Evolution is a Lie - Intelligent Design is the Truth!

The popular modern scientific-materialist-atheist worldview propagated by NASA, the mainstream media and the public education system is that you are here because nothingness for no reason exploded and created everything!  Before time, space, matter, consciousness, intelligence, and life, there was nothing.  Then the nothingness exploded, and instead of destroying things like every other explosion ever, this explosion created things, created everything!  The nothingness explosion somehow created space, time and all matter in the universe in an instant and for no reason at all.  Then all the creationary explosive debris flying outwards at over 670 million miles per hour for 14 billion years culminated to create you!  



Yes, first some of the more gaseous nothing came together forming suns and stars, then solid pieces of the nothing came together forming planets and moons, then the nothing-turned-hydrogen and oxygen came together forming water on the nothing planet Earth, out of which single-celled living organisms magically appeared, got to work dividing and multiplying into multi-celled conscious organisms, which multiplied and divided and mutated into various forms of sea-life which adapted and evolved and crawled onto land, replaced gills with lungs, lost tails, grew opposable thumbs and started grasping at straws like this ridiculous nihilistic notion of Big Bang evolution.



This anti-God materialist theory of evolution has been staunchly protected by the infallibility of “science” for over 150 years, but in actual fact, just as “science” has failed to find one true, valid proof that Earth is a ball spinning around the Sun, scientists have failed to discover a single piece of evidence that the material world is a product of blind chance evolution.  Furthermore, Big Bang evolution actually requires and pre-supposes many other claims which have already been proven false in previous chapters, such as the Plurality of Worlds, Newton’s theory of Gravity, Einstein’s theory of Relativity, Stars being distant Suns, and Earth being a Planet, not a Plane.

“Evolutionary theory claims that life started with a cell that formed by chance.  According to this scenario, four billion years ago various lifeless chemical compounds underwent a reaction in the primordial atmosphere on the earth in which the effects of thunderbolts and atmospheric pressure led to the formation of the first living cell.  The first thing that must be said is that the claim that inanimate materials can come together to form life is an unscientific one that has not been verified by any experiment or observation.  Life is only generated from life.  Each living cell is formed by the replication of another cell.  No one in the world has ever succeeded in forming a living cell by bringing inanimate materials together, not even in the most advanced laboratories.  The theory of evolution faces no greater crisis than on the point of explaining the emergence of life.  The reason is that organic molecules are so complex that their formation cannot possibly be explained as being coincidental and it is manifestly impossible for an organic cell to have been formed by chance.”  -Harun Yahya, “The Evolution Deceit” (128-130)



How could all the inter-connected and compartmentalized components, the cell wall, the cell membrane, the mitochondria, proteins, DNA, RNA, ribosomes, lysosomes, cytoplasm, vacuoles, nucleus and other cell parts magically come together and create conscious intelligent life from unconscious dead matter?  Just making one average-sized protein molecule is already composed of 288 amino acids of 12 varying types which can be combined 10300 power different ways!  Of all those possibilities, only one forms the desired protein molecule and there are over 600 types of proteins combined in the smallest bacterias ever discovered.  

Astronomer Fred Hoyle compared the odds that all the multi-faceted and multi-functional parts of a cell could coincidentally come together and create life analogous to “a tornado sweeping through a junk-yard and assembling a Boeing 747 from the materials therein!”  Hoyle wrote that, “If there were a basic principle of matter which somehow drove organic systems toward life, its existence should easily be demonstrable in the laboratory.  One could, for instance, take a swimming bath to represent the primordial soup.  Fill it with any chemicals of a non-biological nature you please.  Pump any gases over it, or through it, you please, and shine any kind of radiation on it that takes your fancy.  Let the experiment proceed for a year and see how many of those 2,000 enzymes (proteins produced by living cells) have appeared in the bath.  I will give the answer, and so save the time and trouble and expense of actually doing the experiment.  You will find nothing at all, except possibly for a tarry sludge composed of amino acids and other simple organic chemicals.”  Even if scientists placed all the chemical substances necessary for life in a tank, applied to them any processes of their choice, and waited for billions of years, not a single living cell could or would ever form.



"The likelihood of the spontaneous formation of life from inanimate matter is one to a number with 40,000 zeros after it … It is big enough to bury Darwin and the whole theory of evolution.  The beginnings of life were not random; they must have been the product of purposeful intelligence.  From my earliest training as a scientist, I was very strongly brainwashed to believe that science cannot be consistent with any kind of deliberate creation.  That notion has had to be painfully shed.  At the moment, I can’t find any rational argument to knock down the view which argues for conversion to God.  We used to have an open mind; now we realize that the only logical answer to life is creation - and not accidental random shuffling.”  -Astrobiologist Chandra Wickramasinghe



“Scientific proofs from such branches of science as paleontology, microbiology and anatomy reveal evolution to be a bankrupt theory.  It has been stressed that evolution is incompatible with scientific discoveries, reason and logic.  Those who believe in the theory of evolution think that a few atoms and molecules thrown into a huge vat could produce thinking, reasoning, professors, university students, scientists, artists, antelopes, lemon trees and carnations.  Moreover, the scientists and professors who believe in this nonsense are educated people.  That is why it is quite justifiable to speak of the theory of evolution as ‘the most potent spell in history.’  Never before has any other belief or idea so taken away peoples’ powers of reason, refused to allow them to think intelligently and logically, and hidden the truth from them as if they had been blindfolded.”  -Harun Yahya, “The Evolution Deceit” (178-179)



Consciousness, life, the beautiful diversity, complexity and interconnectedness of nature and the universe simply could not be the result of some random coincidental physical phenomenon.  If the likelihood of life forming from inanimate matter is 1 x 1040,000 power, then those are precisely the magnificent odds against which the universe could be unintelligently designed!  Even the simple formation of DNA and RNA molecules are similarly beyond the reach of chance to come together, equivalent to 1 x 10600 power, or 10 with 600 zeros afterwards!  Such a mathematical improbability actually so closely borders the impossible that the word “improbable” becomes misleading.  Mathematicians who regularly work with these infinitesimally small numbers say anything beyond 1 x 1050 powers should be considered, for all intents and purposes, impossible.



Dr. Leslie Orgel, an associate of Francis Crick, the discoverer of DNA wrote, “It is extremely improbable that proteins and nucleic acids, both of which are structurally complex, arose spontaneously in the same place at the same time.  Yet it also seems impossible to have one without the other.  And so, at first glance, one might have to conclude that life could never, in fact, have originated by chemical means.”  Or as Turkish Evolutionist Professor Ali Demirsoy stated “the probability of the coincidental formation of cythochrome-C, just one of the essential proteins for life, is as unlikely as the possibility of a monkey writing the history of humanity on a typewriter without making any mistakes … Some metaphysical powers beyond our definition must have acted in its formation.”



“Let us suppose that millions of years ago a cell was formed which had acquired everything necessary for life, and that it duly ‘came to life.’  The theory of evolution again collapses at this point.  For even if this cell had existed for a while, it would eventually have died and after its death, nothing would have remained, and everything would have reverted to where it had started.  This is because this first living cell, lacking any genetic information, would not have been able to reproduce and start a new generation.  Life would have ended with its death.  The genetic system does not only consist of DNA.  The following things must also exist in the same environment: enzymes to read the code on the DNA, messenger RNA to be produced after reading these codes, a ribosome to which messenger RNA will attach according to this code, transfer RNA to transfer the amino acids to the ribosome for use in production, and extremely complex enzymes to carry out numerous intermediary processes.  Such an environment cannot exist anywhere apart from a totally isolated and completely controlled environment such as the cell, where all the essential raw materials and energy resources exist.”  -Harun Yahya, “The Evolution Deceit” (170)



The Big Bang theory is easily proven false as the nature of explosions is to destroy, to break things down into their constituent parts, increasing chaos and decreasing order; explosions simply do not and cannot create things, causing disparate parts to combine into more ordered wholes as the Big Bang theory contends.  Similarly, the theory of evolution is proven false by entropy, the second law of thermodynamics.  It is a fact that systems left to their own devices tend to become corrupted, disordered and dispersed over time.  All things, living or not, wear out, deteriorate and decay.  They do NOT spontaneously come together over time, in incredibly implausible combinations creating diverse, complex and beautiful living forms!  Thus the theory of evolution is in direct opposition to the law of entropy; Evolution supposes things become more ordered, more structured and more complex over time,  but from rust to mould to rotting corpses, nature is everywhere at odds with such a notion.  Furthermore, according to the Le Chatelier Principle in chemistry, life could not have been formed in the sea as evolutionists allege anyway; since the peptide bond created by amino acid chains produces water molecules, it is not possible for such a reaction to take place in a hydrous environment.



“Organic matter can self-reproduce only if it exists as a fully developed cell with all its organelles and in an appropriate environment where it can survive, exchange materials, and get energy from its surroundings.  This means that the first cell on earth was formed ‘ all of a sudden’ together with its amazingly complex structure … What would you think if you went out hiking in the depths of a thick forest and ran across a brand-new car among the trees?  Would you imagine that various elements in the forest had come together by chance over millions of years and produced such a vehicle?  All the parts in the car are made of products such as iron, copper, and rubber - the raw ingredients for which are all found on the earth - but would this fact lead you to think that these materials had synthesized ‘by chance’ and then come together and manufactured such a car?  There is no doubt that anyone with a sound mind would realize that the car was the product of an intelligent design - in other words, a factory - and wonder what it was doing there in the middle of the forest.  The sudden emergence of a complex structure in a complete form, quite out of the blue, shows that this is the work of an intelligent agent.  An extraordinarily complex system like the cell is no doubt created by a superior will and wisdom.  In other words, it came into existence as a Creation of God.”  -Harun Yahya, “The Evolution Deceit” (170-171)



Many facets of nature are far too complex, specialized, and perfect to ever have arisen simply due to blind chance changes over time.  For example, the eye with its various parts and mechanisms all working together with the brain producing the sharpest, clearest 3-D color images imaginable.  Even the most advanced cameras and plasma screens ever produced by humans cannot provide an image as perfect in detail and clarity as our own eyes.  Charles Darwin, the originator of the theory of evolution himself admitted that “the thought of the eye made him cold all over!” as he knew what an impassable obstacle the eye presented for his theory.  And it is the same with ears and audio equipment.  For over a century many thousands of researchers, scientists and engineers have been working in factories across the world trying to produce sharper, clearer audio/video playing and recording devices, never coming close to the capabilities and perfection of the ear and eye.

“Look at the book you read, your hands with which you hold it, then lift your head and look around you.  Have you ever seen such a sharp and distinct image as this one at any other place?  Even the most developed television screen produced by the greatest television producer in the world cannot provide such a sharp image for you.  This is a three-dimensional, colored, and extremely sharp image … No one would say that a HI-FI or a camera came into being as a result of chance.  So how can it be claimed that the technologies that exist in the human body, which are superior even to these, could have come into being as a result of a chain of coincidences called evolution?  It is evident that the eye, the ear, and indeed all the other parts of the human body are products of a very superior Creation.”  -Harun Yahya, “The Evolution Deceit” (175-178)



Charles Darwin, in his “Origin of Species,” the veritable Bible of atheist-materialists, stated that, “If my theory be true, numberless intermediate varieties, linking most closely all of the species of the same group together must assuredly have existed … Consequently evidence of their former existence could be found only amongst fossil remains.”  Darwin himself knew no such “transitional forms” had been discovered and hoped that they would be found in the future.  He even admitted in his “Difficulties on Theory” chapter that these missing intermediate forms were the biggest stumbling-block for his theory.  He called it “the most obvious and gravest objection which can be urged against my theory.”

“According to the theory of evolution, every living species has emerged from a predecessor.  One species which existed previously turned into something else over time and all species have come into being in this way.  According to the theory, this transformation proceeds gradually over millions of years.  If this were the case, then innumerable intermediate species should have lived during the immense period of time when these transformations were supposedly occurring.  For instance, there should have lived in the past some half-fish/half-reptile creatures which had acquired some reptilian traits in addition to the fish traits they already had.  Or there should have existed some reptile/bird creatures, which had acquired some avian traits in addition to the reptilian traits, they already possessed.  Evolutionists refer to these imaginary creatures, which they believe to have lived in the past as, ‘transitional forms.’  If such animals had really existed, there would have been millions, even billions, of them.  More importantly, the remains of these creatures should be present in the fossil record.  The number of these transitional forms should have been even greater than that of present animal species and their remains should be found all over the world.”  -Harun Yahya, “The Evolution Deceit” (61)



Darwin hoped that transitional forms of animal species gradually evolving into different species would eventually be discovered at some future time in the fossil record.  To this day, however, no such transitional forms have ever been found anywhere in the world.  Darwin’s observations regarding natural selection and adaptation were certainly correct.  So-called “micro-evolution” of various traits and characteristics within a species has been confirmed and widely exists, but “macro-evolution,” the supposed transformation from one species into a completely different species has never been observed, and no evidence of such evolution exists anywhere in the fossil record.  Colin Patterson, senior paleontologist for the British Museum of Natural History and an ardent evolutionist, even he admits that Darwinists must concede natural selection has never been observed to actually cause anything to evolve: “No one has ever produced a species by mechanisms of natural selection.  No one has ever got near it and most of the current argument in neo-Darwinism is about this question.”



