| Topic: |
Religions > Atheism |
| User: |
"Budikka666" |
| Date: |
05 Oct 2007 06:47:29 PM |
| Object: |
Why There's No Design #185 - Transiting Onto Land |
Acanthostega was first discovered in 1933, but it wasn't for another
half century that the beauty of this transitional fossil was fully
realized.
As http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acanthostega explains, "It appeared in
the Upper Devonian (Famennian) about 360 million years ago, and was
anatomically intermediate between lobe-finned fishes and the first
tetrapods fully capable of coming onto land."
The creationists scrambled to explain it away, evidence be damned.
For example, the well-known creation Lie-brary at www.answersingenesis.org
had this to proclaim: "However, Acanthostega was a fully formed and
fully functional four-legged amphibian, with four legs and not four
fins, in some respects not unlike amphibians such as salamanders and
newts."
Unfortunately their lie was exposed in a paper by Coates, M.I. and
J.A. Clack in 1991: "Fish-like gills and breathing in the earliest
known tetrapod". _Nature_ (London) 352: 234-236.
Acanthostega gunnari had both lungs and gills as an exceptionally well-
preserved specimen discovered in 1991 demonstrated.
It was indeed a true transitional as the evolutionists had maintained
all along.
So there's evolution. What of design? Again we have this undeniable
proof from the fossil record of all manner of variation around a
central theme, which can be seen heading upwards through time, towards
modern forms.
Was the designer a child or an amateur, who couldn't get it right no
matter how many times they tried, and had to keep working on it over
millions upon millions of years?
Was the designer simply incompetent?
Or was there no designer at all, merely evolution?
Budikka
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| User: "Budikka666" |
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| Title: Why There's No Design #187 - The Silliness of the Cilium |
05 Oct 2007 07:06:37 PM |
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The message numbered 185 in this thread is actually #186. Here's
Number 187, for good measure.
Again this is from Kenneth Miller's "Finding Darwin's God", starting
on page 140, where he discusses creationist leading light Michael
Behe's declaration of the cilium to be irreducibly complex.
The cilium (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cilium) doesn't come in only
one form, as Behe seems to be implying. The most common version is
apparently nine "doublet" microtubules surrounding a central pair of
"singlet" microtubules. This can be called a 9+2 system.
But as Miller explains, it isn't the only system. There's the sperm
of a genus of caddis fly which has a 9+7 system, and on page 142,
Miller shows a range of others: 9+1, 9+0, 6+0, 3+0, and a completely
free-form version
In short, Behe couldn't be more wrong to pretend that you cannot have
a "reduced complexity" cilium.
So where does this leave design? Flopping in the dust as usual. The
variation in nature shows nothing better than it shows evolution.
If it's supposed to show design, then the ID crowd has some serious
explaining to do, supported with some serious science.
Why is it that a whole *decade* after Behe's publication of his
"Darwin's Black Box" we are **STILL** waiting on the first iota of
creation/ID science?
Budikka
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