Rossiter's Mind over Matter

Among other things, the Sensuous Curmudgeon tracks "self-published geniuses".  #42 was Wayne Rossiter and his book Mind over Matter. Wayne and Brian Rossiter have a Facebook page for their book and they were sufficiently open to criticism to post a link to the Sensuous Curmudgeon. On their Facebook page I posted this review of a sample of their book (text also pasted below if the picture is unclear):

I came here from Sensuous Curmudgeon and read the free sample at amazon. My thoughts on that small piece:
1) I love it when Creationists defend their position using William Lane Craig’s name. It is almost as if they aren’t aware that he strongly supports evolution.
2) Chapter one “Debating 101 Many shutter at the idea of debate.”
Do they shutter their doors?
3) The chapter 2 arguments, “Replace God with science” summarize the evolution position so briefly that they are useless. If “Replace God with Science” included examples such as lightning, it would make more sense. Rossiter’s response “How exactly does science create or cause anything?” is a strange twisting of the argument. Science explains, it doesn’t create. Done.
4) For “We have the fossils” in Chapter 3, Rossiter's response is “We all have the fossils. Our theories are supposed to explain them.” Yes, and evolution does that, while creationism doesn’t come close. Rather than circular logic, "We have the fossils" is a pithy summary. Rather than discuss circular logic, Rossiter should discuss transitional fossils, such as Tiktaalik and six other fish-to-amphibian transitions and Archaeopteryx and dozens of other featured dinosaurs – and look at the debating fallacy of making strawman arguments.

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I've now been blocked from their Facebook page - this is why I took the screenshot above.

Happy Darwin Day! And Creationist agrees that the evidence points towards evolution

It's the 13th here in Korea, but still the 12th in many countries, so I think I'm in the clear and don't have to add an embarrassed 'belated' to the title.

Nice work, Mr President.*

Albert Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky offered remarks about the discovery of gravity waves - I really should learn what their significance is.

Mohler said Christians believe the universe is telling a different story: as the psalmist puts it, “The heavens declare the glory of God.”

Mohler said part of being created in God’s image is an innate desire to understand and know the cosmos around us. At the same time, he warned, much of what is presented as scientific proof is at odds with the Bible, including the historical account of creation recorded in the opening chapters of the book of Genesis. 

“Now to be candid, I don’t believe that the world is 1.3 billion years old, certainly not billions of years old,” Mohler said. “I don’t even believe that is actually millions of years old. But one of the interesting things we need to note here is that the scientists who believe that believe it because they are looking at certain patterns that, to their observation, tell them that. And what we need to note is this, if we ourselves were operating from a simply materialistic and naturalistic worldview, we would probably come to the very same conclusions.”

Does this say that Mohler agrees the evidence, as viewed objectively, supports evolution?

“And we also understand that we are fallen, fragile, fallible thinkers and so as we look at this, if we’re operating from a basically secular worldview, if we believe the universe is going to have to tell us the story all on its own, then there’s no way we’re going to come up with the right story.”

It think it does.
Via the Sensuous Curmudgeon.
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*Thanks, photofunia.

Ruben Bolling does it again

I follow 'Take That Darwin' on Twitter and s/he is able to find variations on the "If humans came from apes..." argument everyday.  Today's Tom the Dancing Bug comic describes what creationists seem to think should happen when they use this argument. To encourage people to see the original, I have shrunk the image and cropped it significantly.

I also moved the 'Tom the Dancing Bug' title to the right so it would be in the cropped image.  Ah, if anyone reads this, have I gone too far in my 'I'm not stealing this image' routine?  Or not far enough?

Why are there still apes?

Blogpost from a science teacher in Kansas on the subject.

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My answer to the question on Quora.