“Even in the most ‘scientific’ books about evolution, the stage of ‘transition from water to land’ - one of the unexplainable points of evolution - is given in such simplicity that they do not prove to be believable even for children.  According to evolution, life began in water and the first developed animals on earth were fish.  According to the story, one day fish species developed the ability to climb out of water and moved on land!  The theory continues that fish which chose to live on land had feet instead of fins and lungs instead of gills!  In most of the books about evolution, nobody explains ‘why’ the transition occurred.  Even in the most ‘scientific’ sources, writers suddenly jump to conclusions like ‘and transition from water to land occurred’ without providing a satisfactory answer regarding how the process worked.  Yet how did this transformation occur?  It is obvious that a fish cannot survive out of water for more than one or two minutes.  If, we assume that a drought really existed as claimed by evolutionists, and fish were, for some reason, drawn to lands then what would happen to fish even if this process lasts for ten millions of years?  The answer is straight: Fish leaving the water would inevitably die in a few moments.  Even if this process lasted for ten millions of years, the answer would still be the same; All fish would die one by one.  Nobody would dare to say: ‘Maybe after 4 million years some of the fish suddenly acquired lungs while they were trying to survive.  This would no doubt be an illogical assertion!  However that is exactly what evolutionists claim.”  -Harun Yahya, “The Evolution Deceit” (212)



The theory of evolution supposes that life somehow originated and evolved in the sea until somehow something that had theretofore lived only under water grew lungs and feet and started living on land!  Darwinists claim fish (creatures living only under water) turned into amphibians (creatures living on both land and water) and then amphibians evolved into reptiles (creatures living only on land).  Then they propose some reptiles evolved wings and became birds while other reptiles evolved and became mammals.  None of these transitional forms have ever been found, however, nor could they realistically exist either.  For example amphibian eggs develop only in water whereas amniotic eggs develop only on land, so some sort of gradual step-by-step evolution scenario is impossible since without perfect, complete eggs a species cannot survive.  Reptiles allegedly evolving into mammals is another example of evolutionist wishful-thinking.  Reptiles are cold-blooded, lay eggs, do not suckle their young, have one middle-ear bone, three mandible bones and bodies covered in scales, whereas mammals are warm-blooded, have live births, suckle their young, have three middle-ear bones, one mandible, and are covered in fur or hair - far too many distinct differences for “gradual evolution.”  Reptiles evolving wings is another sheer impossibility, as the structure of land-dwelling reptiles and air-dwelling birds are far too different.  Engin Korur, a Turkish evolutionist admits the problem wings present to Darwin’s theory, “The common trait of the eyes and the wings is that they can only function if they are fully developed.  In other words a half-way developed eye cannot see; a bird with half-formed wings cannot fly.  How these organs came into being has remained one of the mysteries of nature that needs to be enlightened.”

“Although it is cloaked in the guise of science, the theory of evolution is nothing but a deceit: a deceit defended only for the benefit of materialistic philosophy; a deceit based not on science but on brainwashing, propaganda, and fraud.  The theory of evolution is a theory that fails at the very first step.  The reason is that evolutionists are unable to explain even the formation of a single protein.  Neither the laws of probability nor the laws of physics and chemistry offer any chance for the fortuitous formation of life.  Does it sound logical or reasonable when not even a single chance-formed protein can exist, that millions of such proteins combined in an order to produce the cell of a living thing; and that billions of cells managed to form and then came together by chance to produce living things; and that from them generated fish; and that those that passed to land turned into reptiles, birds, and that this is how all the millions of different species on earth were formed?  They have never found a single transitional form such as a half-fish/half-reptile or half-reptile/half-bird.  Nor have they been able to prove that a protein, or even a single amino acid molecule composing a protein, could have formed under what they call primordial earth conditions; not even in their elaborately-equipped laboratories have they succeeded in doing that.”  -Harun Yahya, “The Evolution Deceit” (214-215)



Darwin's theory is a concept that concerns not only biology, chemistry, astronomy and metaphysics, but actually formed the basis for new political outlooks as well. Within a very short time, this new progressive political attitude was redefined as “Social Darwinism,” and as many historians have suggested, Social Darwinism became the ideological basis of fascism, communism, and eugenics.  Darwin’s ideas of “natural selection” and “survival of the fittest” were central to the insane ideologies of many of the 20th century’s worst mass murderers including Mao, Stalin, Lenin, Trotsky, Marx, and Pol Pot.  Charles Darwin himself was a blatant racist who elucidated in his book “The Descent of Man” how blacks and aborigines, due to their inferiority to Caucasians would “be done away with by the civilized races in time.”



Freemasonic records state that Charles Darwin’s grandfather Erasmus Darwin was a philosopher, scientist and physician who advanced ideas on evolution back in the 18th century.  Before coming to Derby in 1788, Dr. Darwin had been made a Mason in the famous Time Immemorial Lodge of Cannongate Kilwinning No. 2 of Scotland.  He also maintained close connections to the Jacobin Masons in France and Adam Weishaupt’s Illuminati.  Sir Francis Darwin and Reginald Darwin, two of his sons, were also made Masons in Tyrian Lodge No. 253 at Derby.  Charles Darwin does not appear on the rolls of the Lodge but it is most likely that he, like his Grandfather, his Sons and his “Bulldog” T.H.Huxley, was a Mason.  Charles wrote that he used to listen to his grandfather’s ideas of evolution and was greatly influenced by them.  Erasmus was the first man to put forward the notion of evolution in England.  He was known as a “respected” person, but he had a very dark private life and at least two illegitimate children.  Charles himself would go on to marry his first cousin and have three children die due to complications from inbreeding.



“Masons, thinking that Darwinism could serve their goals, played a great role in its dissemination among the masses.  As soon as Darwin’s theory was published, a group of volunteer propagandists formed around it, the most famous of whom was Thomas Huxley who was called Darwin’s ‘bulldog.’  Huxley ‘whose ardent advocacy of Darwinism was the single factor most responsible for its rapid acceptance’ brought the world’s attention to the theory of evolution in the Debate at the Oxford University Museum in which he entered into on June 30th, 1860 with the bishop of Oxford, Samuel Wilberforce.  Huxley’s great dedication to spreading the idea of evolution, together with his establishment connections, is brought into further light according to the following fact: Huxley was a member of the Royal Society, one of England’s most prestigious scientific institutions and, like nearly all the other members of this institution, was a senior Mason.  Other members of the Royal Society lent Darwin significant support … In short, Darwin wasn’t acting alone; from the moment his theory was proposed, he received the support that came from the social classes and groups whose nucleus was made up of Masons.”  -Harun Yahya, “The Theory of Evolution Revisited”



“An important example which proves the fact that Darwinism is one of the biggest deceptions of atheistic freemasonry is a resolution carried in a mason meeting.  The 33rd degree Supreme Council of Mizraim Freemasonry at Paris, reveals in its minutes its promotion of evolution as science, while they themselves scoffed at the theory.  The minutes read as follows: ‘It is with this object in view [the scientific theory of evolution] that we are constantly by means of our press, arousing a blind confidence in these theories.  The intellectuals will puff themselves up with their knowledge and without any logical verification of them will put into effect all the information available from science, which our agentur specialists have cunningly pieced together for the purpose of educating their minds in the direction we want.  Do not suppose for a moment that these statements are empty words: think carefully of the successes we arranged for Darwinism.’  Atheistic freemasonry in the United States has picked up the resolution of Mizraim before long.  New Age magazine in its March 1922 issue stated that the kingdom of atheistic freemasonry will be established by evolution and the development of man himself.  As seen above, the false scientific image of evolution is a deception set in the 33rd degree atheist Masonic lodges.  Atheist masons openly admit that they will use the scientists and media which are under their control to present this deception as scientific, which even they find funny.”  -Harun Yahya, “The Fundamental Philosophy of Atheistic Freemasonry”



The Mimar Sinan journal published by the Turkish Great Freemasonry Lodge has openly discussed their mission to use Darwinism to overthrow religion and belief in God.  One article mentioned, “Today the only valid scientific theory accepted both by most civilized countries and underdeveloped ones remains to be Darwinism.  However, neither the church nor other religions have collapsed yet.  The legend of Adam and Eve is still being taught as religious teachings in holy books.”  In other words, it seems one of the main goals of modern Masons, besides convincing people of the ball-Earth and Big Bang, is to abolish the biblical creation story and replace it with their godless myth of blind chance evolution.  Just like Copernicus never claimed to have any new or special evidence for his heliocentric theory, Darwin never claimed to have any verifiable scientific evidence proving his evolution theory, yet here we are 150 years later, no closer to a proof of either, but with the vast majority of indoctrinated sheeple convinced they are monkey-men hanging from a spinning ball!

“When we look at the Western media carefully, we frequently come across news dwelling on the theory of evolution.  Leading media organizations, and well-known and ‘respectable’ magazines periodically bring this subject up.  When their approach is examined, one gets the impression that this theory is an absolutely proven fact leaving no room for discussion.  Ordinary people reading this kind of news naturally start to think that the theory of evolution is a fact as certain as any law of mathematics.  They print headlines in big fonts: ‘According to Time magazine, a new fossil that completes the gap in the fossil chain has been found’; or ‘Nature indicates that scientists have shed light on the final issues of evolutionary theory.’  The finding of ‘the last missing link of the evolution chain’ means nothing because there is not a single thing proven about evolution.  In short, both the media and academic circles, which are at the disposal of anti-religionist power-centers, maintain an entirely evolutionist view and they impose this on society.  This imposition is so effective that it has in time turned evolution into an idea that is never to be rejected.  Denying evolution is seen as being contradictory to science and fundamental realities.”  -Harun Yahya, “The Evolution Deceit” (210)



“The information we have considered throughout this book has shown us that the theory of evolution has no scientific basis, and that, on the contrary, evolutionist claims conflict with scientific facts.  In other words, the force that keeps evolution alive is not science.  The theory of evolution is maintained by some ‘scientists,’ but behind it there is another influence at work.  This other influence is materialist philosophy.  Materialist philosophy is one of the oldest beliefs in the world, and assumes the existence of matter as its basic principle.  According to this view, matter has always existed, and everything that exists consists of matter.  This makes belief in a Creator impossible, of course, because if matter has always existed, and if everything consists of matter, then there can be no suprematerial Creator who created it.”  -Harun Yahya, “The Evolution Deceit” (202)

The fact of the matter is evolution is, was, and always has been a foregone conclusion by people looking for any answer other than God.  When you metaphysically exclude the existence of an intelligent creative consciousness behind the creation of the material world, the only answer left is random happenstance!  Everything must be the result of coincidence, chance and circumstance once you have excluded the possibility of a supreme intelligent creator.  But no matter how diligently it is denied, the truth remains: you simply are not some cosmic accident, not the result of random happenstance, chance or coincidence, your eyes, your ears, your feelings, your life and consciousness are all the result of the most supremely intelligent design!  My previous book Spiritual Science is a 284-page refutation of materialist science and philosophy which proves far beyond any reasonable doubt that atheistic materialism is an invalid, untenable, destructive philosophy, and that consciousness and intelligence existed before and beyond all space, time and matter.

Malcolm Muggeridge, an atheist philosopher and supporter of evolution for 60 years finally admitted before his death that, “I myself am convinced that the theory of evolution, especially the extent to which it’s been applied, will be one of the great jokes in the history books in the future.  Posterity will marvel that so very flimsy and dubious an hypothesis could be accepted with the incredible credulity that it has.”



“According to these professors, a number of simple chemical substances first came together and formed a protein - which is no more possible than a randomly scattered collection of letters coming together to form a poem.  Then, other coincidences led to the emergence of other proteins.  These then also combined by chance in an organized manner.  Not just proteins, but DNA, RNA, enzymes, hormones, and cell organelles, all of which are very complex structures within the cell, coincidentally happened to emerge and come together.  As a result of these billions of coincidences, the first cell came into being … If you put a carved stone or wooden idol in front of these people and told them, ‘Look, this idol created this room and everything in it’ they would say that was utterly stupid and refuse to believe it.  Yet despite that they declare the nonsense that ‘The unconscious process known as chance gradually brought this world and all the billions of wonderful living things in it into being’ to be the greatest scientific explanation.  In short, these people regard chance as a god, and claim that it is intelligent, conscious and powerful enough to create living things and all the sensitive balances in the universe.”  -Harun Yahya, “The Evolution Deceit” (32)

http://www.atlanteanconspiracy.com/2015/10/evolution-intelligent-design.html

One of the first frauds in the history of Darwinism, known as “recapitulation theory,” and heralded as undeniable “proof of evolution,” was an idea proposed and propagated by a racist eugenicist Professor named Ernst Haeckel in the late 19th century. A contemporary and friend of Charles Darwin and Thomas “Bulldog” Huxley, Haeckel postulated that human (and other animal) embryos experience a miniature form of the entire evolutionary impulse during their development in the womb, displaying first characteristics of fish, then reptile, and lastly mammalian or human. It has long been eliminated from scientific literature, but many people and popular sources still unknowingly quote and believe in Haeckel’s fraudulent work. Several popular magazines and school textbooks as recently as the 1990s, over a century after being exposed, were still publishing Haeckel’s hoaxed pictures and recapitulation theory as science fact!



“It has since been proven that this theory is completely bogus. It is now known that the ‘gills’ that supposedly appear in the early stages of the human embryo are in fact the initial phases of the middle-ear canal, parathyroid, and thymus. The part of the embryo that was likened to the ‘egg yolk pouch’ turns out to be a pouch that produces blood for the infant. The part that had been identified as a ‘tail’ by Haeckel and his followers is in fact the backbone, which resembles a tail only because it takes shape before the legs do. Another interesting aspect of ‘recapitulation’ was Ernst Haeckel himself, a faker who falsified his drawings in order to support the theory he advanced. Haeckel’s forgeries purported to show that fish and human embryos resembled one another. When he was caught out, the only defense he offered was that other evolutionists had committed similar offences!” -Harun Yahya, “The Evolution Deceit” (199-200)



Haeckel was charged with fraud by five professors and convicted by a university court at Jena where he admitted that several of his drawings were forgeries, that he was merely filling in missing links where evidence was thin, and that hundreds of his contemporaries were guilty of the same charge! During the trial he said; “After this compromising confession of forgery I should be obliged to consider myself condemned and annihilated if I had not the consolation of seeing side by side with me in the prisoners’ dock hundreds of fellow culprits, among them many of the most trusted observers and most esteemed biologists. The great majority of all the diagrams in the best biological textbooks, treatises and journals would incur in the same degree the charge of forgery, for all of them are inexact, and are more or less doctored, schematized and constructed.”



