In the Issue of Atheism, Materialism and Evolution. (Part 2)

ALL OF THESE WERE NEVER DOCUMENTED THROUGH FOSSIL EVIDENCES

Not really...evolution can be documented through:
1. In the context of natural selection.
2. Ring species.
3. Understanding of genetics.
4. Anatomical and Molecular parahomology
5. Anatomical and Molecular convergence
6. Anatomical and Molecular suboptimal fuction
7.Through molecular evidences like protein functional redundancy, DNA functional redundancy, transposons, redundant pseudogenes and endogenous retroviruses


It has NEVER been observed in any laboratory that mutations can cause one species to turn into another.

Not really...Just go to the nearest petshop to see how mutation can create new variations. Selective breeding has produced novel features in many species, including cats, dogs, tetras, guppies and  goldfish.

Also, Proteins in the histidine biosynthesis pathway consist of beta/alpha barrels with a twofold repeat pattern. These apparently evolved from the duplication and fusion of genes from a half-barrel ancestor (Lang et al. 2000).

Now...I omitted the said article, but if you want to read the original article where the Christian author copy-pasted his "arguments", it can be found here and here.

Here's what the site looks like.

 

I  didn't bother too much on those articles. Not that I can't answer them...but come on...there are a lot of books in evolutionary biology that can answer the issue about the evolution of mammalian hair and the evolution of mammalian mammary glands. (BTW, speaking of hair evolution,  researchers identified the gene that codes for a protein called hair keratin in mammals, and then looked for those same genes in the feathered and scaly animals. They found several previously unidentified hair keratin genes in the animals, and realized that the genes coded for proteins used in claw and skin formation...it's not in the scale as Christian/Creationists believed. it's in the claw! On the presence of mammary glands, it's a modified apocrine glands. The features of current mammals were gradually accrued through radiations of synapsid ancestors, and the mammary gland is hypothesized to have evolved from apocrine-like glands associated with hair follicles.)

In the issue of of the Cambrian era...why the big fuzz about it?
Well...it was said that in the Cabrian era, there are more phyla existed compare to previous eras. Christian creationists believed that this is the proof that animals suddenly sprang into existance.

And the issue? There are few fossil records before the Cambrian.

Why?

Simple...soft-bodied animals like worms, cnidarians and  sponges don't have fossil records. During the Cambrian, there was the first appearance of hard parts, such as shells and teeth, in animals. The lack of readily fossilizable parts before then ensures that the fossil record would be very incomplete in the Precambrian.


The article also have some (usual) quote-mining. I guess he just copy-pasted the article without even reading it. Oh well...Here's a good example of misquote...and it suppose to come from no other than Prof. Richard Dawkins.

... prominent British evolutionist, Richard Dawkins, comments, “… [W]e find many of them already in an advanced state of evolution, the very first time they appear. It is as though they were just planted there, without any evolutionary history.”

Now here's the complete quote from Prof. Dawkin's book The Blind Watchmaker :

...already in an advanced state of evolution, the very first time they appear. It is thought they were just planted there without any evolutionary history. Needless to say, this appearance of sudden planting has delighted creationists.

Evolutionists of all stripes believe, however, that this really does represent a very large gap in the fossil record.

Now here's another...

In Stephen J. Gould’s popular book, Wonderful Life, he points out that the Burgess Shale Cambrian fossils include “a range of disparity in anatomical design never again equaled, and not matched today by all the creatures in the world’s oceans.” ...

Now here's the complete quote that can be seen in page 208 of his book Wonderful Life :

The Burgess Shale includes a range of disparity in anatomical design never again equaled, and not matched today by all the creatures in the world's oceans. The history of multicellular life has been dominated by decimation of a large initial stock, quickly generated by the Cambrian explosion. The story of the last 500 million years has featured restriction following by proliferation within a few stereotyped designs, not general expansion of range and increase in complexity as our favored iconography, the cone of increasing diversity, implies. Moreover, the new iconography of rapid establishment and later decimation dominates all scales, and seems to have the generality of a fractal pattern.

I don't seen anything here that suggest Gould believe in a 6 day creation. The quote was just "abused" to lend spurious credence to a raft of Creationist nonsense about "who created all the diversity then".

How about this so-called quote from Dr. Austin Clark, a leading biologist of the Smithsonian Institute in Washington.

"No matter how far back we go in the fossil record of previous animal life on earth, we find no trace of any animal forms which are intermediate between the major groups of phyla. Since we have not the slightest evidence, either among the living or the fossil animals, of any intergrading types following the major groups, it is a fair supposition that there never have been any such intergrading types. There are no such things as missing links. ... Missing links are misinterpretations."

The word "There are no such things as missing links" and "Missing links" doesn't came from Dr. Clake and surely, the said quote seems to be canibalized. The first part of the so-called quote can be seen here on page 189 of his book "The New Evolution" (A.H. Clark, The New Evolution; Zoogenesis Williams and Wilkins, >Baltimore, 1930), and the second and third sentences from page 196.

After that...the article presented so-called "hoaxes" to discredit evolution....read it here.

To challenge evolution, throw in some well known hoaxes. Alas! Evolution is false!

So there are hoaxes...big deal. Just because some con men tried making money in the name of evolution doesn't mean evolution is false. We now have have a rich supply of intermediate fossils linking modern humans to the common ancestors we share with other apes.

Now if showing hoaxes prove something as false, then what about The Shroud of Turin and the James ostuary - does these prove Jesus as a hoax? Nah...I won't level on this kind of mentality.

