AronRa vs Bob Enyart - Phylogeny

[AronRa]

Perhaps you could check for me to see what was the longest time that Aron went before posting. I think it was much longer than my current time.

I posted notice of this debate on my blog twenty days ago, which was already more than a month after my last post. I went 37 days at the longest -owing to multiple engagements on both sides of the planet during that time. At this moment, you're at 51 days and counting, but at least you seem to have spent all that leisure time with some good books.

Aron led off some of his posts with his list of things that have kept him busy. Since my debate with Aron began, for radio show/debate prep (for my show generally), I've read Human Action by von Mises, and Biotic Msg by ReMine (and conducted four interviews, http://RealScienceFriday.com/ReMine), and I've read The Future by Oxford's J.R. Lucas, and I'm currently reading for upcoming interviews Universe from Nothing by Lawrence Krauss, Brain Wars, The Battle Over the Existence of the Mind, by neurobiologist Beauregard, and How Eyes Evolved by Schwab. Then in addition to my daily radio show I pastor Denver Bible Church and I've helped collect about 100,000 signatures for our effort in Colorado to legally recognize the unborn child as a person to try to stop abortionists from tearing them limb from limb. I'm also preparing a talk on the February cover story from London's Journal of Medical Ethics on the British (I think they are) "ethicists" who are arguing (like Princeton's Peter Singer and articles in Discover Magazine and the NY Times), that it should be legal to kill a baby, after it's born, for any reason, as their journal article is titled, "Why Should the Baby Live? -- After-birth Abortion". So, we're busy also, albeit, sadly, too busy.

Please feel free to ask AronRa if he'd like to set a limit between posts, say, 48 hours or one week (as I think I proposed),

Now we have a problem. I'm booked up nearly every week over the next few months, with events in Denver, Boston, Austin, Houston, Chicago, Springfield, Tallahassee, Little Rock, and Baton Rouge, to say nothing about a few pod casts, and a couple of charity benefits, on top of my usual commitments. I have so many promotions and presentations to prepare in the interim that I won't have time to reply to you until some time in December, and I'm supposed to have my book published before then too!

Let me suggest an alternate plan. You make your next post your last. In that post, you will reply to my 4th post to this debate. Therein I repeated a summarized list from the first post to this thread, which was itself a summarized list from the first thread. I can't make this any easier for you. As we agreed back in November, you must actually answer all of the questions directed to you, and properly address each of the charges and challenges therein. Your last submission will be the last word, and the last post to this debate, but it will also be your last chance to do the one-and-only thing you agreed to do when we decided to do this. As you have utterly failed to defend any of the many errors you made on your show, and here as well, and since you haven't been able to rebut any of the points I made then or since, dispute all the months we've been at this, then this will be the moment of truth, the truth you've been trying to duck or dodge since this discussion started. It's time to put up or shut up. If your next submission does not adequately address or acknowledge the errors you made while I was on your show -which is the whole and sole reason we're even having this debate in the first place, I will take that to mean that you won't, and others will take that to mean that you can't. This debate will then be over, and we'll just leave it to public opinion to agree that I won.

 

[BobEnyart]

AronRa vs. Bob Enyart Round Six Post Pt I

ARONRA vs. BOB ENYART ROUND SIX POST And DEBATE CONCLUSION

Bob Enyart Admits an Error: I claimed that Gregor Mendel remained a creationist (i.e., after he read Darwin) but with Aron's challenge on Mendel, I find that I am not able to substantiate my claim, which I here retract. More on this below.

Aron's Request: In his final post, Aron asked that I specifically respond to his nine challenges, which I do below. And since he mentions Dawkins pal, physicist Lawrence Krauss, a couple times, I've interviewed him (realsciencefriday.com/krauss) to get more material for this post.

Two Personal Matters: This type of long-form written debate is a time-consuming effort, so thank you Aron for participating, and League of Reason for hosting this. I'm confused though Aron about why both you and PZ Myers blogged on July 25th about how well this debate was going for the atheists, with you writing that Bob's "next submission ought to be interesting whatever it is"¦", and then you quit on Aug. 15th, the day after we posted in the comment thread that I was preparing my Round 6 post. I had the sense that PZ posted without having read the debate; do you know if he finally got around to it?

Second, at the end of our on-air debate, in Part 7, from 26:15, 27:45 we agreed to a "5 or 10 round written debate" on LoR, of which you said, "I just want to ask two or three questions each round," and that we would begin in "January at some point." For some reason, you've been claiming that somehow bound me to reply to the 30-pages worth of mostly text that you posted on LoR in December, with your 18,000-word analysis of our entire on-air debate. That's "two or three questions per round"? I've heard of an "opening post", but never what you refer to as an, "opening thread". Have you ever heard of a debate starting:
- before it's agreed upon time
- without informing your opponent
- with an 18,000-word, 30-page thesis?

I haven't heard of such a thing. So instead, as in the manner of debates, we offered, and you accepted, to begin this debate in January, in this thread, and you've been complaining about this, probably dozens of times, to PZ Myers, on your blog, here, and everywhere. I'm confused about all that.