What an admission! Not only did Haeckel confess his own forgeries, but he admitted that there were hundreds of other scientific fraudsters similarly doctoring findings in the best biological textbooks, treatises and journals (several of which will be examined in this chapter). As it turns out, Haeckel had simply copied and printed the same human embryo pictures several times over claiming each were various other animal embryos with exact parallels, when in fact the parallels do not exist, and the pictures were copies he knowingly and intentionally made to suit his recapitulation idea.

“To support his theory, Haeckel, whose knowledge of embryology was self-taught, faked some of his evidence. He not only altered his illustrations of embryos but also printed the same plate of an embryo three times, and labeled one a human, the second a dog and the third a rabbit ‘to show their similarity.’” -Malcolm Bowden, “Ape-Men: Fact or Fallacy?”

“This is one of the worst cases of scientific fraud. It’s shocking to find that somebody one thought was a great scientist was deliberately misleading. It makes me angry … What Haeckel did was to take a human embryo and copy it, pretending that the salamander and the pig and all the others looked the same at the same stage of development. They don’t … These are fakes.” -Dr. Michael Richardson, The Times London, Aug. 11, 1997



For the past 150 years, evolutionist scientists have been working diligently to propagandize the public into believing that modern humans are descended from ancient apes. The final and most difficult theoretical leap for the theory of evolution is this supposed million-year transition from ape to human. The utter impossibility of “evolving” abilities like bipedality, erect spinal columns, and complex linguistic skills has been debated since the theory was first presented, but such obstacles will never stop die-hard evolutionists set on discovering (or inventing!) a believable monkey-man transitional species.



The first of these convenient evolutionary “discoveries” was the “Neanderthal Man” found in the Neander Valley of Germany in 1856, just in time for the release of Darwin’s Origin of Species. To this day, reconstructed drawings of hairy ape-like “Neanderthal” men are depicted in scholarly journals and school textbooks and claimed to be a missing evolutionary link. The fact is, however, that all so-called Neanderthal remains have never been shown to be any more different from modern humans than an Asian from a Caucasian, or an Inuit from an Aborigine. Also the skull size shows its brain was actually 13% larger than the average brain of modern man, making it impossible to be an intermediary between man and ape. Even Time magazine in 1971 proclaimed the primitiveness of Neanderthal to be unwarranted, that he could walk the street today unrecognized, one writer even commenting that historians of the future may “declare us all insane for not detecting and refuting this incredible blunder with adequate determination.”



One of the main proponents pushing Neanderthal Man as an authentic species nowadays is Reiner Protsch, a German professor who dated the fossils at 36,000 years old allowing them to fit perfectly in the evolutionist’s timeline. In 2005, however, Protsch was forced to retire in disgrace by a panel of Frankfurt University heads who determined he had “fabricated data and plagiarized the work of his colleagues over the past 30 years.” The once-renowned “carbon-dating expert” has presently been completely ostracized from the scientific community. It has since been determined that all Neanderthal skeletal remains are no more than a few thousand years old, some only a few hundred! They have also found modern human DNA in the bones, that their brain capacity was 13% larger than the modern average, their height 5’9” comparable to our average, and they had advanced tools, buried their dead and enjoyed art!

University of Berlin Professor Rudolf Virchow, Ernst Haeckel’s former professor and the “father of modern pathology” back in 1872 concluded the original “Neanderthal” remains were simply that of an unfortunate homo sapiens who had suffered childhood rickets, adult arthritis, and was victim to several damaging blows to the head. Erik Trinkaus, a paleoanthropologist from New Mexico University concluded his examination stating, “Detailed comparisons of Neanderthal skeletal remains with those of modern humans have shown that there is nothing in Neanderthal anatomy that conclusively indicates locomotor, manipulative, intellectual, or linguistic abilities inferior to those of modern humans.”



In 1891-92, the next ape-man “discovery” was found in Java, Indonesia by Eugene Dubois, who “coincidentally” happened to be a student and apprentice of evolutionist hoaxster Ernst Haeckel! Dubois found a skullcap, a leg bone, a jaw fragment and three teeth, from which was reconstructed the ape-like “Java Man.” Within 10 years of its discovery, Java Man was the main subject of over 80 evolution books and articles. It was given the “scientific name,” of “Anthropopithecus erectus,” and later changed to “Pithecanthropus erectus” and finally “Homo erectus” undoubtedly for super-official pseudo-scientific reasons.



“Java man was discovered by a Dutchman. I’m a little embarrassed by that because I’m a Dutchman myself. His name was Eugene Dubois. The bones were found in 1891-92 on the Indonesian Island of Java in Southeast Asia along the banks of the Solo River. And there was an interesting assortment. He found a leg bone, a skullcap, a jaw fragment and three teeth. And that’s what he concocted Java man from. Interestingly enough some of the teeth were old and some young. The bones belonged to ape, female and male. It was an interesting conglomeration and the reason that people didn’t catch on to it is because the find of Dubois was kept from scholars for about 30 years. He also withheld the discovery of modern human remains, which were found in the same stratum as Java man. Of course, that would have ruined his claims that Java man was the ancestor of modern day humans. Finally, enough pressure was placed on him that the actual bones were allowed to be examined and the discrepancies were found. And eventually, enlightened America as well as the world found out that this was a hoax. Unfortuantely hoaxes die hard. [Recently] Time Magazine ran a cover story entitled “How Man Became Man” and starts off ridiculing Christians and Creationists then goes on to present Java man as though it were fact.” -Hank Hanegraaff, “The Face that Demonstrates the Farce of Evolution”

“Java Man’s” teeth were found to be of different ages and the bones a mixture of human and ape, with a giant gibbon skull! Rudolph Virchow, Haeckel’s own professor and the foremost pathology expert of his time stated, “In my opinion this creature was an animal, a giant gibbon, in fact. And the thigh bone has not the slightest connection with the skull.” He and many others have concluded the thigh bone is quite clearly human while the skullcap and teeth belonged to a primate.



In 1912 a doctor and paleo-anthropologist named Charles Dawson claimed to have found a jawbone and cranial fragment of an ape-man transitional form in a pit in Piltdown, England. It was alleged to be 500,000 years old and was displayed as absolute proof of human evolution in museums across the world. For the next 40 years, scores of “scientific” articles, artist reconstructions, and over 500 doctoral theses were written about “Piltdown man.” Objections and criticisms were raised immediately by contemporaries like Arthur Keith but managed to be mitigated by Dawson until 1953 when tests proved conclusively that the Piltdown skull was actually human and only a few hundred years old, while the lower protruding jaw was from a recently deceased orangutan!



Investigators found that Dawson had artificially worn down the orangutan jaw, and that the “primitive tools” discovered alongside the fossils were imitations Dawson had sharpened with steel implements! Dawson also filled the molar surfaces of the teeth to more resemble those of man, and stained all the fossils with potassium dichromate to give them an antiquated appearance. The stains quickly disappeared when dipped in acid however. Wilfred Le Gros Clark, a member of Joseph Weiner’s team who uncovered the forgery, stated that, “the evidences of artificial abrasion immediately sprang to the eye. Indeed so obvious did they seem it may well be asked, how was it that they had escaped notice before?” Within days, Piltdown man was removed from the British Museum where it had been on display for four decades.

Since conclusively being proven a hoax in 1953 many of Dawson’s other paleontological “finds” have also proven to be fakes or planted. In 2003, Dr. Miles Russell of Bournemouth University published the results of an investigation into Dawson’s antiquarian collection concluding that at least 38 specimens were clear fakes, noting that “Dawson’s entire academic career appears to have been built upon deceit, sleight of hand, fraud and deception, the ultimate gain being international recognition.”



The next fraudulent attempt at creating and propagating a supposed ape-man transitional form was carried out in 1922 by Henry Fairfield Osborn. Co-founder of the American Eugenics Society, President of the White Supremacist Pioneer Fund and director of the American Museum of Natural History, Osborn declared that he had been sent an anomalous tooth found in Snake Brook, Nebraska, which had characteristics of both ape and man! He determined that it came from the Pliocene period of ancient history, from the transitional species “Pithecanthropus erectus,” and affectionately labeled the tooth’s owner “Nebraska Man.”

“Nebraska man was also immediately given a ‘scientific name,’ Hesperopithecus haroldcooki. Many authorities gave Osborn their support. Based on this single tooth, reconstructions of the Nebraska man’s head and body were drawn. Moreover, Nebraska man was even pictured along with his wife and children, as a whole family in a natural setting.” -Harun Yahya, “The Evolution Deceit” (95)



Once “Nebraska Man” made the media rounds of popular publications and the pliable public was sufficiently propagandized, the story disappeared until 1928 when William Bryan and William Gregory had the opportunity to independently examine the tooth. Their investigations both conclusively found that the tooth did not belong to a man or ape, but was actually from an extinct species of wild American pig called Presthennops! After William Gregory published his article, “Hesperopithecus: Apparently Not an Ape Nor a Man,” in Science magazine all drawings and models of “Nebraska Man” and his “family” were quickly removed from evolutionist publications.

Henry Osborn himself was forced to concede that Nebraska Man, “Hesperopithecus haroldcooki,” the supposed example of the “Pliocene Pithecanthropus erectus” and his whole imaginary family were completely fictional fabrications. He never admitted to intentional fraud (and why would he?), but as an ardent evolutionist, eugenicist and white supremacist, a level of confirmation bias was likely. Osborn was even such a sadistic racist that he was quoted during a national debate unabashedly saying of WWI Army intelligence tests that; “I believe those tests were worth what the war cost, even in human life … We have learned once and for all that the Negro is not like us.”



“After Darwin advanced the claim with his book The Descent of Man that man evolved from ape-like living beings, he started to seek fossils to support this contention. However, some evolutionists believed that ‘half-man half-ape’ creatures were to be found not only in the fossil record, but also alive in various parts of the world. In the early 20th century, these pursuits for ‘living transitional links’ led to unfortunate incidents, one of the cruelest of which is the story of a Pygmy by the name of Ota Benga. Ota Benga was captured in 1904 by an evolutionist researcher in the Congo. In his own tongue, his name meant ‘friend.’ He had a wife and two children. Chained and caged like an animal, he was taken to the USA where evolutionist scientists displayed him to the public in the St. Louis World Fair along with other ape species and introduced him as ‘the closest transitional link to man.’ Two years later they took him to the Bronx Zoo in New York and there they exhibited him under the denomination of ‘ancient ancestors of man’ along with a few chimpanzee, a gorilla named Dinah, and an orangutan called Dohung. Dr. William Hornaday, the zoo’s evolutionist director gave long speeches on how proud he was to have this exceptional ‘transitional form’ in his zoo and treated caged Ota Benga as if he were an ordinary animal. Unable to bear the treatment he was subjected to, Ota Benga eventually committed suicide. Piltdown Man, Nebraska Man, Ota Benga… These scandals demonstrate that evolutionist scientists do not hesitate to employ any kind of unscientific method to prove their theories.” -Harun Yahya, “The Evolution Deceit” (96-97)



In 1927 Davidson Black declared he had discovered five crushed skulls and several teeth near Beijing belonging to an ancient ape-man species now widely known as “Peking Man.” Somewhere between 1941-1945 all the original bones were mysteriously “lost,” however, leaving only a few plaster casts left to examine! At the same site where this supposed “missing link” was found, there were also found the remains of 10 fully human skeletons who quarried nearby limestone, built fires and left behind a variety of tools. Many scientists now believe the tools were used on the Peking Man rather than by them. The back of the skulls were all bashed in and in that part of the world, monkey brains are a delicacy, so it is likely that Peking Man were actually Peking apes, and they were man’s meal, not man’s ancient ancestor.



In 1974 Donald Johansson discovered “Lucy” a three-foot tall supposedly three-million year-old “Australopithicine” in Ethiopia. Widely publicized as our oldest direct human ancestor, Lucy made the usual rounds of scientific magazine journals and school textbooks. Don Johansson modestly claimed that Lucy was “the most important find made by anyone in the history of the entire human race,” and the media heralded him a hero. He was promoted from assistant professor to receiving his own Institute for Human Biology at Berkley. During all this time he never allowed scientists to examine Lucy’s bones until 1982, eight years later. Since then, and as more “Australopithecine” skeletons have been found and examined, however, many leading evolutionists agree that Lucy is simply an extinct type of ape, similar to modern pygmy chimpanzees and nothing more. They may have walked slightly more upright than most apes, but were not bipedal or erect, could not talk, spent most time in trees, and walked on all fours.

Lord Solly Zuckerman and Professor Charles Oxnard did 15 years of research on Australopithecines along with a team of five specialists coming to the conclusion that all the various specimens of Australopithecus they examined were only an ordinary ape genus and definitely not bipedal. The French Science and Life magazine ran the cover story in May 1999 “Goodbye Lucy” writing about how “Lucy” the most famous fossil of Australopithecus was not the root of the human race and needs to be removed from our supposed family tree. However, even now in 2014 a movie named “Lucy” has just been released by Masonic “Universal Pictures” where the Lucy ape-woman fraud is still treated as scientific fact throughout the entire movie.



