a Swiss watch do. But if this is so, then how can such a system develop at all? For if any one of the specific cog wheels in these chains is changed, then the whole system must simply become inoperative. Saying it can be improved by random mutation of one link, is like saying you could improve a Swiss watch by dropping it and thus bending one of its wheels or axes. To get a better watch, all the wheels must be changed simultaneously to make a good fit again." Albert Szent-Györgyi von Nagyrapolt (Nobel prize for Medicine in 1937). "Drive in Living Matter to Perfect Itself," Synthesis I, Vol. 1, No. 1, p. 18 (1977) [winner of two Nobel Prizes for scientific research and Director of Research at the Institute for Muscle Research in Massachusetts].
"The development of the metabolic system, which, as the primordial soup thinned, must have "learned" to mobilize chemical potential and to synthesize the cellular components, poses Herculean problems. So also does the emergence of the selectively permeable membrane without which there can be no viable cell. But the major problem is the origin of the genetic code and of its translation mechanism. Indeed, instead of a problem it ought rather to be called a riddle. The code is meaningless unless translated. The modern cell's translating machinery consists of at least fifty macromolecular components which are themselves coded in DNA: the code cannot be translated otherwise than by products of translation. It is the modern _expression of omne vivum ex ovo [everything that lives, (comes) from an egg]. When and how did this circle become closed? It is exceedingly difficult to imagine." Jacques Monod
(Nobel prize for Medicine in 1965, biochemist, Director, Pasteur Institute, France. "Chance and Necessity:
An Essay on the Natural Philosophy of Modern Biology", [1971], Transl. Wainhouse A., Penguin Books: London, 1997, reprint, pp.142-143. Emphasis in original).
EARLY MAN
"The real question is whether we have enough imagination to reconstruct their lives [the lives of early humans]."
-- Robert Blumenschine, paleoanthropologist of Rutgers University in a 1989 U.S. News and World Report cover story.
"Fossil evidence of human evolutionary history is fragmentary and open to various interpretations. Fossil evidence of chimpanzee evolution is absent altogether". (Henry Gee, Nature vol. 412 p. 131, 2001).
"If pressed about man's ancestry, I would have to unequivocally say that all we have is a huge question mark. To date, there has been nothing found to truthfully purport as a transitional specie to man, including Lucy, since 1470 was as old and probably older. If further pressed, I would have to state that there is more evidence to suggest an abrupt arrival of man rather than a gradual process of evolving". Richard Leakey, world's foremost paleoanthropologist, in a PBS documentary, 1990.
FOSSIL EVIDENCE
"Why then is not every geological formation full of such intermediate links. Geology assuredly does not reveal any finely graduated organic change, and this is the most obvious and serious objection that can be urged against the theory". (Charles Darwin, The origin of the species).
Evolutionist David Raup, Curator of Geology at Chicago's Field Museum of Natural History said:- "The evidence we find in the geological record is not nearly as compatible with Darwinian natural selection as we would like it to be ....We now have a quarter of a million fossil species but the situation has'nt changed much. The record of evolution is suprisingly jerky and, ironically, we have even fewer examples of evolutionary transition than in Darwin's time ... so Darwin's problem has not been alleviated". (Raup, Field museum of Natural History Bulletin).
"With few exceptions, radically new kinds of organisms appear for the first time in the fossil record already fully evolved, with most of their charactersistic features present". -- Dr T S Kemp, Curator of Zoological collections, Oxford Universisty (Kemp, 1999. Fossils and evolution, p.253).
Steven Stanley, an affirmed evolutionist, was objective enough to point out:- "The known fossil record fails to document a single example of phyletic evolution accomplishing a major morphologic transition and hence offers no evidence that a gradualistic model can be valid." -- Steven M. Stanley, Macroevolution: Pattern and Process. San Francisco: W. M. Freeman & Co., 1979, p. 39.
"Fossil evidence of human evolutionary history is fragmentary and open to various interpretations. Fossil evidence of chimpanzee evolution is absent altogether". (Henry Gee, Nature vol. 412 p. 131, 2001).
George Gaylord Simpson, another leading evolutionist, sees this characteristic in practically the whole range of taxonomic categories:- "...Every paleontologist knows that most new species, genera, and families, and that nearly all categories above the level of family appear in the record suddenly and are not led up to by known, gradual, completely continuous transitional sequences." -- George Gaylord Simpson (evolutionist), The Major Features of Evolution,
New York, Columbia University Press, 1953 p. 360. (Back to top)
The only response I got to all those posts on the previous page was this list of quotes and nothing else.
None of my evidence was addressed, none of my questions or challenges answered. Just this.
But I replied as politely as I could, and still tried to arrange some kind of formal debate.
Thank you for your response. If this is going to be an intellectual debate on the scientific merits of creationism vs evolution then I am very exited to participate! Please allow me a day to respond appropriately, but know in advance that I appreciate the reply.
Also, I intend to publish this entire discourse verbatim and in-context on the web, on its own site free from any periphrial statements that might be conscrued as propaganda. If I do, do you agree to link to that debate on your site, like you did with your informal discussion with Dr. Dr Kostura?
Or if you still refuse that proposal, would you please say so?
The debate with Dr Kostura was with Joe Baker, not me. I have not time to debate with you as I have a full time job and lots of commitments outside work. However, perhaps Craig, Kylie, Paul or Joe will want to debate with you (all CC:ed).
By all means publish the Scientific quotes I sent you on your web site. If you disagree with such comments, then that is up to you, but I have not got the time or inclination to argue the minutia with you. However, I do hope you can be open minded enough to accept the validity of the comments by secular scientists that I sent you as it is not only some Christians who think the Science to support the Theory of Evolution is at best poor.
There have been many similar debates and there are well qualified people on both sides of the fence. To be honest, I doubt that such a debate will achieve much for free thought. At the end of the day much is about interpretation and meaning given to so called evidence. You look at everything with the assumption that evolution happened, and if that is what you want to believe, then I see no point in spending hours to try and get you to be one minded enough to see things from another viewpoint, as I know already that your mind is set.
I will not respond to future E-mails, but perhaps the others will.
God Bless you.
So there it was. The best this Ph.D. in microbiology could do was to copy a web page full of misleading quotations, most of which from people who've studied this topic exhaustively and have only ever held the position that evolution were at least mostly accurate, while Biblical creationism was not at all accurate about anything. And he followed that with a refusal to discuss the matter further. And no one else chimed in willing to debate me either. That's why I posted this to Talk.origins
where most are of the opinion that no professional creationist will ever consent to a published written debate.