The Final Word on AronRa's 99.86% Statistic: During this debate I obtained the 1987 Newsweek article that Aron referenced (no small task), communicated with Ann McDaniel, now senior vice president of the Washington Post Company who co-wrote the article, and contacted the current membership director of the Creation Research Society. Ms. McDaniel was very gracious but, understandably, can't recall where that "one count" of 700 creationist scientists came from. Surveys don't "count" the number of adherents, say of atheism; they poll. We can be sure that McDaniel's unsourced reference was of the dues-paying members of the CRS. So, religioustolerance.org and all the evolutionists who use Aron's invalid statistic that 99.86% of scientists accept evolution should take Aron's own advice: "if you believe in truth at all, then you should make sure that the things you say actually are true; that they are defensibly accurate, and academically correct; and if they are not correct, you should correct them!" [hear it]. For by that same invalid statistical method, atheists themselves comprise only two-hundredths of one percent of 230 million U.S. adults if we calculate using one count of atheists, namely, the membership of Michael Shermer's Skeptics Society.

AronRa's 1st Foundational Falsehood Video Unsubstantiated: If my accusation here is true, that Ra provides zero evidence to support the central claim of his first video, one might question the credibility of AronRa's entire Foundational Falsehoods series.

AronRa Fails to Cite Even a Single Example: Aron's 1st Foundational Falsehood video against creationists, titled "evolution = atheism" says that we creationists claim that evolution is synonymous with atheism. We do not. We all deal with theistic evolutionists all the time. AronRa's video provides not a single quote from any leading creationist to substantiate his claim. When I pointed this out in our radio debate at realsciencefriday.com/ra, Aron said that his video presents Ken Ham himself, the president of Answers in Genesis, making this (admittedly ridiculous) claim. But I pointed out that Aron presented video of Ken Ham, but with AronRa's own voice superimposed. I am unfamiliar with any creation ministry that makes the claim, as in Aron's bald assertion, that evolution equals atheism. Ra has never met my challenge to provide one example from any leading creationist. In his own words, here's what Aron, without evidence, alleges, that creationism:

• 3:53, 4:03 "is based on at least a dozen foundational falsehoods. First and foremost among them is the idea that accepting evolution requires the rejection of theism, if not all other religious or spiritual beliefs as well."
  
  4:03, 4:14 "For decades, those behind the creationist movement have tried very hard to portray that one cannot accept evolution and still believe in God. They know better."
  
  6:43 - 6:52 "Poll after poll continues to reveal that, around the world, most 'evolutionists' are Christian, and most Christians are evolutionists." [BE: That's true because Darwinism is today's reigning paradigm and there are 800 million more Christians than Muslims.] "So evolution is not synonymous with atheism"
  
  4:20, 4:23 "That's been their central claim since the movement began." [hear all four]

Central claim? RSF cannot present here the quotes or evidence that Aron provides, because his FFF video presents nothing to back up his claim. Nothing. Judging by his YouTube channel's millions of views, his atheist viewers must be satisfied with accusation without evidence. For he was unprepared to give me such an example. And so, apparently, his atheist viewers have not been asking him for evidence of his allegation. Bias has that effect. So Aron should either show that this belief of his is defensibly accurate or he should correct it. As Aron says in his 4th Foundational Falsehood video:

• 8:17, 8:30 "But if you believe in truth at all, then you should make sure that the things that you say actually are true. That they are defensibly accurate, and academically correct. And if they are not correct, you should correct them. You wouldn't claim to know anything that you couldn't prove that you knew." hear it

AronRa Confused About His Own 1st Foundational Falsehood: When creationists argue that evolution is false, and that atheism is false, AronRa confuses himself into thinking that we are asserting that evolution is synonymous with atheism. That is his non sequitur. Aron explicitly did this on air when he accused me of conflating evolution with atheism on the sole grounds that I argued that both are false. (See the related story, realsciencefriday.com/pot.) Aron is as confused as if he claimed that anyone opposed to the UFO craze and also opposed to Keynesian economics is therefore claiming that Lord Keynes was an alien. So I challenge AronRa to:
- admit (although in a different forum since he has quit this debate) that his 1st foundational video provides not a single quote to substantiate his point, and then to,
- try to find a substantiating quote from any leading creationists, and if he cannot, then he should,
- take his own advice.

Positive Evidence Contradicting AronRa's 1st Foundational Falsehood: Creationists have always acknowledged and responded to theistic evolutionists. (Aron, evolutionists generally misrepresent conclusions as though they were evidence, something you do throughout your videos. The rest of this paragraph is an example of the presentation of evidence.) Strident evolutionists (like William Provine and as in the journals Nature and Science), as well as creationists, have long argued that the opposing positions are untenable. Here, however, are examples of the leading creationist organizations writing about those who advocate both the existence of God and evolution, by way of theistic evolution:
- CMI's creation.com has many articles dealing with T.E. including 10 dangers of theistic evolution
- AiG's answersingenesis.org has many articles dealing with T.E. including The Basic Assumptions of T.E.
- ICR's icr.org has many articles dealing with T.E. including Could evolution and creation be telling the same story
- CRS's creationresearch.org has many articles dealing with T.E. including An examination of theistic evolution
- CSC's creationscience.com has many references to T.E. including Theistic evolution vs. the Biblical account

Aron's first video shows that there are millions of theistic evolutionists in the world, something creationists have always addressed. And he argues that the very existence of theistic evolutionists proves that we're wrong, since he alleges we claim that theistic evolutionists don't exist. Unless you can provide evidence to back up your claim Aron, you have committed a straw man fallacy, where you easily knock down your opponent because you misrepresented him.