In 1982 a skull fragment found in the Spanish town of Orce was hailed to be the oldest fossilized human remain ever found in Eurasia! “Orce man” was supposedly a 17 year old ape-man who lived between 900,000 - 1,600,000 years ago, and was presented to the world with the usual reconstructed drawings showing a young, hairy man-ape teenager. In 1983, however, a team of scientists from France concluded that the skull fragment was actually from a four-month old donkey! A three-day scientific symposium had been scheduled so experts could examine and discuss the bone, but was immediately cancelled after the French investigation; embarrassed Spanish officials sent out 500 letters to the would-be attendees apologizing. After more conclusive tests The Daily Telegraph on May 14, 1984 carried the headline “Ass Taken For Man.”



Later in 1984, Kemoya Kimeu in a team led by paleoanthropologist Richard Leakey, discovered “Turkana Boy,” at Nariokotome near Lake Turkana, Kenya. Turkana Boy was proclaimed to be a pre-teen boy from 1.5-1.6 million years ago and is now regarded as the most complete early human skeleton ever found. Much like Neanderthal Man, however, Turkana Boy or “Narikotome Homo erectus,” is no different from modern man. American paleoanthropologist Alan Walker said, “I doubt the average pathologist could tell the difference between the fossil skeleton and that of a modern human.” He wrote that he laughed upon first seeing it because “it looked so much like a Neanderthal.”

Turkana Boy was bipedal, with arms and legs of human proportions, an upright skeletal structure, comparable in height, cranial size, and development rate of modern humans. Even the discovering team-leader Richard Leakey stated that the difference between this specimen of “Homo erectus” and modern man are no more pronounced than simple racial variances: “The shape of the skull, the degree of protrusion of the face, the robustness of the brows and so on… These differences are probably no more pronounced than we see today between the separate geographical races of modern humans. Such biological variation arises when populations are geographically separated from each other for significant lengths of time.”



So, when seen for what they really are, all the supposed ape-men discoveries and reconstructions are nothing but frauds and fantasies. Neanderthal Man was just an ordinary man, Java Man and Piltdown Man were composed of human and ape bones, Nebraska Man was actually a pig, Peking Man was actually a man’s meal, Lucy was just a monkey, Orce Man was a donkey, and Turkana Boy was just a boy!

“Reconstruction can be explained as drawing a picture or constructing a model of a living thing based on a single bone - sometimes only a fragment - that has been unearthed. The ‘ape-men’ we see in newspapers, magazines, or films are all reconstructions. The fossils that are claimed to be evidence for the human evolution scenario are in fact products of fraud. For more than 150 years, not even a single fossil to prove evolution has been found. As a matter of fact, the reconstructions (drawings or models) of the fossil remains made by the evolutionists are prepared speculatively precisely to validate the evolutionary thesis. David R. Pilbeam, an anthropologist from Harvard, stresses this fact when he says: ‘At least in paleoanthropology, data are still so sparse that theory heavily influences interpretations. Theories have, in the past, clearly reflected our current ideologies instead of the actual data.’ Since people are highly effected by visual information, these reconstructions best serve the purpose of evolutionists, which is to convince people that these reconstructed creatures really existed in the past.” -Harun Yahya, “The Evolution Deceit” (90)



All the many models, drawings, cartoons, mannequins, and movies made involving various “ape-men” are complete fiction and fabrication because no one can actually accurately determine the outward appearance of an animal based solely on bone structure. Soft tissue, which vanishes quickly after death and is responsible for the look of one’s eyes, ears, nose, lips, hair, eyebrows, skin etc., totally depends on the imagination of the person reconstructing them. Earnest A. Hooten of Harvard University stated, “To attempt to restore the soft parts is an even more hazardous undertaking. The lips, the eyes, the ears, and the nasal tip leave no clues on the underlying bony parts. You can with equal facility model on a Neanderthaloid skull the features of a chimpanzee or the lineaments of a philosopher. These alleged restorations of ancient types of man have very little if any scientific value and are likely only to mislead the public… So put not your trust in reconstructions.”

“There is no concrete fossil evidence to support the ‘ape-man’ image, which is unceasingly promulgated by the media and evolutionist academic circles. With brushes in their hands, evolutionists produce imaginary creatures, nevertheless, the fact that these drawings correspond to no matching fossils constitutes a serious problem for them. One of the interesting methods they employ to overcome this problem is to ‘produce’ the fossils they cannot find. Piltdown Man, which may be the biggest scandal in the history of science, is a typical example of this method.” -Harun Yahya, “The Evolution Deceit” (93)

The current evolutionist ape-to-human transitional theory goes “Australophithecus,” - “Homo habilis,” - “Homo erectus” - “Homo sapiens.” Australophithecus, which means “Southern Ape,” has been proven to be nothing but an extinct ape which closely resembles many modern chimpanzees in height, arm and leg length, skull shape, teeth, mandibular structure, and many other details. Homo habilis, a hypothetical classification created in the 1960s by Turkana Boy team-leader Richard Leakey was what evolutionists deemed necessary to exist between Australophithecus and Homo erectus, because the jump was far too drastic. There needed to be a species of ape-man with a larger cranial capacity that could walk upright and use tools.



Serendipitously for his career, fossils unearthed in the late 1980s were deemed Homo habilis, and Leakey was regarded a scientific genius! That is until his contemporaries Bernard Wood and C. Loring Brace determined the Homo habilis arms were too long, legs were too short, and skeletal structure too ape-like to be anything but an ape. Their fingers and toes were that of tree-climbers, and their jaws and cranial capacities were comparable to modern apes. American anthropologist Holly Smith in 1994 concluded Homo habilis was not Homo, or human, at all, but simply an ape just like Australopithecus. She stated that, “Restricting analysis of fossils to specimens satisfying these criteria, patterns of dental development of gracile australopithecines and Homo habilis remain classified with African apes. Those of Homo erectus and Neanderthals are classified with humans.”



So Australopithecus and Homo habilis, the first two classifications, are both actually fully ape, while Homo erectus and Homo sapiens, the second two classifications, are in fact fully human and comparable to modern man, with variances no greater than the natural variances of race and genetics. So even after 150 years of “discoveries” evolutionists are no closer to finding a true “transitional species” existing between ape and man, and no closer to proving their theory. Nor can they answer, how could apes develop bipedality, human arm/leg length ratios, erect spinal columns and complex linguistic skills? If humans evolved from apes, why do apes still exist? Why don’t any of these supposed transitional forms still exist now, and where are true examples in the fossil record?

“The evolutionists wrote the scenario of human evolution by arranging some of the ape skulls that suited their purpose in an order from the smallest to the biggest and scattering the skulls of some extinct human races among them. According to this scenario, men and today’s apes have common ancestors. These creatures evolved in time and some of them became the apes of today while another group that followed another branch of evolution became the men of today. However, all the paleontological, anatomical and biological findings have demonstrated that this claim of evolution is as fictitious and invalid as all the others. No sound or real evidence has been put forward to prove that there is a relationship between man and ape, except forgeries, distortions, and misleading drawings and comments. The fossil record indicates to us that throughout history, men have been men and apes have been apes.” -Harun Yahya, “The Evolution Deceit” (98)

http://www.atlanteanconspiracy.com/2015/12/ape-men-never-existed.html

Post by gnosticwarrior on Oct 12, 2015 at 4:10pm

Absolutely fantastic information resource right here!

Terence McKenna often criticized the materialist science cosmology in his lectures. He was known for asserting that the Big Bang was/is THE single-most unlikely of events that could/would ever occur. "The most unlikely of the unlikely".

He had more than once also explicitly said "Material science's game is one of "Give us one free miracle, and we'll explain the rest"". Nobody explained it better and in more detail in a live setting for me.

Absolutely eye-opening insights for those still under the spell of "psyience".

Post by Admin on Oct 12, 2015 at 7:22pm

Oct 12, 2015 at 1:09pm lookingfortruth said:
could you explain what atoms are and how they work?

Hey, since atoms and their constituent parts are all too small to actually be seen, even by deceivingly named "electron microscopes," their conceptions of atoms as miniature solar systems with ball-planet electrons revolving around nucleus nuclear sun centers is complete speculation on par with their molten magnetic ball-Earth core thousands of miles deeper than they've ever actually dug. The majority of "science" nowadays is science-fiction.

Principles of Radiocarbon dating

William Frank Libby and his team developed the principles of radiocarbon dating during the 1950s. By 1960 their work was complete and in December of the same year Libby was presented with the Nobel Prize for Chemistry. One of the scientists who nominated Libby for the award commented:

"Seldom has a single discovery in chemistry had such an impact on the thinking of so many fields of human endeavour. Seldom has a single discovery generated such wide interest"

Libby discovered that the unstable radioactive component of carbon (C14) disintegrated at a predictable level against the stable elements of the carbon composite (C12 and C13). All three of these isotopes occur naturally in our atmosphere in the following proportions: C12 - 98.89%, C13 - 1.11% and C14 - 0.00000000010%.

The stable isotopes of carbon (12 and 13) were formed when all of our planet's atoms materialised --a long, long time ago. C14 is formed, albeit on a miniscule level, due to bombardments of cosmic rays that hit our planet, on a day-to-day basis, and interact with our atmosphere. These rays strike the earth's existing atoms and break them up leaving the neutrons of these atoms to float around our atmosphere.

A carbon 14 isotope is formed when one of these floating neutrons merges with the nucleus of a nitrogen atom. Radiocarbon, therefore, is a kind of Frankenstein isotope, a fusion between different atomic elements. These rogue carbon 14 isotopes, which are produced at a steady rate, are then oxidized and absorbed into the biosphere through the process of photosynthesis and the natural food chain.

Consequently all living things incorporate the atmospheric ratio of C14 to C12 in their geographical area, which is maintained by their metabolic rate. Once dead, however, living organisms stop absorbing carbon and it is the behaviour of C14 after this point that is interesting. Libby discovered that radiocarbon decays with a half-life of 5568 years. This means that after 5568 years or so, half of the original amount of C14 would have disintegrated from the sample. After another 5568 years, again, half of what is left dies.

Therefore, with the original amount of C14 to C12 being a geological constant, the age of a sample can be determined by measuring the residual C14 present. For example, if one quarter of the original amount of C14 is present then the organism in question died two half lives ago (5568 + 5568), which equates to an age of 10, 146 years.

Herein lie the basic backbone principles of radiocarbon dating as a tool of science and archaeology. It is a fact that radiocarbon is absorbed into the biosphere. It is a fact that when an organism dies no more C14 is absorbed. It is a fact that C14 spontaneously dies after this point. It is a fact that this process can be measured.

Into The Laboratory

With all of these facts (and they are facts), it is confusing then to pick up Radiocarbon (Journal that lists worldwide radiocarbon laboratory results) and read:

"Six reputable dating laboratories performed 18 age determinations on wood from Chelford, Cheshire. The finite ages reported ranged between 26,200 and 60,000 BP, a spread of 34,600 years"

Here is another fact for you; whilst the theory of radiocarbon dating is convincing, when its principles are practically applied to samples in a laboratory human processes come into the fray. In short mistakes are made, big ones. Furthermore, samples are contaminated in laboratories by background radiation that can and do pollute the residual level of C14 to be measured.

As pointed out by Renfrew in 1973 and Taylor in 1986, Radiocarbon dating relies on a series of unsubstantiated assumptions that were made by Libby when he was developing his theory. For example there has been much debate in recent years about Libby's measurement of the half-life to 5568 years. Indeed, today it is generally agreed that Libby was wrong and that the half-life of C14 is actually closer to 5730 years. This is a discrepancy of 162 years and becomes very significant when dating samples thousands of years old.

But with his Nobel Prize for chemistry came complete belief from Libby in his new system. Libby radiocarbon dated Egyptian archaeological samples that had already been historically dated - the ancient Egyptians kept good records of their chronology. Unfortunately Libby's results kept coming up to young, in some cases by 800 years. Amazingly though, Libby concluded,

"This plot of the data suggests that the Egyptian historical dates beyond 4000 years ago may be somewhat too old, perhaps five centuries too old at 5000 years ago"

This is a classic case of scientific arrogance and blind religious belief in the superiority of the scientific method over the archaeological - Libby was wrong, his method had failed him. Now this problem has been addressed but has this attitude of self-authority given radiocarbon dating a reputation above its level of reliability?

Similar problems such as these, and there are many of them, have been addressed and are accounted for in modern radiocarbon studies. However, my research has indicated that there are two serious issues of concern with radiocarbon dating that still cause serious problems today. These are 1) Sample contamination, 2) Measuring the levels of C14 in our atmosphere over the geological ages.

Sample Contamination

Mary Levine states, "Contamination refers to the existence of nonindigenous organics in the sample that were not formed together with the sample material"

Many pictures from the early days of radiocarbon sample collection operations show scientific experts smoking cigarettes. Not very clever boys! As Renfrew points out - "drop a little ash onto your - soon to be chemically analysed - samples and you'll get the radiocarbon age of the tobacco plant that was used to make your cigarette".

Although such methodical incompetence would never be tolerated today, archaeological samples still suffer from contamination. Known contaminants and how to deal with them are discussed in Taylor (1987). He groups major contaminants into four categories 1) physically removable, 2) acid soluble, 3) base soluble, and 4) solvent soluble. All of these contaminants, if not removed, can drastically influence the age determination the laboratory will come to for a sample.

H. E. Gove, one of the developers of Accelerator Mass Spectrometry (AMS), radiocarbon dated the Turin Shroud. The conclusion he came to was, that the fibre used to weave the shroud dated to AD 1325.