But for the sake of our readers let us answer the said accusations:

Yes, the Piltdown Man was a hoax (It was said to be perpetrated by an amateur paleontologist named Charles Dawson), but not everything in that list were a joke.

According to the said anti-evolution Christian site, the Neanderthals were regular humans with bone disease (rickets). It was a certain Rudolf Virchow who claimed that Homo sapiens neanderthalensis are modern men who suffer rickets somewhere in the early 1800's. Yet rickets does not produce a Neanderthal morphology; it is clear from many sources (Reader 1981; Tattersall 1995) that the original Neanderthal skeleton was unlike any previously known, even in a century in which rickets was a common disease. Ironically, the Creationist author Jack Cuozzo on his book "Buried Alive" (1998, pp.275-279) said that the symptoms of these diseases bear very little resemblance to the features of Neanderthals.

The Java Man was discovered by Eugene Dubois in 1891 and was classified as Pithecanthropus erectus. Mistakenly considered as a species of a giant gibbon, the Java Man, together with the Peking Man are now classified in the genus Homo as Homo erectus.

It was said that the H.erectus was the first human to come out of Africa. That is why their remains were found from Koobi Fora, to Java and in Majuangau, west of Beijing. Homo Erectus were also the one that discover the idea of cooking food as discovered in Zhoukouien (Dragon Bone Hill), a cave situated about twenty-five miles south-west of Beijing in China.

Another deliberate misinformation in the Christian/Creationist anti-evolution article is about Lucy. They say that Lucy is a mosaic, with bones assembled from different locations and that actually more like a monkey than man.

Er….whatever.

Now “Lucy” is a 40% complete skeleton of an early hominid ever found. She was discovered in 1974 by Donald Johanson in Ethiopia. Lucy is now classified as Australopithecus aferensis. There are now numerous fossils of A. aferensis that were discovered like the “First Family" found at the A.L. 333 locality. Other localities bearing A. afarensis remains include Omo, Maka, Fejej and Belohdelie in Ethiopia, and Koobi Fora and Lothagam in Kenya.

Lucy is our proof that by 3.4 to 2.9 millipn years ago, early humans were bipedal.

The Kenyan Skull came from a chimp…said Ken Ham, Executive Director of Answers in Genesis…Man, I’m not born yesterday. “Answers in Genesis” is a Christian/Creationist website!

The Kenyan Skull (KNM-ER 42700) is believed to be a homonid older than “Lucy”. The skull, discovered by Frederick Manthi of the National Museums of Kenya, was assigned to the species Homo erectus despite being a similar size to that of a habilis skull.

The Laetoli footprints are modern human footprints…said who?

Discovered in 1978 by a team headed by Mary Leakey at Hadar in the Awash Valley of Ethiopia’s Afar Depression, the Laetoli footprints led to the stunning revelation that humans walked upright well before they made stone tools or evolved large brains.

New evidence suggested that The footprints were left in a fresh layer of volcanic ash, which is very easily dateable. They were left by a member of Australopithecus Afarensis, a hominid with gracile morphology (in essence, thinner boned) who, despite not being as avid of brachiators and chimpanzees, spent much of their time in the trees. It is believed that our early ancestors did not abandon their arboreal habitat until around 2 million years ago.

According to the recent studies conducted by David Raichlen, an assistant professor in the University of Arizona School of Anthropology and other researchers from the University at Albany and City University of New York’s Lehman College, the Laetoli footprints would resemble those of someone walking with a bent knee, bent hip gait typical of chimpanzees, and not the striding gait normally used by modern human. He also added, “but to our surprise, the Laetoli footprints fall completely within the range of normal human footprints.”

Now does this prove that modern humans produced these footprints? According to Adam Gordon, “The fossil record indicates that our ancestors did not make a full-time commitment to leaving the trees and walking on the ground until well over a million years after these (Laetoli) prints were made. The fact that partially tree-dwelling animals, like Lucy, had such a remarkably modern gait is a testament to the importance of energetic efficiency in moving around on two legs,"

Now let us proceed with the Archaeopteryx. The article said, "Originally thought of as a transitional fossil between the reptiles and birds, it is now considered by most evolutionists to be a true bird..."

What?

The Archaeopteryx lithographica is not a missing link between reptiles and birds. Cladistically speaking, birds and reptile are classified seperately. Birds are more connected with dinosaurs than with lizards.

By the way, two species of dinosaur have recently been found in northeast China which possess feathers (Qiang et al. 1998). Protoarchaeopteryx robusta and Caudipteryx zoui show regiges, rectrices and plumulaceous feather inpressions.

SO MUCH LIKE STRICT MATERIALISM, THE THEORY OF EVOLUTION IS ANOTHER NONSCIENTIFIC, HIGHLY ILLOGICAL AND VERY FAULTY CONCEPT. These very concepts are the very core concepts and principles of atheism and we are not even talking yet of the concept of moral accountability and humanity which are very blurred logical concepts for atheists. ARE YOU NOW AWARE OF YOUR BIG IGNORANCE AND IDIOCY?

Simply put it in, the author of the said article did a very lousy job refuting atheism.

First, ad hominem attacks don’t refute anything. It only proves that the Christian author has the level of a typical palengkera (a noisy store vendor).

Second, think first before you act. To refute atheism one must refute the atheist's reason. Straw-man tactic serves nothing.

And third, well...what can I say...More research please and don't rely too much on copy-paste articles from other Christian sites.

So who's the idiot now eh Mr. Soria...ah I forgot, he already changed his article. hehehe!