Evolutionists and Closed-minded Refusal to Follow the Evidence: Aron, I submit that you and many atheists are guilty of your main criticism of creationists, that we are closed-minded and refuse to follow the evidence. Here is a perfect example. I asked:

• "Would millions of nautiloids the size of your arm standing on their heads fossilized in limestone in the canyon provide evidence of rapid stratification Aron?"

You answered, "No, not even if they existed. Limestone can't form rapidly"¦"

You guys have a similar refrain: "Soft, transparent dinosaur blood vessels don't exist, and even if they do, it's irrelevant." "Short-lived carbon doesn't exist in billion-year-old diamonds, but even if it does, it doesn't mean anything."

On Aron's objection to Bob's citing of creationist fathers of science: [Aron's 1st of 9 Issues]: "Bob tried to claim credibility for creationism within the scientific community by citing several pre-Darwinian scientists as creationists." To this, I will address:
- Francis Bacon
- Lord Kelvin, and
- Gregor Mendel.

Aron, by Round 3, when you wrote this, you dropped Isaac Newton's name from among the scientists you claim should not be listed as a creationist. Thanks for doing that (as we dealt with it fully, and Newton was a young-earth creationist who even specifically rejected the nebula hypothesis of solar system formation in favor of His belief in the Bible's claim that God spoke the planets into existence 4,000 years before Christ).

I offered this line of evidence only as a counter to your "complete consensus" claim about evolution. You repeat that I mentioned pre-Darwin creationists (which I did, like Copernicus, Bacon, Kepler, Galileo, Pascal, Boyle, Newton, Cuvier, and Dalton). But I also listed post-Darwin fathers of the physical sciences who rejected Darwinism, including Faraday (ironically, one of Bill Nye's favorite scientists), Pasteur, Joule, Kelvin, Lister, and Carver, who along with many other scientists, continued to reject evolution and advocate for special creation.

On Aron's objection regarding Francis Bacon: Ra complained that I "cit[ed] several pre-Darwinian scientists as creationists [including] Francis Bacon [who] invented scientific methodology, so he obviously didn't reject it." I'll quote from Bacon himself:

• ""¦the contemplation of second causes detracts from our dependence upon God, who is the first cause." from "Of the Proficiency and Advancement of Learning, Divine and Human" quoted by Encyclopedia Britannica, in, "Great Books Volume 30,", Chicago IL: 1952, p. 2.
  
  "[Man] fell at the same time from his state of innocency [in the Garden of Eden] and from his dominion over creation"¦ both of these losses can, even in this life, be in some part repaired; the former by religion and faith, the latter by arts and sciences." -Bacon, quoted in, The Soul of Science, Charles Thaxton, Wheaton IL: Crossway Books, 1994, p. 36.

Notice though that Aron changed the subject though, which shift could provide an illusion that he was correct and that Bacon was not a creationist.

This is a Lawrence Krauss type error, when Krauss overstated the evidence and told me that, "All scientists are evolutionists." Many scientists, who use the scientific method, including the hundreds of members of CRS, like Cornell University's famed geneticist Dr. John Sanford, are biblical creationists. So Aron's claim is a non sequitur.

On Aron's objection regarding Lord Kelvin:

• Most amusingly Bob tried to cite the laws of thermodynamics as being opposed to, or a challenge for evolution, and he also lists Lord Kelvin on his side. However Kelvin invented those laws... -AronRa

Aron, in my entropy debate, I argued that information entropy and thermodynamic entropy are different phenomena and therefore do not have convertible units. Therefore you, PZ Myers criticizing me on this, and Prof. Dan Styer who wrote the immediately popular American Journal of Physics article, Evolution and Entropy, err in not making this distinction. (It's true though that this confusion was started a half-century ago by a creationist.) For we live with an explosion of scientific discovery regarding genetic information as the blueprint for biological life, for life is information based. (Of course, I do realize that atheists today are becoming increasingly uncomfortable with the very concept of information itself, and with the reality of logic, and even with the existence of truth.) So in my debate with another worthwhile opponent, on Entropy and Evolution in the Coliseum over at TheologyOnline.com, thankfully, Prof. Styer himself joined in. (You should see his concluding post!) I did concede however that that Henry Morris, the beloved father of the biblical creation movement, made two significant errors regarding entropy, including Styer's, in that he failed to distinguish between information and heat entropy, which error directly led to the ubiquitous confusion to this day among both evolutionists and creationists. (But if you've ever wondered, as did Einstein, why relativity, electrodynamic, and thermodynamic equations could be so "beautiful", then see the entropy formula engraved on Boltzmann's tombstone for an explanation.)

Letting Kelvin Answer Aron's History Challenge: Aron asked me to, "Name one time in the history of science when supernatural explanations ever proved to be correct"¦" I avoid these kinds of questions, which merely ask the opponent to repeat one of his arguments. But since asked, I'll let the president of the British Association for the Advancement of Science answer for me, as I respond to the second part of Aron's Kepler claim:

• Most amusingly Bob tried to cite the laws of thermodynamics as being opposed to, or a challenge for evolution, and he also lists Lord Kelvin on his side. However Kelvin invented those laws, and yet he said that evolution was 'not unscientific'. -AronRa