Whilst Gove and his team support the authenticity of their findings completely many, for obvious reasons, believe that the Turin Shroud is older. Gove and his cohorts defend all of their criticisms expertly and if I had to choose a lane I would say that the scientific dating for the Turin Shroud is probably correct. Even so, the level of criticism that has been thrown at this particular project, illustrates how much can go wrong with radiocarbon dating and how suspicious some scientists are of it.

The samples, it has been argued, may have been contaminated by younger organic carbon; the cleaning techniques could have missed any modern traces of contamination. Indeed Robert Hedges of Oxford University has stated: "It is worth noting that small systematic errors cannot be completely ruled out". I wonder if Hedges would explain the discrepancies in the dates reached by the laboratories dating the Chelford wood as the result of "small systematic errors"? Again are we being fooled by heavy rhetoric, are we taken in by the inner confidence present in scientific reporting?

With regards to the official dating of the Turin Shroud Dr Leoncio Garza Valdes would certainly think so. All ancient textiles are coated in a bio-plastic film produced by bacteria that Garza-Valdes believes can throw radiocarbon dates way off. In fact, he argues that the Turin Shroud could well prove to be 2000 years old as the radiocarbon date for it cannot be taken as the final word; other evidence has to be considered. Interestingly Gove (although he disagrees with Garza Valdes) conceded that his criticisms warranted further investigation.

C14 Levels In Our Atmosphere

Libby's principle of simultaneity, presumes that the levels of C14 in any particular geographical area has been constant and regular throughout the geological record. This presumption was integral to the validity of radiocarbon dating during the early years of its development. Indeed, you have to know how much C14 was present in an organism at the time of its death to be able to measure, reliably, how much of it has disintegrated. This assumption, as Renfrew points out, is not correct:

"It is now known, however, that the proportion of radiocarbon to ordinary C12 has not remained constant through time, and that before about 1000B.C. the deviations are so great as to make radiocarbon dates significantly in error."

Advances in Dendrochronological research (the study of tree rings), shows conclusively that the amount of C14 in our atmosphere over the past 8000 thousand years has fluctuated significantly. Libby was starting with a false constant. His research was based on erroneous foundations.

The bristle cone pine, a tree that grows in southwestern regions of the USA, lives for thousands of years. Some, that are still alive today, began their life four thousand years ago. Furthermore, dead bristle cone logs that have been collected from the ground in the areas they grow, extend the tree ring record back by a further four thousand years. The California sequoia and the European oak are other trees that are useful as they also live for thousands of years.

As everyone knows, for every year of growth trees produce annual rings. These rings can be counted giving the age of the tree in question. It made sense then that the level of residual C14 in a tree ring that was say 6000 years old could be predicted as the level of C14 in our atmosphere was the same then as it is today. Wrong.

Tree ring analysis has shown, for example, that that the level of C14 in our atmosphere 6000 years ago was much higher than today. Consequently, samples dated from that age were "scientifically proven" to have been much younger than they actually were - a contradiction in terms. Thanks to the work of Hans Suess graphs for correcting C14 values to compensate for the geophysical fluctuations of our atmosphere have been devised. However, this has heavily reduced the authority of C14 dates for samples that are older than 8000 years. We simply have no information on the level of radiocarbon in our atmosphere before this date.

Radiocarbon dating is a developing scientific method. However, at every stage of its development scientists have supported its overall integrity completely only to eat their words when a significant error of judgement or method is highlighted. Mistakes are made and not surprisingly when one considers the amount of uncontrollable variables the scientist has to take into account: atmospheric fluctuations, background radiation, bacterial growth, contamination and human error.

Source: http://www.grahamhancock.com/forum/HancockS1-p1.htm
(link no longer works)

Post by richlion on Oct 13, 2015 at 2:53pm

How can perfectly formed planets come from an explosion?

I would like to make some comments on the stupid “Big Bang Theory.” they are:

How can a big bang last forever (13 billion years and going)?
How can an explosion create round planets and suns?
How can all these stars and planets join in groups and form solar systems?
Where does the energy come from to make these stars and planets move in space?
What was the explosive ingredients that caused the explosion that lasts for billions of years?

And, talking about energy, we are told that gravity is like magnetism? If that is so, why don't the planets and stars contain the same properties as regular magnets? And, if gravity is like magentism, then why aren't all the planets and satellites “stuck together” like nails to a magnet?

Questions like this, as well as all the questions on this Thread, the evolutionists can't answer.

Post by paranoidgramdroid on Oct 13, 2015 at 3:31pm

Oct 12, 2015 at 7:22pm Admin said:
Hey, since atoms and their constituent parts are all too small to actually be seen, even by deceivingly named "electron microscopes," their conceptions of atoms as miniature solar systems with ball-planet electrons revolving around nucleus nuclear sun centers is complete speculation on par with their molten magnetic ball-Earth core thousands of miles deeper than they've ever actually dug. The majority of "science" nowadays is science-fiction.

We can clearly see a Star of Soloman/David in an atom. A grubby fingerprint of you know who, in my opinion.

Oct 13, 2015 at 2:53pm richlion said:
How can perfectly formed planets come from an explosion?

Where does the energy come from to make these stars and planets move in space?

Questions like this, as well as all the questions on this Thread, the evolutionists can't answer.

What energy/force causes stars and planets move in space, all together, at constant speed, direction, bearing, relative to earth over thousands or more years?

Nassim Haramein, one of my former favorite alternative physicists (pre-flat earth), claims that the whole thing, galaxies, stars, suns, moons, planets, everything is zooming through space with the planets in our solar system zooming around the sun as it zooms thru space. while i liked this explanation better than the textbook version, I was always troubled by how the millions of stars and other planets all remained in the same places over such a long time. it doesn't make any sense at all, and therefore needs a really good explanation. now i know there is none. because it doesn't happen at all. no zooming.

the stars, et al, are rotating above in mostly the same positions. right?

Post by paranoidgramdroid on Oct 14, 2015 at 12:38pm

Just watched this video by Trey Smith and he totally nails it. Enjoy!

Post by richlion on Oct 15, 2015 at 5:16pm

Oct 13, 2015 at 2:53pm richlion said:
How can perfectly formed planets come from an explosion?

Note: I thought this post below would in a Table format but it didn't turn out that way, but you'll still understand what I mean...

Real Explosion
'Big Bang' Explosion
Has no mass
Has mass
Has fuel (explosive or flammable material)
Has no fuel
Ignited by someone
Ignited by no one
Explosion last a fraction of a second to a couple of seconds
Explosion last 13 billion years and counting

Break time for a good hardly LAUGH!

Material is all shapes and size but none are ball or globe shaped
Most of the material is globe or ball shaped, perfectly formed
Material flies off in all random directions – complete random and disorder
Material of trillions of these planets and stars are in complete order
Material travels, at most, a couple of hundred miles an hour
Material traveling at the speed of light. Some how these planets and stars don't disintegrate from the great speed that it is going.
Material comes to a stop usually within a few seconds of the explosion
Material still traveling after 13 billion years
All of the above is logical and believable; faith required is as little as a mustard seed.
All the above is fantasy of the highest order; requires too much faith to believe in.

Conclusion: Life did NOT start from a 'Big Bang' but started by a Creator who has a purpose and design in mind.

Post by schpankme on Oct 15, 2015 at 6:29pm

Science like Religion needs one miracle to prove everything.

Post by csp on Oct 16, 2015 at 10:31am

Oct 16, 2015 at 5:56am mspuddle said:
but like do you believe they exist? Not like the picture, but in general? I only ask because that would mean a lot of things and other then this response I can't seem to find anything regarding this.

It doesn't matter if you, I or Eric believe's they exist - if there is no definitive proof, then it's just speculation.

Post by timewarper108 on Oct 17, 2015 at 2:46pm

Oct 12, 2015 at 7:22pm Admin said:
Hey, since atoms and their constituent parts are all too small to actually be seen, even by deceivingly named "electron microscopes," their conceptions of atoms as miniature solar systems with ball-planet electrons revolving around nucleus nuclear sun centers is complete speculation on par with their molten magnetic ball-Earth core thousands of miles deeper than they've ever actually dug. The majority of "science" nowadays is science-fiction.

The word atom means indivisible or irreducible or some such thing so if it's made of protons,neutrons,muons and gluons etc. then it's not an atom is it?just another B.S. story

Post by damnice on Nov 2, 2015 at 4:44pm

Nov 1, 2015 at 7:28pm time4freedom said:
My only real thought on evolution is this; Africa. Where lions and other big cats live. Why would a gazelle or Antelope
also evolve there? The one place that's a really bad idea to evolve into... That's where they are.

A real battle ground of predator and prey.

Predators and Prey. How would that work in an evolutionary model?! It makes no sense. The 'circle of life'
only really makes sense, in my mind with a creator.

The theory of evolution wasn't original at its time. We've known for millennia about selective breeding to narrow traits desired in our animal companions. Micro-evolution is real, and caused by the elimination of genetic information and possibilities through selective breeding. The theory was also created before the knowledge of DNA and how genes actually work, how cells actually replicate, how alleles recombinate, etc. The way those things all happen completely disprove evolution as a random mutative advancement.

One example, in junior high/high school I remember reading in our textbooks that humans were 98% identical genetically to chimps. Turns out that was a lie, modern comparison techniques puts it closer to 79-80%, the same we also share with pigs and horses. Beyond that the biggest smoking gun disproving human evolution is the Y chromosome. The Y chromosome doesn't fully recombinate with the X chromosome in men like the two X chromosomes can in women. It stays very consistent through generations, and when comparing the Y chromosomes of any of the primate species compared to humans the difference gets even greater sharing only about 60% of the same genes. So an almost unchanging chromosome from generation to generation hasn't had enough time to account for such a huge difference from the supposed divergence of our common primate ancestors we descended from til today. This is just ONE example completely disproving the theory, it's a junk theory that spawned the term junk DNA, there is no junk. DNA is our code and all of it matters, all of it is accounted for, all of it is replicated precisely, all of it is double-checked, if any of it is wrong it is fixed, if it can't be fixed you have a detrimental mutation and NEVER has a mutation been shown to be beneficial or create entirely new genes which consist of millions/billions of base pairs which comprise the proteins of our DNA code.

TL;DR - Evolution is a huge lie, it's entirely debunked by modern science therefore any questions regarding such only have a place in our imaginations of an imaginary world where evolution can exist.

A LOGICAL DEBUNKING OF ATHEISM
Excerpted from: 'The God of Logic: A Deductive Debunking of Unscientific Atheism'

"Darwin's work is most important and suits my purpose in that it provides a basis in natural science for the historical class struggle."
Communist, Atheist NWO front man Karl Marx

In light of what we have learned in preceding chapters, a reasonable man must by now be wondering how such a Great Fairy Tale could possibly have become so enthroned, so entrenched, and so widely accepted by otherwise intelligent people who ought to have known better. If Classical Science and Reason were not the forces that propelled Unscientific Evolutionary Atheism to such unassailable heights, then what did?

There were two essential factors that contributed to Evolution’s “fast start”, meteoric rise, and continuing supremacy:

1. Growing 19th Century Skepticism Concerning Biblical Literalism

2. The Powerful International Force of Marxist-“Progressive”-Liberal Politics

By the time that Darwin had set pen to paper, many among the European and American Intelligentsia were having their doubts about the literal accounts of the Book of Genesis. They weren’t necessarily Atheists. Indeed, Darwin himself was an Agnostic, not an Atheist.

But many were thirsty for an alternative explanation of Creation. These reasonable doubts had thus predisposed the Intellectual Class to accepting a different explanation for the mystery of life. The soil of many educated minds had already been loosened and fertilized before Darwin even published Origin of Species.

The 2nd (and most significant) element of Darwin’s instant success has to do with politics. Even more so than money, politics can be the most corruptive force created by man. As with any other historical myth, it was the power of politicized force that exalted and sustained Evolution. And make no mistake; the rise of Darwinian Evolution has always been steeped in the corruptive culture of politics; of the Leftish type.

Recall that Soviet Comrade Oparin (under Stalin’s supervision) gave us the “Primordial Soup”. Communist lover Urey gave us a rigged amino acid experiment. The pro-Communist ACLU brought us the circus of the Scopes Monkey Trial. Marxist Hollywood brought us one ridiculous Straw Man version of Inherit the Wind after another after another. Son of a Communist Gould brought us “Punctuated Equilibrium”. The pattern is unmistakable. The question is: why?

The ink in Darwin’s 1859 Origin of Species was barely dry before the two man-gods of the logically flawed ideology of Communism, Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx, began promoting Darwin’s work. Engels had actually acquired one of the first 1200 copies of Darwin’s clap-trap. Follow this sequence of events.

November 24, 1859: Darwin publishes Origin of Species

November 27-30, 1859: Engels acquires of the very first copies and sends a letter to Marx telling him:

"Darwin, by the way, whom I'm just reading now, is absolutely splendid".

December 19, 1860: Marx writes a letter to Engels telling him that Darwin’s book provides the natural-history foundation for the Communist viewpoint:

“These last four weeks, I have read all sorts of things. Among others, Darwin's book ….this is the book which contains the basis on natural history for our view.

January 16, 1861: Marx writes an excited letter to his Communist friend Ferdinand Lassalle, the founder of the International Socialist movement in Germany:

“Darwin’s work is most important and suits my purpose in that it provides a basis in natural science for the historical class struggle.”

June 18, 1862: Marx had already re-read Origin of Species, and again writes to Engels: “I am amused at Darwin, into whom I looked again”

1862: Marx quotes Darwin again within his Theories of Surplus Value:

"In his splendid work, Darwin did not realize that by discovering the 'geometrical progression' in the animal and plant kingdom, he overthrew Malthus theory.”

