Scientific American Resource on "Creationism"

Someone was asking for help refuting a Creationist book last night and I came across this today in my bookmarks.

Wriiten by SA's editor-in-chief and called "15 Answers to Creationist Nonsense," this article hits all the dazzling Creationist arguments, including "Evolution is only a theory; their misinterpretation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics*; the "argument from design"; and questions like "If we evolved from monkeys, why are there still monkeys?"


http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=000D4FEC-7D5B-1D07-8E49809EC588EEDF&pageNumber=1&catID=2


On the last page, you can click More Resources -- or just click here to get the list, most of them with links:

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=000276B7-6792-1D0A-8E49809EC588EEDF


Faith in God is ALWAYS a big issue in debating anyone who questions evolution. I'm not sure the author really addresses the "contradiction" that creationists see between a belief in God and a belief in evolution. For starters, of course, scientists believe in evolution in the same way as gravity, not in the same way as believing in God or love. (And God IS love, but I digress!)

But I have always thought that the best argument is basically "What contradiction? Don't you believe God is all-powerful? And created the entire universe? Then surely He could create evolution!"

"If we evolved from monkeys, why are there still monkeys?"

Good question! Why didn't all the monkey species just disappear into oblivion as soon as humans appeared?

One of my favorite creationist tales regards the chimpanzee that's given a typewriter and an endless supply of paper. The Christian kooks reason that a chimp could type forever and never create even the simplest book from chance.

How a chimpanzee sitting at a typewriter mimics biological/evolutionary forces isn't explained. If you could transport a typewriter back through time several hundred million years and present it to a bunch of trilobites, what could they create with it? If you gave a yo-yo to a giraffe, what could it accomplish?

Who cares?

covers both the reason there are still monkeys *and* the famous typing monkeys. Computer modeling showed that those simian sorts could turn out a masterpiece sooner than you (or at least the creationists) would think.

I think it would be difficult to get trilobites to do much with a typewriter, though, unless they were to jump on the keyboard headfirst as archie did (See Marquis, Don, and/or "archie and mehitabel.") Maybe giraffes could be taught to hold a yo-yo with their tongue? Their feet are poorly adapted for the task.

As much as I don't believe in creationism; I doubt very much monkey typing for however many years could EVER reconstruct an entire Shakespeare play; and the computer program does nothing to prove they could.

Unless I am mistaken; read carefully what the program does

"...a computer program that generated phrases randomly while preserving the positions of individual letters that happened to be correctly placed"

The program wasn't just spewing out random letters; it was keeping those that "happened to be correctly placed". So it was guided by what WE know to be the correct arrangement of letters to produce a Shakespeare play. Any number of monkeys left on their own would have no idea what a correct word was; let alone what a Shakespeare sonnet was.

We'd end up with monkey's typing away at type writers sometimes stringing together the right letters to produce words. And even if chance they produced all the words that are in Hamlet, they'd still wouldn't have Hamlet. Not even close. The program is guided in the form of the instructions given to it by the programmer; the monkeys (in this thought experiment) aren't.

The whole notion is bogus IMHO. It's just an attempt to justify a scientific theory. In other words scientists subscribe to the typing monkey idea because they believe that life today is just a series of random events strung together. If that's the case, the typing monkey notion is a piece of cake. Because Shakespeare is much more simpler then life. But we are not certain exactly what the mechanisms are that led to life on earth and it's evolution to present day; so how can we say anything about what typing monkeys might come up with given enough time.

Of course what do I know...I ain't no scientist :)

A monkey certainly would recreate a shakespear play - eventually.
Because one of the random combinations of characters/words that can be produced would inevitably correspond to a shakespear play.

But the number of combinations absolutely humongous;
something in the order of
(number of characters in a shakespear play) to the power of (the number of characters in the alphabet). (or the other way around).
anyway that's probably more then there are subatomic particles in the universe. to produce all those combinations would probably take longer then the time universe will exist.

so is entirely inpractical to conduct such an experiment.

Evolution hold that whenever random chance rearranges the letters ATCG on DNA correctly, the pattern is conserved. Why, because this accidental rearrangement aids the survival and reproduction of the animal that happens to have gotten the lucky break.

So the logic goes, if the chimp happens to type the right letter in the right place, it is kept. Then in the next generation you start with those letters in the right place and randomly fill the other blanks. By sheer chance, some of those will be right, and therefore conserved for the next generation, and so on.

The point is that evolution is only driven by a random engine. The process itself is ordered and moderately to highly selective. Life or death based on survival of the fittest can be very black and white. The springbok that is a step faster outruns the cheetah, the one that is a step slower is lunch.

The one that got the letters in the right order lives to breed another day.

If you believe that genetics passes characteristics to the children, the rest of evolution is the inevitable mathematical consequence.

If the chimp were able to "save" the phrases it manages to type out thru chance, it would be able to write a book in a relatively short amount of time. In other words, lets assume that the chimp is using "special" paper that only gets imprinted by the actually intelligible sentences, and not the gibberish, then slowly, but surely lil' Shrubby could conceivably tap out a simple book in a couple hundred years (maybe less). That is a much closer analogy to evolution. Only the advantageous mutations survive to the next generation, the disadvantageous ones eventually die out. Just like the special paper, only the "words" get saved.

for it's purpose. But do not fixate on it too long. It demonstrates a mechanism fairly well in simple terms. Where it falls off the track is on the notion evolution had a goal.

While this is much more difficult to illustrate in a simple analogy, there is no intent to evolution. The theory does not hold that we are the final, inevitable, and intentional result of the process.

The goal for the monkeys of creating Shakespear actually is setting the bar much too high. It is more appropriate to set the goal at creating "anything that makes sense". Then from there perhaps anything that makes a little better sense, with no final product in mind.

If the right would really like to prove the difficulty in the concept, I suggest they put 100 GW Bush* in a room with typewriters and have them try to create an intelligent foriegn policy. This would take millenia!!!

over in the science forum

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=115&topic_id=2462

i posted over there what is now thought to be the key molecular difference between monkeys and humans (post #18) and how it was achieved via evolutionary processes.