Aron, you are quote mining. Your two-word quotation misrepresents Kelvin's intense commitment to intelligent design and to God as Creator. I'll excerpt and link to a lengthier passage that presents Kelvin's actual view in context. Remember, I've only offered these arguments (Newton, U.S. doctors, etc.) as rebuttal evidence to your exaggerated claim of how many scientists were evolutionists. Regarding admittedly old-earth Kelvin, I'll let him say which side he's on. In the Address of Sir William Thomson [Lord Kelvin], President, at the Forty-First Meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, he specifically disavowed the mechanisms of Darwinism, "if evolution there has been," and he disavowed that mankind would have evolved from animals. Then, after praising William Paley (promoter of the intelligent design argument), Kelvin then concluded:

• "¦overpoweringly strong proofs of intelligent and benevolent design lie all round us; and if ever perplexities, whether metaphysical or scientific, turn us away from them for a time, they come back upon us with irresistible force, showing to us through Nature the influence of a free will, and teaching us that all living beings depend on one ever-acting Creator and Ruler. -Lord Kelvin

On Aron's objection regarding Gregor Mendel: As I admitted above, I can't substantiate my assertion that Mendel remained a creationist. Evolutionists though, including Ra, appear equally guilty of revisionist history, as when Aron wrote, "Gregor Mendel actually supported Darwinian evolution. In fact Mendel's contribution brought about the modern Mendelo-Darwinian [sic] synthesis." Aron here does what evolutionist Michael Ruse warns against. Writing in the Houston Chronicle, Ruse addresses a claim similar to Ra's, "that Mendel really was trying to plug the gap in Darwin's theory", and Ruse corrects that misconception. "Mendel never thought of himself as working on Darwin's problem and as trying to solve it"¦ we should beware of taking the knowledge that we have today and reading it straight back into the past." Mendel's vital work, after all, he is the father of genetic science, was ignored for almost half a century, very likely because he demonstrated that traits that appear in an organism had previously existed in recessive genes, and that these traits were merely re-emerging. At least on the surface, this breakthrough discovery does not support the popular Darwinist view that such traits were likely to be novel but is inherently consistent with the expression over time of variability in a created genome.

Regarding Aron's mention of THE SYNTHESIS (and other unknown words): At RSF we've noticed a psychological idiosyncrasy among evolutionists who when speaking to creationists, greet certain terms with a note of incredulity, as though they had never heard certain terms before. I've just interviewed physicist Lawrence Krauss (RealScienceFriday.com/krauss), and when I said that mentioned "evolutionist," he asked incredulously, as though he hadn't heard the term, "What's an evolutionist?" In fact, here's a list of quotes, from 3 atheists, all with incredulity in their voice, as though they've never before heard these words or these concepts.

Lawrence Krauss (from our 45 minute interview)
- "What's a person?"

- "What's an atheist?"

- "What's an evolutionist?"

- "What's Darwinism?"

- Multiverse proposed to answer the fine-tuning question [he had never heard of that either]

- What's panspermia? [He said he never heard of a scientist suggesting that life might have come from space, even though it's been discussed from its proposal by the co-discoverer of DNA to recently when his friend Richard Dawkins suggested it in Ben Stein's movie Expelled.]

Eugenie Scott chastised me, when I committed the apparently mortal sin of pluralizing the word "evidence", and instead of giving me the "two or three evidences" that any higher functions, like say mobility, blood-clotting, or echolocation, evolved, she used up her time with complaining about "evidences" (even though Darwin's mentor Lyell wrote a book with that word in its title, and Google finds 9 million web pages with the word "evidences", excluding pages that also mention the any terms like: Bible, Christianity, Scripture, creation). Eugenie did, however, give a decent "What's an evolutionist?" performance, and rather than offering the two or three examples of evidence that I requested, she claimed affirmatively that all the non-coding DNA was affirmatively known to have no function, and offered that as a (philosophical, reverse-ID) argument against creation (hear this at realsciencefriday.com/eugenie-scott), which argument is going the way of the Dodo bird and the vestigial human organs claims.

AronRa demonstrated this same quirk by asking with incredulity:
- "What's an evolutionist?" When I answered, "Someone who believes in Neo-Darwinism," he asked:
- "What's Neo-Darwinism?" with incredulity in his voice, as though he never heard the term. Now, because I'm not interested in tactics designed to distract from a substantive airing of the disagreement, even though Google finds ZERO uses of Aron's term on the entire Internet, I don't waste everyone's time by asking him, "What's a Mendelo-Darwinism synthesis?" I know what he means. But on air, atheists often withhold that kind of courtesy, not seeking clarification, as they sometimes pretend (Krauss didn't even do that), but evidently preferring obfuscation and diversion over substantive dialog. Wouldn't it have been better to discuss the famous paper from the father of the Neo-Darwinian synthesis, Theodosius Dobzhansky? For I here assert (RealScienceFriday.com/Dobzhansky) that his 1973 paper was replete with logical fallacies, failed predictions, and scientific errors. Yet I'm asked, "What's neo-Darwinism?" Aron, it's what you believe. It's the synthesis. Why do you guys all do this?
To psychoanalyze this worldwide quirk among evolutionists, it seems that they are generally uncomfortable with a substantive disagreement over evidence, so they move to territory that they're comfortable with and one that they assume makes their creationist opponent look like an uneducated nut who doesn't even know what evolution is; what atheism means; that you can't pluralize evidence; what a person is; etc. So rather than spend more time engaging on, say with Krauss, the many astounding discoveries and observations that seem to challenge BB cosmology, he's way more comfortable acting like he's never heard of any serious scientist or any observation ever that might challenge the current pop science. Like the Fiddler's Tevye, it's all unthinkable, unheard of. So, like Eugenie stumbling over "evidences", and Krauss pretending that he's never heard anyone propose that life came to Earth from outer space, Aron pretends that he's never heard of "neo-Darwinism".
On Aron's objection regarding Copernicus and Galileo: Aron offers another non sequitur when he argues that these scientists had conflicts with the ecclesiastical powers of their day, by implying that therefore I am wrong to list them among creationists. Yet Copernicus began the scientific revolution in 1543 by breaking with Aristotle and Plato's pagan Greek geocentrism.