German Communist leader Wilhelm Liebknecht later described just how excited the 19th Century Communist leaders all were about the new theory:

"When Darwin drew the conclusions from his research work and brought them to the knowledge of the public, we spoke of nothing else for months but Darwin and the enormous significance of his scientific discoveries.”

Though not directly connected to them, Darwin was heavily promoted by Marx & Engels.

Historian Richard Weikart revealed that Marx had started to attend "a series of lectures by Thomas Henry Huxley on evolution.” Huxley, and many in his family, were afflicted with severe, generational mental health problems. This may, or may not, account for Huxley’s odd obsession with passionately promoting a theory that had no evidence behind it, other than the minor variations in finch beaks. For his fanatical promotion of Evolution, the blustering biologist became known as “Darwin’s Bulldog”.

Why would a scientific truth need a “bulldog” to promote and defend it anyway? As the Philosopher St. Augustine once observed, “The truth is like a lion; you don't have to defend it. Let it loose; it will defend itself.' After a century and a half of searching for millions of magical missing links, Darwinism still requires a whole pack of “bulldogs” to defend it.

In the 2nd Edition of Das Kapital, Marx included two explicit references to Darwin and evolution in which he related Darwin's theory to his own opinion about production and technology development. Marx referred to Origin of Species as "epoch-making work”, and went on to compare Darwin’s view of organs to his own bizarre view of tools and manufacturing.

In a book review of Das Kapital, Engels wrote that Marx was:

"…striving to establish the same gradual process of transformation demonstrated by Darwin in natural history as a law in the social field."

June 16, 1873: Marx sends Darwin an autographed copy of Das Kapital, with the words:

Mr. Charles Darwin, On the part of his sincere admirer - Karl Marx.

October, 1873: Darwin writes back to Marx, thanking him for having sent his work:

"I believe that we both earnestly desire the extension of knowledge.

Marx’s admiration for Darwin’s work had little to do with Science. The Communists believed that Darwin provided a perspective that suited the goals of Atheistic Communism.

Post by schpankme on Nov 24, 2015 at 3:37pm

Google promotes the 41st anniversary of converting man to ape, with the discovery of "LUCY" in 1973.

Lucy was named after The Beatles song "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds", which was claimed to have
been derived from the literary style of Alice In Wonderland.

Donald Johanson, paleoanthropologist, who claims to have discovered the skeletal remains of "LUCY" in
Africa, stated that he found 40% of the skeleton and that this was not Chimpanzee as the bones dated
much older, and of course the skeleton had an evolutionary kinship with Human.

"All of a sudden, she became a person," Johanson told the BBC



Lucy promotes Darwinism and the Origin of Species through evolution. You see, based on the skeletal
remains of "LUCY" it becomes self evident, that man came down from the trees to cook his meat and
dairy, exchange cooking recipes and reproduce.

Post by iahawks on Nov 24, 2015 at 8:22pm

And these Lucy bones also prove the big bang, as one can clearly see by careful examination of the little finger-tip bone.

(That's sarcasm in case it's not clear.)

Post by gnosticwarrior on Nov 25, 2015 at 12:10pm

Nov 2, 2015 at 4:59pm lizardking said:
A LOGICAL DEBUNKING OF ATHEISM
Excerpted from: 'The God of Logic: A Deductive Debunking of Unscientific Atheism'

"Darwin's work is most important and suits my purpose in that it provides a basis in natural science for the historical class struggle."
Communist, Atheist NWO front man Karl Marx

Amazing post, lizardking! Thank you!

Nov 2, 2015 11:44:56 GMT -5 damnice said:

One example, in junior high/high school I remember reading in our textbooks that humans were 98% identical genetically to chimps. Turns out that was a lie, modern comparison techniques puts it closer to 79-80%, the same we also share with pigs and horses.

TL;DR - Evolution is a huge lie, it's entirely debunked by modern science therefore any questions regarding such only have a place in our imaginations of an imaginary world where evolution can exist.

Agreed, and I have to laugh at how the totally gloss over those statistics in terms of % of relationship. My education was very similar, and I was in private school!

Post by thinkforyourself on Nov 29, 2015 at 6:58pm

It should come as no surprise that the same immoral and treacherous liars who call themselves atheist scientists (including Dawkins), also lie in order to cover-up the rape and sexual abuse of several women:

The Wall of Silence Around Michael Shermer:

September 29, 2014 by Adam Lee

Earlier this month, I wrote about the serious allegations of sexual harassment and sexual assault made against skeptic “thought leader” Michael Shermer by three women, who agreed to be named in an article published by Buzzfeed. That article, as you’d expect, has provoked an enormous amount of controversy and outrage.

But what I find more surprising is who isn’t discussing it. Some prominent individuals in the atheist and skeptical community are either minimizing this story, treating the allegations as if they were no big deal, or are trying to make the whole thing go away, acting as if the allegations never happened or shouldn’t be mentioned. It’s as if they’re trying to build a protective wall of silence around Michael Shermer.

One of them was named in the Buzzfeed article: James Randi, whose foundation was putting on the convention where Alison Smith alleges she was raped by Shermer. This is what he said to the reporter:

“Shermer has been a bad boy on occasion — I do know that,” Randi told me. “I have told him that if I get many more complaints from people I have reason to believe, that I am going to have to limit his attendance at the conference.

“His reply,” Randi continued, “is he had a bit too much to drink and he doesn’t remember. I don’t know — I’ve never been drunk in my life. It’s an unfortunate thing… I haven’t seen him doing that. But I get the word from people in the organization that he has to be under better control. If he had gotten violent, I’d have him out of there immediately. I’ve just heard that he misbehaved himself with the women, which I guess is what men do when they are drunk.”

I quoted this statement in my previous post, but the more I reread it, the more damning it becomes.* This isn’t some innocent misunderstanding of the situation; Randi had been told by multiple people that Shermer had done something blameworthy, and he believed them. (He warned about what would happen if he got “more” complaints from “people I have reason to believe” – implying that he already had some.) He doesn’t even have the slender reed of an excuse that he didn’t think the complaints were credible. But because he didn’t have reports that Shermer had done anything “violent”, he dismisses it with a “ho ho ho, boys will be boys, what do you expect when people are drinking” attitude.

You may also recall my recent Guardian article about Richard Dawkins. Some of the tweets I mentioned there show that he wanted to talk about the Shermer case without talking about it. That’s the only reasonable context for his victim-blaming advice to women who are raped: “If you want… to testify and jail a man, don’t get drunk” (as well as his even more appalling comparison of being raped while drunk to driving while drunk).

Unless you choose to believe that Dawkins just happened to be idly speculating on the topic of drinking and rape at the same time this controversy was occurring – as one of my commenters put it, popping off random facts from “the lottery ball machine of his mind” – the obvious inference is that he believes the allegations against Shermer should be doubted on those grounds. Yet he says so without making it explicit who or what he’s talking about.

There’s also Michael Nugent, chairperson of Atheist Ireland, who wrote several lengthy posts criticizing my Guardian article. Most of Nugent’s criticisms consist of endless hyperskeptical hair-splitting; but when I brought up the point about how Dawkins was clearly speculating about the Shermer case, this is what he said:

You then engage in detailed speculation about why you believe Richard was trying to convey a message that a specific person (who you name, and I won’t) should be considered an untrustworthy witness in a specific allegation of rape (which you give details of, and I won’t) against another specific person (who you name, and I won’t).

Nugent calls this “salacious speculation”, and says that he avoids repeating it to “help protect victims”. This would seem like a laudable concern for the privacy of rape victims, if you didn’t know that Smith intentionally came forward to tell her story. She wanted to go public to warn other women, precisely because she says she had brought this up privately with Randi’s foundation and they declined to act.

In that context, Nugent’s assertion that “allegations of rape should be reported to the police, not to bloggers” can only reasonably be read as a claim that rape victims should keep quiet and not speak to the media. If someone rapes you, you should go to the police and otherwise tell no one; and if the police decline to prosecute or don’t get a conviction, too bad for you, you should never bring it up again.** (I await Nugent’s post condemning Richard Dawkins’ “salacious speculation” about his own experience of being fondled by a schoolmaster when he was young. Doesn’t Dawkins have any concern for the privacy of victims?)

Next, there’s Jerry Coyne, who as I previously mentioned was very upset about my Guardian article. Three people have since told me that Coyne immediately banned them from his site for questioning or criticizing his post about me (1, 2, 3). One of them, ahermit, said this:

And now I’ve been banned from Coyne’s blog for pointing out the obvious…that Dawkins tweets were a response to the Buzzfeed article about Shermer. Can’t have people talking about that little problem now can we?

Lastly: One of the women quoted in the Buzzfeed article was the astronomer Dr. Pamela Gay. In a post on her blog earlier this year, “My mistake of silence“, she discussed the incident without using names. At the time, she said that someone she called “Famous Person A”, since named as Shermer in the Buzzfeed article, had tried to grope her. She also said that another individual, “person B”, intervened to protect her at the time but later tried to pressure her into silence:

I was cc’d on a chain of emails that resulted in person B denying my experience… It was clear these emails wanted me to retract my very simple account of what happened in 2008.

…Today I received the following threat from the person I thought was my friend, the person who intervened for me, person B. It was in the context of trying to get me to say nothing ever happened. He wrote, “I will also publicly speak about this as necessary, providing all documentation as necessary, including photos, emails, etc., and contact all relevant employers, as well.” He cc’d Famous Person A.

I’ve corresponded with Dr. Gay, and she’s agreed to speak on the record. According to her, “person B” is D.J. Grothe, the former president of the James Randi Educational Foundation. (The Buzzfeed article cited Grothe as saying that “he had never once received a complaint” about Shermer’s behavior.)

There is, of course, no law obligating anyone in particular to discuss the accusations against Shermer, much less to believe them. However, our community has consistently condemned religious organizations that try to cover up misdeeds by one of their own – and with good reason, in my view. Secrecy leads to unaccountability, to corruption, and hence to harm. Conversely, the truth has nothing to fear from open and honest discussion. It’s this same principle which leads me to conclude that these allegations deserve a hearing, at the very least. Intellectual consistency demands no less.

There are many, many atheists who’ve condemned Catholicism and other religions for covering up allegations of molestation by clergy, shuffling predators from one parish to another or trying to pressure the victims into silence. If any of the atheists who’ve said this in the past are now taking the position that the allegations against Shermer shouldn’t be discussed, those people owe the Catholic church a very large apology. As for me, I don’t believe in a double standard, nor do I expect religion to abide by any moral rule that I don’t strive to live up to myself.

UPDATE: There’s one more relevant piece of information that’s since come to my attention and that deserves to be mentioned here. According to a post Ophelia Benson published today (and alluded to in earlier remarks), around the time she was corresponding with Richard Dawkins to negotiate the language of their joint anti-harassment statement, he asked her to “dissuade people from spreading the ‘libellous allegation that Michael Shermer is a rapist or a sexual predator.’” She declined to do as he requested.

* It’s worth comparing Randi’s paraphrase of Shermer’s explanation of his behavior – “he had a bit too much to drink and he doesn’t remember” – to Shermer’s own description of his encounter with Alison Smith as “sober and consensual”: “She was sober. I was sober.” If these are referring to the same event, there’s obviously a significant contradiction. Or are there other stories that we haven’t heard?

** If this is not Nugent’s position, I’ll be glad to issue a correction. But in that case, I’d expect him to state that he thinks Alison Smith did the right thing by coming forward. So far, he’s ducked multiple opportunities to say so.

Post by vamsi108 on Nov 29, 2015 at 11:56pm

EVOLUTION - Fish perfected themselves by crawling into an environment they couldn't breathe - What you talkin bout willis?



Birds gave up flying to develop stumps instead... huh?



Speciation evolved... became speculation



The Big Bang Theory DECIPHERED -

Let’s Talk About Lucy
http://scienceagainstevolution.org/v4i5f.htm

Last month we started a series about “human ancestors”. We made some general observations about the change in interpretation of human evolution over the past 40 years. This month we will start to look at some specific fossils in detail.

One of the best known “human ancestors” is an Australopithecus afarensis skeleton called Lucy. Probably nobody knows more about Lucy and her species than her discover, Donald Johanson. So let’s see what Donald Johanson has to say about Australopithecus afarensis.

All Those Fossils

How many fossils do you suppose we have that tell us about Australopithecus afarensis? You might think there are lots. You have probably read something like this:

Of the 250 hominid fossils we found at Hadar between 1973 and 1975 that led to the naming of a new species, Australopithecus afarensis, the earliest bones are from 3.4 million years ago. Dato’s discovery--if it was 3 million years old--had allowed us to double our estimates as to the length of time that hominids lived at Hadar. 1

We will have something to say about the age of these bones later. Right now we want to talk about the “250 hominid fossils” they found in just two or three years. It sounds like there is an abundance of evidence, until you see the picture below. It contains at least 16 of those 250 fossils. Presumably they are some of the best. Why would they show the 16 worst if they had 234 better ones to show?



These "16 fossils" make up just part of one skull. Our most observant readers will immediately notice that it is a male skull.

Just how was this skull found? We are so glad you asked.

We went looking for Yoel Rak, an Israeli paleoanthropologist who had interrupted his anatomy lectures at Tel Aviv University to join us in the field. Yoel had looked furiously for hominid fossils at Hadar in 1990 but came up empty-handed. He said he couldn’t leave this year without finding a hominid, and as an expert on the australopithecine face, what he really wanted was a skull, which had so far eluded us. 2

…

Perhaps because Yoel was with me, I began mentally picturing skull fragments--smooth, flat, slightly dished pieces of bone. Then I blew away some soft sand in front of me and saw the edges of a pair of eye sockets. “Oh my God,” I shouted. “Here’s part of the skull. We’ve got glabella!” Glabella, one of the reference points used for skull measurements, is the most forward projecting part of the forehead, just above the bony ridge over the eye sockets. 3

This brings up a question of objectivity. Evolutionists sometimes criticize creationists for starting with a preconceived notion, and then looking for evidence to back up that conclusion. If it is wrong for creationists to do this, then it is wrong for evolutionists to do it, too. There should not be a double standard.