As others have told you, the problem appears to be in your understanding. An evolutionist* would tell you that humans and other apes currently alive are descendants of a now extinct ape or hominid. Humans evolved from a species of ape and so did currently living species of apes. If it helps, recall that there are at least three species of great ape besides us: orangutans, gorillas and chimpanzees. In this analogy, apes are not my grandparents but my cousins.
A month ago, I would spoken less sympathetically about who is 'smartest' and 'dumbest'. However, I have considered the problem further since then and think you might be confused by some of the analogies normally used. The typical rebuttal by analogy goes, "If Americans are descended from Europeans, why are there still Europeans." Modern formulations would add Asia, Africa, ... and all the wide variety of places people have left to become Americans. The problem with the analogy is that people today change from European to American, while apes are not currently changing into humans.
So why did some apes become human while others did not? I'm going to use another analogy and ask a question. What are the most successful animals on Earth today? let's look at success as a combination of numbers and mass. There are around eight billion humans and we average forty kg (88 lb). Well, chickens have similar numbers - around 24 billion though much lighter. E-coli bacteria in total would have similar mass. Ants, though not a single species, would also be in the running.
The point is, there are many routes to success. There is no reason to believe that the evolutionary line that led to humans immediately jumped to the success we have now. As I understand it, our line became more savanna based while other apes moved deeper into the forest.
In short, there is no reason to expect that all apes would evolve into humans nor that our evolutionary line was successful right away.
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*I am an evolution proponent. An evolutionist would be a scientist who studies evolution and would be under the greater umbrella of 'biologist'. I have a degree in biology but do not work in that field.

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And, "Will Chimps evolve into Humans?"

No.
Randomness is an oft-misunderstood pillar of evolution. In natural selection, a number of mutations occur in random locations that may cause difference in how the animal looks, acts or lives. Ones that benefit the animal -in longer lifespan and/or increased number of offspring - are more likely to be 'selected' and passed on to those offspring. It might be possible to backtrack one beneficial mutation, for evolution to reverse one position - but more likely if such a reversal were selected, the gene would be broken. I've written it very abstractly so here is a sort of example. When a group of fish in Mexico began living their whole lives in caves, having eyes actually became a liability (as a entry point for infection with no sensory value). The eyes did not vanish but were covered over with flesh. The eyes are still there, just covered over and broken.
Once two groups take a few steps away from each other, neither one can retreat to the original intersection and follow the other's path. As Ariel Williams (another responder to this question) noted, chimps might become more intelligent and capable of swimming and long distance running but still would not be human - they not look much like humans either

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12 days of evolution

I find the Dropbox ads a little annoying.  I mean, the content is only two minutes so a 30 second commercial feels quite long.  Still, on Youtube, here are 12 days of evolution.

THE bounty Hunter

I have long been a fan of Piraro's Bizarro comic.  The subject of this one fits my blog so here is a shrunken version of it.  To see it full size, go to Piraro's blog.  Stay a while.

Misconceptions? About evolution? About Creationism?

Jim Stump names and corrects 10 misconceptions about evolution here.  At AIG, Avery Foley tries -and mostly fails, to correct those corrections.

Most glaring, is Foley's counter regarding the second law of thermodynamics.  After correctly discussing open- and closed- systems, Foley quotes astronomer Dr Danny Faulkner (with my bolding):

However, merely being an open system does not automatically mean that entropy decreases. Life depends upon a huge number of complex biochemical reac-tions continually operating. These biochemical reactions operate opposite to the direction that they would naturally proceed. That is, living things synthesize simpler molecules into more complex ones. The inputs are matter and energy (required to bond the more complex molecules), which is why living things are open systems. However, these inputs are insufficient in themselves to circumvent the second law of thermodynamics. The di-rection of the chemical reactions normally is decay from the more complex to simpler molecules, the opposite of what living things require to exist. Given this, the appeal to an open system to rescue the day for evolution is not demonstrated and amounts to hand-waving and gross extrapolation.