Copernicus wrote:

• ""¦when I had mediated upon this lack of certitude"¦ concerning the"¦ movements of the spheres of the world, I began to be annoyed that the philosophers"¦ had discovered no sure scheme for the movements of the machinery of the world, which was built for us by the Best and Most Orderly Workman of all." Quoted by Encyclopedia Britannica publisher of The Revolutions of Heavenly Spheres, found in Great Books Volume 16, Chicago IL, 1952, p. 508.
  "Similarly, in the case of the other planets I shall try, with the help of God, without Whom we can do nothing, to make a more detailed inquiry concerning them." p. 510.

Galileo, in his 1613 letter to the professor of mathematics at Pisa Galileo wrote:

• Holy Scripture and nature are both emanations from the Divine word; the former dictated by the Holy Spirit, the latter, the executrix of God's commands.

And also:

• It seems to me that it was well said by Madama Serenissima, and insisted on by your reverence, that the Holy Scriptures cannot err, and that the decrees therein contained are absolutely true and inviolable. But I should have in your place added that, though Scripture cannot err, its expounders and interpreters are liable to err in many ways; and one error in particular would be most grave and most frequent, if we always stopped short at the literal signification of the words.

Encyclopedia Britannica describes Galileo's famous dialogue as a "witty conversation between Salviati (representing Galileo)"¦ and Simplicio (the dyed-in-the-wool Aristotelian)." So this was one brilliant Christian creationist scientist, Galileo, defending another brilliant Christian creationist scientist, Copernicus, from pagan Aristotle. And the Inquisition, which was Aristotelian in its science, theology, and sociology, did all they could to stifle liberating biblical science from scientists who were Christian in their worldview, just as Aron Ra and the evolution camp try to do today.

On Aron Conflating "Natural Law" and "Naturalism": You wrote, "I doubted whether Bob could show that Newton wrote extensively about denying naturalism when Newton is famous for composing natural laws"¦" However, you used the logical fallacy of conflation, a form of equivocation, by confusing naturalism with natural law, to give the illusion that support for naturalism among leading scientists is greater than it actually is. All creationist fathers of the natural sciences had a great respect for and/or are famous for "composing natural laws", including Paracelsus, Copernicus, Bacon, Kepler, Galileo, Harvey, Pascal, Boyle, Newton, Linnaeus, Cuvier, Dalton, Faraday (one of Bill Nye's favorite scientists , Pasteur, Joule, Kelvin, Lister, Carver, yet all of these and many today (including a majority of U.S. doctors), reject naturalism.

On AronRa's claim: They don't have dinosaur tissue: [Aron's 2nd of 9] Incredulously, in Aron's final post he asks me to respond to this: "Bob also claimed that 'original biological material' had been found in a handful of Cretaceous [dinosaur] fossils. Left at that, the claim is ambiguous and arguable. However Bob specified that these discoveries confirmed original blood and other tissues that had not decomposed, and this is not the case. All that has been confirmed relating to the blood and feathers Bob specifically mentioned were that both had been decomposed and/or were preserved only as residue."

I'm not sure if I should reply to his denial here, "this is not the case," or to Aron's claim in Round Four that "I never denied dinosaur soft tissue." Aron's confusion on this topic throughout shows that he likely only perused my Post 3-B catalog, created for this LoR debate, presenting the world's most complete listing of peer-reviewed soft-tissue papers on dinosaur soft tissue. These papers are running ten-to-one against Aron's erroneous claim that such finds are either unconfirmed, "refuted", or "not the case." Even theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss (emphasis on the theoretical) admitted, to me, that he accepts the existence of blood vessels in a T. rex. We've recreated our Round 3 post as DinosaurSoftTissue.com and in Google searches for: dinosaur soft tissue, our site is ranked #4 out of 150,000 pages beating out phys.org, PZ Myers and scienceblogs, Science Daily, Discover Magazine's infamous Schweitzer's Dangerous Discovery article, Wikipedia, Scientific American, and talkorigins and pandasthumb (both terribly out of date). It's not just because of our great domain name, but our single-page resource is flat-out more up-to-date and informative than anything any evolution site offers with our catalog, links, videos, and excerpts. So, even during this debate, the ranks of Soft Tissue Deniers are diminishing (even here on LoR), and increasing numbers of evolutionists are joining us creationists in acknowledging the greatest paleontological discovery in a century! Now, the next step will be for them to begin to wrestle with (as research is beginning to show) the non-racemized (i.e., mostly) left-handed amino acids and the short-duration Carbon 14 in this uncontaminated original biological material from dinosaur soft tissue.

On T. rex Tasting Like Chicken Aron wrote in Round Two and Round Four that I had been implying that the dinosaur tissue was "perhaps even still edible"¦" Rather than dropping that when I replied how absurd such a thing is, Aron dug in. He posted a link from and quoted Brett Palmer, a member of our unofficial RSF team of atheist fact checkers, quoting me saying that it looked like the T. rex tissue came from a butcher shop.