We don’t entirely agree with the evolutionists’ claim that it is wrong to look for data to support a theory. You rarely find something unless you are actively seeking it. There are scientists who believe there is a cure for AIDS, and they are looking for it. There is nothing wrong with that. It only becomes wrong if the desire to find the cure makes you consciously (or unconsciously) report the results incorrectly. That is, there is nothing wrong if a zealous doctor actually finds a cure for AIDS. There is something wrong if he manipulates the data to make it appear that he has found a cure when he hasn’t.

So, we don’t blame Yoel Rak and Donald Johanson for looking for a hominid skull. We realize, however, that their strong desire to find something may have affected their analysis of what they actually discovered. Johanson certainly seemed to make a positive identification of a fragmentary bone very quickly.

Therefore, we are just a little bit cautious about taking the Australopithecus face he found at face value.

Does Money Corrupt?

Similarly, our suspicions were aroused when we read Donald Johanson’s own account of his 1973 expedition.

In October 1973, we arrived at Hadar with nine other French and American scientists, prepared for a two-month stay. By this time I had left Chicago and taken a job teaching anthropology at Case Western Reserve University, in Cleveland. With these credentials, I had managed to get some funding for my first expedition as a co-leader. I knew, though, that I had to prove myself by finding some hominids or the money would dry up. 4

Imagine what would have happened if he had found these fossils and reported, “I found a lot of ape bones.” You can almost hear the money cracking as it dries up.

Does money really influence the interpretation of data? That’s hard to say, but after almost 30 years working in the defense industry, I’ve noticed an interesting pattern. Whenever a weapon system is in trouble, and its funding is about to be cut off, the test results show that the weapon works well enough to go into production. Then, after the weapon is introduced into the fleet, and funding is about to be cut because the project was successfully completed, there always seems to be a study that shows that the weapon doesn’t work well enough, and a “product improvement program” gets funded. Is it just a coincidence that studies always seem to come to the conclusion that brings the most money?

Remember the “evidence of life” found on the “Martian Meteorite” in August, 1996? That sure gave the NASA Mars program a big boost. By December 14, 1996, Science News reported that, “they don’t have a shred of evidence to back it up.” Do you think money was a factor in the initial report?

A passionate desire to prove evolution (and a pressing need to fund for further research) may have affected Johanson’s analysis. Consider these statements:

I found a bone from the palm of the hand, a second metacarpal, looking more like a fresh twentieth-century bone than one that had been buried for 3 million years. 5

Did he ever consider, even for a moment, the possibility that it doesn’t look 3 million years old because it really isn’t 3 million years old? Could it look more like a 20th century bone because it might be just a few hundred years old?

There are probably evolutionists reading this who are thinking to themselves, “That’s ridiculous. That bone couldn’t be hundreds of years old because Australopithecines died out 3 million years ago.” How do they know when they became extinct? Evolutionists claimed that the coelacanth had been extinct for millions of years before one was captured alive a few years ago. Maybe Johanson has actually found evidence that Australopithecines lived in modern times. He says it looks fresh. Maybe it is fresh.

Calibrated Fossils

How does Johanson know that his hominid fossils are 3 million years old? From the age of other fossils, as evidenced by statements like this one:

Though we had no confirmed dates yet from the rocks at Hadar, by comparing other mammal fossils from Hadar, especially pig teeth, with those that had been found at the Omo, Tom Gray and I suspected that the knee joint could be between 3 and 4 million years old. 6

When radioactive dating gives the desired results (i.e., the same as the presumed age of the pig fossils), then radioactive dating is considered to be precise and accurate. But when it gives different ages, then the radioactive dates are swept under the rug with statements like this one:

The site, known as Gona, has hundreds of stone tools--flaked pebbles and cobbles of lava--that may be the oldest example of human technology, some 2.5 million years old. The ash layers at Gona, however, do not give reliable dates, and Bob has been struggling since 1975 to determine the age of these artifacts. 7

When that was written in 1994, poor old Bob had been trying for almost 20 years to get a radioactive date close enough to 2.5 million years that people would believe it. We wonder how many times he tried, and what dates he actually got. Did he consistently get 50 million years? Did he get ages that vary from 1 million years to 200 million years? We will never know because they won’t be published. The justification for not publishing them will be, “There is no reason to publish them because they are obviously erroneous.”

Evidence Against Evolution

Surprisingly, Johanson seems to brag about his evidence for the lack of evolution in his fossils. He says,

Separated by 200,000 years, these fossils were almost identical--making a good case for little evolutionary change in this hominid species. From fossils found at a site south of Hadar, the Middle Awash, we know that Australopithecus afarensis existed as far back as 3.8 million years ago, so it seems to have lived for almost a million years, remaining remarkably similar for all that time. 8

All the 1992 Hadar hominids are about 3 million years old; the oldest Hadar hominids come from sediments that are 3.4 million years old. Add on the fossils from Laetoli, a site in Tanzania, most of which date to 3.4 and 3.5 million years ago, and you have a half million years of documented Australopithecus afarensis evolution. Including the Middle Awash site south of Hadar, where hominid fossils are 3.8 or 3.9 million years old, that adds up to almost a million years with afarensis around, evolving very little, from what we could tell after our first look at the new fossils. 9

In other words, he believes the fossils show evidence of one million years without any evolution. Then, in the last 2.5 million years, he says, Australopithecines evolved into modern humans. Where is the logic in that?

The Laetoli Footprints

We even had a set of footprints. Owen called the famous footprint trail discovered in 1978 by Mary Leakey’s team at Laetoli, Tanzania, the “perfect cementing evidence” for bipedalism [walking upright on two feet]. In a trail of ash that has been dated to 3.5 million years ago, the tracks of two hominids were captured for a distance of nearly eighty feet, lasting impressions that give us a direct glimpse of how they got around.

I believe that afarensis made the footprints--first because afarensis fossils have been found at Laetoli, and second, because a composite foot, made from fossil bones belonging to Homo from nearby Olduvai Gorge combined with Hadar toe bones, has been shown to fit the Laetoli prints. When a chimpanzee walks on two legs, it leaves a print with the big toe splayed away from the rest of the foot. The Laetoli prints resemble modern human footprints, with the big toe in line with the other toes. 10

The facts are: 1) that the footprints are indistinguishable from modern human footprints and 2) that the rocks are unquestionably dated (by evolutionists’ standards) to be 3.5 million years old. So, what conclusions could an evolutionist reach?

One could say that this is “perfect cementing evidence” that modern man (Homo sapiens) lived 3.5 million years ago. If that is true, they lived before almost all of the alleged “human ancestors”. Therefore, those other hominid species could not be ancestral to man.

The second conclusion one might reach is that the ash isn’t really 3.5 million years old. If modern man has only been around for a few hundred thousand years, then the ash fell within the last few hundred thousand years. If that is true, then Lucy lived a few hundred thousand years ago, and could not have been our ancestor.

Since the first two conclusions are unacceptable to evolutionists, they come to the third conclusion--that afarensis (Lucy) made the footprints. But look at Lucy’s skeleton at the right. Notice her feet in particular. (Just kidding. There aren’t any feet to notice.) That’s why they need “a composite foot, made from fossil bones belonging to Homo from a nearby Olduvai Gorge combined with Hadar toe bones” to compare with the tracks.

Is it scientifically valid to make a composite foot using 3.5 million-year-old toe bones from one species and foot bones from another upright-walking species that allegedly lived about one million years later? The very fact that Johanson has to do something this silly means that he doesn’t have any 3.5 million-year-old foot bones that fit the tracks.



Lucy’s Pelvis

But if Lucy’s feet don’t show evidence of upright walking, what about her pelvis?

Lucy’s left innominate [hip-joint socket] had been bent out of shape and broken into about forty pieces while it was embedded in the ground. Owen X-rayed the fossil and discovered that the back of Lucy’s pelvis, where the sacrum connects with the innominate, had smashed against a rock or another bone during burial, shattering and twisting the ilium. He then spent six months carefully outlining and numbering each fragment of ilium, casting each piece of the fossil in plaster, smoothing out the edges, and then reassembling them in a three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle. Every fragment had to line up with adjoining pieces from both the front and the back side of the bone to convince Owen that he had overcome any distortion that occurred after the bone was damaged. Once Owen had restored the left side of the pelvis, he sculpted a mirror image of the right side in plaster and placed Lucy’s sacrum in between to complete his masterpiece.

…

When Owen brings a human pelvis, a chimp pelvis, and a cast of Lucy’s pelvis into an elementary-school classroom, the children have no trouble deciding which two look alike. Lucy’s pelvis has a bowl shape like a human pelvis, but it is not as deep. 11

So, Lucy's left-half pelvis you saw above isn’t one piece. It is about forty pieces that have been carefully shaped to remove the “distortion” they experienced during burial. Distortion is, by definition, a deviation from the normal shape. But since this is the only pelvis (actually, it is just a half-pelvis) they have for this species, how do they know what it is supposed to look like? All they have is a pre-conceived notion of what it should look like. Since it didn’t look like that when it came out of the ground, they had to reshape it to look the way Owen Lovejoy thought it should look.

Why Call Lucy a “Hominid”?

Australopithecus means “southern ape”. What makes it more than an ape? What human-like characteristics make it “hominid”? Johanson says,

Over this considerable span of time the fossil remains of Australopithecus afarensis reveal a unique but constant mosaic of features: from the neck up, chimpanzee; from the waist down, human. 12

The human characteristics are “from the waist down.” Is he referring to the missing foot bones that are so remarkably human? Or is he referring to the composite foot bones made from a Homo species that supposedly lived more than a million years later? Or is it the pelvis that was radically redesigned during reconstruction to make it look more human and less “distorted” that is the feature that makes Lucy human from the waist down?

What Did Johanson Really Find?

As far as we can tell, the bones that Johanson actually found indicate that Australopithecus afarensis is an extinct ape. It is the bones that he didn’t find (feet bones and an ”undistorted” pelvis) that have human characteristics.

Furthermore, by his own reckoning, he found bones that span more than one million years with very little variation in them. He found positive evidence that Australopithecus afarensis shows virtually no sign of evolution in a million years.

Revenge of the Peppered Moths?
http://www.evolutionnews.org/2012/02/revenge_of_the056291.html



The peppered moth story is familiar -- even overly familiar -- to most readers of ENV, so I will summarize it only briefly here. Before the industrial revolution, most peppered moths in England were light-colored; but after tree trunks around cities were darkened by pollution, a dark-colored ("melanic") variety became much more common (a phenomenon known as "industrial melanism"). In the 1950s, British physician Bernard Kettlewell performed some experiments that seemed to show that the proportion of melanic moths had increased because they were better camouflaged on darkened tree trunks and thus less likely to be eaten by predatory birds.

Kettlewell's evidence soon became the classic textbook demonstration of natural selection in action -- commonly illustrated with photos of peppered moths resting on light- and dark-colored tree trunks.

By the 1990s, however, biologists had discovered several discrepancies in the classic story -- not the least of which was that peppered moths in the wild do not usually rest on tree trunks. Most of the textbook photos had been staged.

In the 2000s the story began disappearing from the textbooks. British biologist Michael Majerus then did some studies that he felt supported the camouflage-predation explanation. But before he died of cancer in 2009, he only managed to publish a report of his study in the Darwin lobby's in-house magazine Evolution: Education and Outreach. Now four other British biologists have presented his results posthumously in the Royal Society's peer-reviewed Biology Letters. In an accompanying supplement, the authors presented their version of what they call "the peppered moth debacle." And a debacle it certainly is, but not in the way they think.

According to Charles Darwin, natural selection has been "the most important" factor in the descent with modification of all living things from one or a few common ancestors, yet he had no actual evidence for it. All he could offer in The Origin of Species were "one or two imaginary illustrations." It wasn't until almost a century later that Kettlewell seemed to provide "Darwin's missing evidence" by marking and releasing light- and dark-colored moths in polluted and unpolluted woodlands and recovering some of them the next day. Consistent with the camouflage-predation explanation, the proportion of better-camouflaged moths increased between their release and recapture.

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, however, researchers reported various problems with the camouflage-predation explanation, and in 1998 University of Massachusetts biologist Theodore Sargent and two colleagues published an article in volume 30 of Evolutionary Biology concluding "there is little persuasive evidence, in the form of rigorous and replicated observations and experiments, to support this explanation at the present time." (p. 318)

The same year, Michael Majerus published a book in which he concluded that evidence gathered in the forty years since Kettlewell's work showed that "the basic peppered moth story is wrong, inaccurate, or incomplete, with respect to most of the story's component parts." (p. 116) In a review of Majerus's book published in Nature, University of Chicago evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne wrote: "From time to time, evolutionists re-examine a classic experimental study and find, to their horror, that it is flawed or downright wrong." According to Coyne, the fact that peppered moths in the wild rarely rest on tree trunks "alone invalidates Kettlewell's release-and-recapture experiments, as moths were released by placing them directly onto tree trunks."

In 1999, I published an article in The Scientist summarizing these and other criticisms of the peppered moth story, and in 2000 I included a chapter on peppered moths in my book Icons of Evolution. Then, in 2002, journalist Judith Hooper published a book about the controversy titled Of Moths and Men. Hooper accused Kettlewell of fraud, though I never did; my criticism was directed primarily at textbook writers who ignored problems with the story and continued to use staged photos even after they were known to misrepresent natural conditions.