I don't understand what Faulkner is saying.  Is he saying that all living things break the second law of thermodynamics.  It sure looks as if he -an astronomer so knowledgeable about physics in general, but not necessarily about biology - is saying that.  Let me help him.
For humans, or plants, or fungae, or archaea, or other animals, synthesizing complex molecules happens all the time  Plants take in water and carbon dioxide and produce sugar.  We use sugar and other organic compounds and make hemoglobin and more.  Yes, plants are also using the sun's energy so they are clearly benefiting from an open system but what about us?  Well, as a newborn, I was around 3 kg.  I feel I was at a physical peak at around age twenty-five.  I don't know when my mental peak was but I sure forget a lot of stuff now so I think I have passed it.  Let's stick with twenty-five.  At that time, I weighed 76kg. Ah, those were the days.
...Anyway, during those twenty-five years, I ate food.  A lot of food.  Far more than 73 kg of food.  From age fifteen to twenty-five, I ate more than 151 kg per year. What did I do with that food?  I was a serious athletes in those days and used the food as energy burned while swimming twelve hours a week, and as the building blocks for muscles of great power and endurance.
I excreted and exhaled most of that mass.  I made the air around me, with my exhalations, warmer and wetter and spread carbon dioxide far and wide, so that it dispersed and settled at the global average concentrations. While concentrating complex molecules in my body, I increased global and universal entropy.  I radiated heat. I released liquids.  I released gases.  And I did so to a greater extent than I locally decreased entropy in my body.  Again, in that last year, I ate 150+ kgs of food, but gained less than 5 kg of mass.

Foley is also concerned with Stump's explanation for how new information can be added to DNA.

He argues that genetic mutations and gene duplication can create new information, but they don’t. All they do is work on already existing information.

Again, I am not sure what Foley is saying.  If I rearrange a word, have I created a new word or not?  'From' and 'Form' are two different words which change the information content of a sentence.

Let's dig in.  Duplication mutations have been observed copying an entire gene.  More localized mutations have been observed changing parts of that gene. The new gene has been observed to have new functions.  How is this not new information?
From Sci Am 1, 2.  From Talk Origins. From Stump's original article.

Is evolution a theory in crisis?

...the vast majority of scientists are evolutionists (although some do doubt evolutionary ideas) ...have been indoctrinated to think that way. They interpret the evidence through the lens of evolutionary ideas because they have an evolutionary worldview. What we do point out are the huge problems with evolutionary ideas that should make it a theory in crisis! The evidence is much better explained through the lens of God’s Word and is consistent with a biblical worldview.

I don't think evolution is a theory in crisis, but I am not about to argue a philosophical point.  I do want to point out that to my knowledge, no evolutionary scientist has had to sign a form promising to only view evidence according to a specific worldview or lose their job.  Foley has.  Everyone at AIG has.  Here is that statement.  There is no such oath for evolution proponents.  Creationists are not automatically guilty of deliberate misrepresentation of the facts but are automatically more highly suspected of such misrepresentation.

On the fossil record and transitionals:

A fully formed and functional creature is discovered, and it’s labeled a “transitional” or “intermediate” creature because it’s interpreted that way based on assumptions about how life formed and how old the fossil is. A biblical creationist will go and look at the exact same fossil and reach an entirely different con-clusion, that this is a fully formed organism that belonged to one of the original kinds God creat-ed, because we have an entirely different starting point—the true history revealed in God’s Word.

Here is another example of creationists and evolutionists looking at the same evidence - only the evolutionist looks at all the evidence.  When we find a 'fully formed organism' or fossils thereof, we also note that it is only found among a set of specific other animals, looking for all the world as if some animals had roamed the earth and gone extinct and new animals appeared and gone extinct then the fossil in question appeared and gone extinct then we appeared in the fossil record. This does not in any way resemble a 6-day Creation story.
About the fossils themselves - we have a beautiful set of seven transitions from fish to amphibian.  One such fossil was found by making predictions based on an ancient Earth and evolution principles.  Tiktaalik is a big problem for creationists like Foley.

Via the Sensuous Curmudgeon.