At any rate, the whole funny story is at realsciencefriday.com/first-soft-tissue-radio-show#tastes-like-chicken. We wanted to dock Brett's pay (until we realized that he's a volunteer) when it turned out that in six years, it seems that he's the only person who took Bob woodenly literally about "eating T. rex," that it goes well with "ketchup," tastes a bit more though like spotted owl, etc. even) Aron ended this series by asking, "Now Bob, will you admit that you actually said that? Or do you want to keep pretending that I misrepresented you?" My reply is that extreme intellectual bias and emotional dislike increases confusion and distracts from substantive dialogue.

On AronRa's claim that he answered my dinosaur evolution challenge: [Aron's #3 of 9] Aron wrote, about Part 3 of our radio interview [from 26:37, 27:05]: "Part 3 ended with Bob's assertion that I could either not present any precursors for dinosaurs or could not cite any scientists who agreed with whatever I might suggest. I answered that challenge with a succession of fossil precursors endorsed by an international team of paleontologists."

That radio segment might have gone differently than Aron remembers it. Here's a transcript, and you can hear this for yourself:

• Bob Enyart: Dinosaurs? Where did dinosaurs come from? What did they evolve from? They just appear in the fossil record"¦
  
  AronRa: No they don't.
  
  Bob Enyart: They just appear in the fossil record. Where"¦
  
  AronRa: No they don't.
  
  Bob Enyart: What did dinosaurs evolve from? And tell me, who in the world agrees with you? Where did they come from?
  
  AronRa: They're very. Actual paleontologists agree with me, on where dinosaurs come from.
  
  Bob Enyart: Where?
  
  AronRa: You have archosaurs"¦ ahh, oh God"¦ [hear it; the topic then changes to Aron's denial of dinosaur soft tissue]

Regarding Aron's constant naming of groups of animals that evolved from other groups, clades from clades, etc., the leading evolutionists below say that such a claim itself is unscientific and illogical, because groups are not evolutionary units, in that they do not reproduce. For example, Aron believes (and says repeatedly, although using different words), that dinosaurs evolved into birds. (Actually, like he says that we are apes, he believes that birds are still dinosaurs, but a subset of dinosaurs). So, on his claim that one group evolves into another, i.e., that "birds" come from "dinosaurs", consider:

Peter Forey, longtime evolutionist, Nature contributor, and curator at London's Natural History Museum, in his Neontological Analysis Versus Paleontological Stories, wrote on page 133, "a genus does not evolve from a genus, a family from a family and so on." Why not? "Evolutionary theory does not allow for supraspecific ancestors"¦"

Anti-creationist Joel Cracraft writing with Eldredge nevertheless admitted: ""¦logically, only species can serve as evolutionary units. Taxa of higher rank are merely"¦ aggregates of one or more species, and thus do not exist in the same sense as do species and cannot serve as ancestral or descendant units"¦ Nonetheless, the literature is replete with phylogenetic trees depicting ancestor-descendant relationships among genera and taxa of even higher rank."

Niles Eldridge, world-renowned evolutionist and longtime curator for the American Museum of Natural History, wrote: "The literature on macroevolution is fraught with references to the derivation of one higher taxon from another, as when, for example, mammals and birds are conventionally said to be derived from 'reptiles.'"

Aron's presentation is typical of a widespread behavior from evolutionists. They attempt to present an illusion that they have "answered the challenge" and an illusion that they've identified biological ancestors, by using language that disguises their actual non-answer. As we discussed on air with information expert Walter ReMine, evolutionists:
- claim that non-reproducing entities, like body organs or supergroups, evolved into other organs or species
- claim that a paraphyletic group evolved into some other group.

For example, they'll argue that body parts evolve, as in fins evolved into fingers and scales evolved into teeth. A paraphyletic group of organisms is one defined on something that they lack. So, invertebrates are defined as creatures that LACK a backbone, and voilà , by definition, Darwinists can now tell us that vertebrates evolved from invertebrates (they assume their conclusion, yet provide the assumption as though it were the very evidence that proves the case). Another example, all four-legged creatures that grow from an embryo that develops within a sac that are NOT mammals or birds are reptiles. So, mammals evolved from reptiles. Voilà ! Aron says that dinosaurs evolved from archosaurs. Which dinosaur evolved from which archosaur? When they get specific, their "evidence" is short-lived, because they get burned, like when they claimed that Tiktaalik evolved into four-legged creatures, until the Poland right-left-right-left trackways that predated Tiktaalik by 18 million years ended the reign of yet another missing link. So, classical Darwinists wanted to identify actual ancestors, but spent over 100 years fumbling and contradicting one another. As a result, world-renowned evolutionist Stephen Jay Gould famously said that large morphological gaps in the fossil record are the "trade secret of paleontology", and also, that anyone could disprove his theory of punctuated equilibrium (fast evolution) merely by showing gradual evolution in the fossil record.

 

[BobEnyart]

AronRa vs. Bob Enyart Round Six Post Pt II

On What Evolved from What: Aron wrote, "Many times in our discussion"¦ Bob"¦ insist that whatever fact I present be endorsed by 'leading' experts in whatever field it happens to relate to." I recall asking for this once (in Round 1, Part 3, at 26:40) regarding what evolved into what. For example, Aron says that it "is a fact", yea, a "verifiable fact" that birds evolved from (are a subset of) dinosaurs. But in an unguarded moment, dinosaur expert (and Jack Horner associate Don Lessem wrote:

• "Little dinosaur meat-eaters were probably the ancestors of birds, but we aren't sure which ones."