By then, what had previously been a fairly limited scientific dispute over the cause(s) of industrial melanism had become a debacle. Sargent and I were demonized, and Majerus and Coyne were persuaded to reaffirm the peppered moth story as the prime example of Darwinian evolution in action. Majerus also embarked on the study that was just recently reported in Biology Letters.

In that study, conducted over a seven-year period from 2001 to 2007, Majerus performed release-and-recapture experiments in an unpolluted woodland near his home with 4,522 light-colored and 342 dark-colored moths, using methods he considered superior to Kettlewell's. He found that dark-colored moths (which were less camouflaged in this situation) had only a 91% survival rate compared with light-colored moths. He also observed 135 moths in resting positions, of which 35.6% were on tree trunks.

Yet during the seven years of Majerus's study, thousands of peppered moths must have passed through the woodland near his house, so 135 moths were a tiny fraction of the total. Furthermore, as he himself acknowledged in a 2007 lecture in Sweden, his results might have been "somewhat biased towards the lower parts of the tree, due to sampling technique."

Indeed. If peppered moths normally rest high in the upper branches, as several researchers concluded in the 1980s, then doing statistics on those visible to an observer on the ground (even one who climbs part-way up some trees, as Majerus did), is bound to suffer from sampling bias. Imagine someone looking over the side of a boat and concluding that most fish in the sea live within ten feet of the surface.

The correct question to ask is not whether peppered moths ever rest on tree trunks, but whether peppered moths normally rest on tree trunks. It's possible they do, but finding 48 moths resting on tree trunks over the course of seven years does not answer that question -- especially when tree trunks are the primary location where you are looking for moths.

Majerus titled his 2007 lecture "The Peppered Moth: The Proof of Darwinian Evolution." He summarized the results of his seven-year study, but he explained that the real proof of Darwinian evolution is the following:

Darwinian evolution is a logical fact, and had to be even in 1859. Consider Darwin's four observations and three deductions, upon which selection theory is based.

Organisms produce far more offspring than give rise to mature individuals.

Yet, population sizes remain more or less constant.

Therefore, there must be a high rate of mortality.

The individuals in a species show variation.

Therefore, some variants will succeed better than others, and those with beneficial characteristics will be naturally selected to produce the next generation.

There is a hereditary resemblance between parents and offspring.

Therefore, beneficial traits will be passed to future generations.

Given these four observed facts and three simple, logical deductions, selection cannot NOT happen.

So the evidence Majerus presented was ultimately irrelevant. Though consistent with the camouflage-predation hypothesis, Majerus's results could not "prove" the latter, much less Darwinian evolution. His "proof" was logical, not empirical.

In any case, Darwinian evolution requires much more than the selection of beneficial traits, and much more than a shift in the proportions of light- and dark-colored moths. It requires the descent with modification of all living things from one or a few common ancestors. Darwin did not write a book titled How the Proportions of Two Pre-existing Moth Varieties Can Change Through Natural Selection; he wrote a book titled The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection.

Majerus went on to say that "there are a tremendous number of examples of Darwinian selection in action." And indeed there are: beak changes in Galápagos finches, for one. Natural selection happens; I've never met anyone who doubts it. The question is whether natural selection can produce new species, organs and body plans. This question is not answered by shifts in the proportions of pre-existing varieties of the same species. Even if the camouflage-predation explanation for industrial melanism were undisputed, it would not get us any closer to "proving" Darwinian evolution.

Since there are other, better examples of natural selection, why do Darwinists go to such lengths to defend the peppered moth story? And why do they practically bite themselves in two vilifying its critics?

The answer, I think, can be found in the conclusion of Majerus's 2007 lecture. "The rise and fall of the peppered moth," he said, "is one of the most visually impacting and easily understood examples of Darwinian evolution in action, [so] it should be taught. It provides after all: The Proof of Evolution." It doesn't matter that the camouflage-predation story is scientifically disputed. It doesn't matter that the story doesn't come close to demonstrating the origin of a new species, much less the descent of all species from a common ancestor. What matters is that the peppered myth is a useful tool for indoctrinating students in Darwinian evolution.

In 1999 Canadian textbook-writer Bob Ritter, who knew that peppered moth pictures were staged but used them anyway, defended his practice on the same grounds. "You have to look at the audience," he was quoted as saying in the April 5, 1999, Alberta Report Newsmagazine. "How convoluted do you want to make it for a first time learner?" High school students "are still very concrete in the way they learn," said Ritter. "The advantage of this example of natural selection is that it is extremely visual."

It's no wonder that science education is in trouble.

Darwin's Finches Show Rule-Constrained Variation in Beak Shape
http://www.evolutionnews.org/2014/06/darwins_finches086581.html



A simple yet powerful mathematical rule controls beak development, Harvard scientists find, while simultaneously preventing beaks from evolving into something else. This adds more design punch to Casey Luskin's recent rebuttal of Pigliucci's defense of Icon of Evolution #7, Darwin's finches.

The Harvard Gazette presents findings of a new study by evolutionary biologist Arkhat Abzhanov and mathematician Michael Brenner. They looked at how developmental mechanisms both allow for great variability and create powerful constraints on the shape of the beaks of songbirds. While they apparently give no evidence for doubting neo-Darwinism in a general sense, what they found is not the usual Darwinian story:

Evolutionary biologists have long held up songbirds, particularly the Galapagos finches first described by Charles Darwin, as an example of natural selection at work. In order to exploit different environments and food sources, the birds developed a startling variety of beak shapes -- from short, blunt beaks ideal for cracking seeds and nuts to long, slender beaks designed to sip nectar from flowers. The assumption was that natural selection was the primary, if not the sole, cause for the variation.

But while that variation can be tied, in part, to the way the beaks develop, Harvard researchers say that common developmental mechanism is also a powerful constraint on new beak shapes. (Emphasis added.)

Instead of using Darwin as a source, Abzhanov and Brenner turned to Scottish mathematician D'Arcy Thompson, father of geometric morphometrics and a Darwin critic. Thompson's 1917 book On Growth and Form relegated natural selection to a secondary role; to him, mathematical laws were primarily responsible for biological structures. His view has been termed structuralism: the belief that biological forms are best explained by law-like processes.

In that tradition, the two Harvard professors uncovered a non-random process -- mathematics -- at work in beak development, not an unguided process like natural selection.

"What it shows is that the variations in beak shapes are far from random -- the birds are using these specific geometric transformations to produce morphological diversity," Abzhanov said. "With just two mathematical transformations, we can show how all the diversity across these species can be related."

All the fantastic variation in songbird beaks can be described mathematically, they say, as a basic cone shape environmentally modified by two transformations: scaling and shear. Those factors are applied in a uniform developmental process common to all songbirds.

As cell division begins in a "growth zone" in the embryo where the beak will take shape, processes governed by these mathematical transformations ensure it will turn out with the correct shape. This has the effect of limiting the amount of variability:

Through modeling, Abzhanov and Brenner were able to show that, for a beak to maintain the conical shape created by the growth zone during development and still obey the rules of scaling and shear transformations during evolution, the growth zone must decay at a particular rate. Tests using embryos of zebra finches showed the predictions made by their model to be accurate.

"Thus, most or all songbirds out there in nature, so remarkably diverse and distinct, are united by this particular rule, when we observe a two-tier variation in their beak shapes with scaling and shear transformations explaining their origins," Abzhanov said. "These birds all have conical-shape bills constructed in a certain way, and this creates a paradox in the entire process of their beak evolution when there is both flexibility and powerful constraints."

This is very different from neo-Darwinism. Darwin taught that all the variety in the natural world could be explained by random variation and natural selection -- processes that are thoroughly unguided and aimless. What these Harvard biologists found were mathematical rules that put limits on what can evolve. The "powerful constraints" they found, that they were able to model mathematically, contain enough flexibility to allow birds to adapt to the food available, but keep them "united" as birds by a "particular rule."

This sounds like design. We find in Darwin's finches (and all songbirds) an internal system, controlled by a non-random developmental process. It is flexible enough to allow for variation, but powerful enough to constrain the beak to its basic form (a conical shape modulated by scaling and shear) so that the rest of the bird's structures are not negatively affected. Beak development is controlled by a decay process that must operate at a particular rate. It's all very precise, so much so that it could be modeled mathematically.

What Darwinian explanation can make meaningful predictions? These scientists tested their model, and "showed the predictions made by their model to be accurate."

The very birds that have long been used as iconic examples of natural selection become, on closer examination, paragons of intelligent design.

Back to School to Learn about the "Darwin's Finches" Icon of Evolution
http://www.evolutionnews.org/2012/09/back_to_school_064601.html

With students returning to school now, it's worth mentioning a delightful book, published last year, by University of Texas, Austin historian Alberto A. Martinez: Science Secrets: The Truth about Darwin's Finches, Einstein's Wife, and Other Myths. Science Secrets takes on a number of well-established scientific myths, including some that seem stubbornly ensconced in science textbooks.

One of these is the idea that the Galápagos finches -- known as "Darwin's finches" -- were critical to the development of Darwin's ideas about evolution. Martinez debunks this myth:

   Many old books claim that when Charles Darwin visited the Galápagos Islands, he was inspired to think about evolution by seeing variations in finches' beaks. ... Allegedly, he found that each species of finch belonged to a particular island and had developed distinct feeding habits that matched their evolving beaks, for cracking small or big seeds or for eating insects. That's what many people still think, and so, one of the most widely reproduced pictures in history is that of Darwin's finches.

   However, in sterling historical studies, Frank J. Sulloway of Harvard University showed that, really, Darwin was hardly influenced by finches and scarcely observed their feeding habits. He did not correlate their diets and beaks; in fact, Darwin collected too few specimens to determine whether any finch species was unique to each island. He did not even keep track of where he picked up every specimen. Really, no finch species was unique to any one island. Unfortunately, some teachers and writers remain unaware of Sulloway's historical findings.

   (Alberto A. Martinez, Science Secrets: The Truth about Darwin's Finches, Einstein's Wife, and Other Myths, pp. 95-96 (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011).)

Martinez goes on to observe that "Textbooks decorated by pictures of finches echoed such claims" (p. 96). But if you read ENV regularly, you knew this already. We documented recent textbooks that make false claims about the Galápagos finches in our "Evaluation of 22 Recent Biology Textbooks and Their Use of Selected Icons of Evolution," released last year. For example:

 •   BSCS Biology: A Molecular Approach (Glencoe/McGraw Hill, 2006) states: "On the Galápagos Islands, which Darwin visited during his travels, some members of the same finch species have short, thick beaks while others have longer, thinner beaks. On the basis of these observations, Darwin concluded that some variations would help members of a species survive in a particular environment, whereas other variations would not be helpful." (pp. 10-11)
 •   Sylvia S. Mader, Essentials of Biology (McGraw Hill, 2007) states: "One of the best examples of speciation through adaptive radiation is provided by the finches on the Galápagos Islands, which are often called Darwin's finches because Darwin first recognized their significance as an example of how evolution works." (p. 251)
 •   Sylvia S. Mader, Biology (McGraw Hill, 10th ed., 2010) is even worse, stating: "These birds would eventually play a major role in his thoughts about geographic isolation" and "Darwin had formed his natural selection hypothesis by observing the distribution of tortoises and finches on the Galápagos Islands." (pp. 270, 275)
 •   Kenneth R. Miller and Joseph Levine's Biology (Pearson, 2010) is also quite bad, stating:

       Darwin noticed several types of small brown birds on the islands with beaks of different shapes. He thought that some were wrens, some were warblers, and some were blackbirds. ... the little brown birds that Darwin thought were wrens, warblers, and blackbirds were actually all species of finches! They, too, were found nowhere else, though they resembled a South American finch species ... Darwin was stunned by these discoveries. He began to wonder whether different Galápagos species might have evolved from South American ancestors. He spent years filling notebooks with ideas about species and evolution. ... Once Darwin learned that the birds were all finches, he hypothesized that they had descended from a common ancestor. Darwin noted that several finch species have beaks of very different sizes and shapes. Each species uses its beak like a specialized tool to pick up and handle its food... Darwin proposed that natural selection had shaped the beaks of different bird populations as they became adapted to eat different foods. (pp. 452-453, 471-472)

If these textbooks are any indication, it seems that many students will be learning inaccurate information about Darwin's finches when they go back to school. Martinez says the following about the standard finch story:

   To return to the myth about finches, we can summarize that old story as follows: While visiting the Galápagos Islands, Charles Darwin noticed that various species of finches had beaks of different shapes and sizes. Observing their eating habits, he noticed that the shapes of their beaks corresponded to their diets. He also noticed that some species were distinct to some islands. Hence he inferred that the various species were related: they were descended from common ancestors that had populated the islands and had adapted variously to the distinct island conditions. Species evolved.

   The short story works because it fits in the space allotted by a science textbook. And it works because, as Sulloway argued, it fits into the form of a classic journey of discovery: man departs from home on a bold adventure, encounters and overcomes hardships, and returns with a deep truth. But the story is false... (p. 117)

Jonathan Wells of course wrote very much the same thing in Icons of Evolution. He devoted an entire chapter to the icon of Darwin's finches, and summarized problems with this textbook myth as follows:

   The Galápagos finches did not inspire Darwin with the idea of evolution, and oscillating natural selection on their beaks produces no observable net change. (Icons of Evolution, p. 260)

It looks, in other words, like Jonathan Wells has been vindicated once again. It would be nice to think that someday biology textbooks will be amended accordingly.