Again, a group doesn't evolve into a group so these repeated claims violate one of the primary observations of biology, that, like bodily organs, supergroups are not reproducible entities. So, because they cannot reproduce, which is a requirement for any Darwinist mechanism, therefore it is obfuscation to claim that a supergroup evolved into something else, especially when used in a circular fashion such as when a conclusion is presented as the very evidence that supports that conclusion, which illusion is the primary mechanism of AronRa's phylogeny. Yet, that illusion, as we'd say here in the U.S., is "too big to fail." And so, among Darwinists, it persists and has become the dominant paradigm, the one by which Aron "proves" descent as "a demonstrable fact."

The Standard Model of the Universe (as having no center) is Not Based on Observation: [Aron's 4th of 9]: In Part 3 of our radio debate, AronRa defended his Falsehoods video in which he emphatically asserts that: "there is NO CENTER to the universe." [hear it] I explained that such a conclusion is not based on scientific fact but on belief; specifically, on philosophy. Aron you insisted however on defending your statement as though it were not a "belief," but something that you are justified in asserting as true. However, in Scientific American's profile of cosmologist George F. R. Ellis, the Stephen Hawking co-author, Ellis stated:

• "People need to be aware that there is a range of models that could explain the observations... For instance, I can construct you a spherically symmetrical universe with Earth at its center, and you cannot disprove it based on observations... You can only exclude it on philosophical grounds... What I want to bring into the open is the fact that we are using philosophical criteria in choosing our models. A lot of cosmology tries to hide that."

Further, Hawking and Ellis together wrote, in The Large Scale Structure of Space-Time on page 134, that scientists, "are not able to make cosmological models without some mixture of ideology." Even Wikipedia's article on the Cosmological principle says that this a "working assumption", and a "strongly philosophical statement"¦"

Yet to mock what you say the Bible teaches, Aron you emphatically claim that, "there is NO CENTER to the universe!" I differentiated between a lack of evidence for a center, as compared to positive evidence for no center. Aron shows no appreciation for this important distinction. Further, as a way of fending off criticism he wrongly argued that his support for the current BB model was not an affirmation (because what he was defending was the BB's claim that there is no center; so he thought the "no" in "no center" meant that he was not making a positive affirmation). Thus Aron you violate your own test of integrity. Click to hear Ra in his own voice, almost as though he were chastising himself:

• "¦if you believe in truth at all, then you should make sure that the things that you say actually are true [something he hasn't done regarding the universe having no center]. That they are defensibly accurate, and academically correct. And if they are not correct, you should correct them. You wouldn't claim to know anything that you couldn't prove that you knew [like that the universe lacks a center]." hear it

Aron, you should correct yourself on this. Make it clear that the passionate belief [hear it] that you present as fact, that "there is NO CENTER to the universe," is not based on scientific observation, but probably on your emotional opposition to the Bible, an emotion which moves you to state as fact things that you cannot defend as academically correct. You could edit your video to say something like, "Most cosmologists believe that the universe has no center."

Aron wrote that "the redshift quantization [Bob] pleaded for is an illusion":
No Pleading: Far from "pleading," I said that I don't at all know whether or not the universe even has a center. I did go on to say that some have proposed that the mapping of hundreds of thousands of galaxies seems to show a quantized redshift that might suffice as evidence that the universe has a center.

An Illusion: The scientists at the Institute of Physics in Kiecle, Poland did not view the galaxy redshift periodicity they found in their comprehensive review, updated in 2008, of all the major studies as an illusion. This survey is consistent with a Quantized Redshifts review back in 1997 which found that "the redshift distribution has been found to be strongly quantized in the galactocentric frame of reference. The phenomenon is easily seen by eye and apparently cannot be ascribed to statistical artefacts, selection procedures or flawed reduction techniques. "¦ The formal confidence levels associated with these results are extremely high." Aron should be able to admit that this data which, if true, would mean that the universe has a center and that it is centered on our galaxy, is not the product of creationism bias but is the product of mathematical analysis by qualified scientists of the measurements of hundreds of thousands of galaxies. It seems to be primarily the Big Bang evangelists who object to this scientific data, and notice, that because their "no center" universe is a belief not based on science but on philosophy, that they are putting their ideology above apparent scientific data. So, just like soft tissue was not an illusion (much to the dismay of many here on League of Reason), it might be that quantized redshift is here to stay also.

On AronRa's claim that Bob was wrong to say PNAS published an alternative model to the Big Bang: I told Aron that I didn't know if the universe had a center or not, but that the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2003 published a paper proposing an alternative cosmology, of a bounded universe centered on our Milky Way galaxy. Aron dismissed this on air, and has now asked me to respond to this:

• "Bob claimed an alternative model to Big Bang cosmology -which does not exist"¦" -AronRa

Standard BB cosmology claims an unbounded, homogeneous (the same everywhere) universe that therefore lacks a center. The alternative BB model I referenced was published in 2003 in PNAS. Smoller and Temple describing their proposal, wrote that, "by incorporating a shock wave at the leading edge of the expansion of the galaxies"¦ [which would be] bounding a finite total mass", that they thereby present, "a cosmological model"¦ of an asymptotically flat Schwarzschild spacetime." For those unfamiliar with the subject, physics professor John Hartnett explains that Smoller thereby "implies that the earth or at least the Galaxy is in fact close to the physical center of the Universe." As Smoller and Temple themselves admit, in their paper, "the Copernican Principle is violated in the sense that the earth then has a special position relative to the shock wave.

• "Bob claimed an alternative model to Big Bang cosmology -which does not exist, and he said it was concordant with the creationists' model of the universe -which also does not exist." -AronRa

See the two creation models I briefly describe and link to at RealScienceFriday.com/starlight-and-time#time-dilation proposed by two physicists, one a professor in Australia was has received a prestigious IEEE award, and the other an alumnus of Sandia National Labs where he received awards, including an Award for Excellence for contributions to light ion-fusion target theory.

Aron, again, as with soft tissue, nautiloids, 14C everywhere, you seem to be the one in denial. I don't promote these young-earth models, but as I said on air, they are consistent with that 2003 PNAS paper including in that they propose a bounded universe centered on our solar system. Yet instead of engaging on the substance you and other atheists mock me and my creationist associates.

On Aron repeatedly referencing Lawrence Krauss: Aron wrote, "I defended myself against Bob's accusation of having misrepresented Laurence [sic] Krauss by showing where Krauss also refuted Bob's claim of a geocentric universe."

Aron, not only did I never claim (listen to the beginning of Part 3 of our radio debate) that we have a geocentric universe (I don't know if we do), I specifically and repeatedly told you that I was NOT claiming such a thing, and that I don't know, one way or another. However, if there is actually a center (and I did say there is some evidence that might indicate a center), that this would falsify your cosmology and the standard BB model, which already is challenged by many leading secular scientists and by many astronomical observations. It is your falsehood videos that are emphatic on this matter to a point beyond what the science justifies.

Aron, your repeated mentions of Krauss led us to set up an interview with him, which was especially enjoyable. Unfortunately, while interviewees are attracted by the great audience reach of the 50,000-watts of our "blowtorch" radio station, still, I had to agree to interview him on his latest book, A Universe from Nothing. So, while your geocentric universe concern is addressed above, our RSF Krauss interview was very worthwhile, including, for example:
- Krauss does not side with you and the Soft Tissue Deniers but admitted that his friend Jack Horner has excavated a T. rex that still had blood vessels in its thigh bone.
- Krauss characterized the hundreds of scientists at respected institutions who have publicly announced that they doubt the Big Bang, as "400 nuts."
- Krauss did not have a good defense of my challenge to chemical evolution from Supernovas when I cited the unexpected different isotopes of oxygen and nitrogen in the Earth and the Sun, and that 90% of Earth's radioactivity is concentrated in less than 1% of its mass, in the continental crust (which observation Krauss agreed to). My argument was that if our solar system condensed from a post-Supernova nebulae (gas and dust cloud), then the Earth and Sun should have the same isotopes (versions of oxygen and nitrogen). Similarly, if our uranium and thorium came from stardust, we should expect to find it more evenly spread out through the earth than we do, and especially, we should find it in greater abundance in the ocean floor. While Krauss might be able to come up with a workable explanation, he had none immediately available (other than to admit my point, that the radioactivity is concentrated around granite). Incidentally, while the chemical evolution theory (from stardust) requires extreme secondary mechanisms (rescue devices), Dr. Walt Brown's Origin of Earth's Radioactivity is a great fit to the observed data.
- Krauss responded to my argument that Carbon 14, which cannot last a million years, is everywhere it's not supposed to be (like in petrified wood, oil, marble, dinosaur fossils, diamonds, etc., as described at RealScienceFriday.com/Carbon-14), by saying, "Don't talk to me about anomalies." That's a shocking sentiment coming from an allegedly unbiased scientist. It is exactly the "anomalies" that led Christian young-earth creationist Johann Kepler to discover the laws of planetary motion and free the world from millennia of the science-stagnating geocentrism that came not from Scripture but from commitment to the pagans Plato, Aristotle, and Ptolemy.

On Mitochondrial Eve, AronRa, and Y-chromosomal Adam: [Aron's 5th of 9]: Aron wrote: "Y-Chromosome Adam evidently lived 140,000 years ago, and"¦ a genetic bottleneck in the human lineage was traced to 74,000 years ago, not the 4,000 years that Bob claimed for both of these."

Women First: Taking her namesake from Genesis 3:20, genetic researchers have named the one woman from whom all humans have descended, "Mitochondrial Eve" and theoretically, they can date her based on today's mitochondrial DNA variation among humans (I know, I know, "What's a human?") and extrapolating backward using current mutation rates. Of course, as with soft tissue in dinosaurs, along with 14C (also in diamonds) evolutionists can hardly bear to even look at evidence that calls into question their old-earth scenario. (For example, for this summer's Singapore conference hosted by the American Geophysical Union in Singapore, five leading laboratories found ample modern carbon in the 10 dinosaurs that they dated with AMS. Lord willing, I'll air an interview with the presenter by October.) So, one technique used to suppress the young age for mtEve is to begin not with human DNA, but with an illusion, with theoretical, non-existent, composite human-chimp mtDNA.

Geneticists have openly admitted that they included chimpanzee DNA in some of their analyses, including to get what they viewed in one study as a reasonably old date of 200,000 years ago (which is still surprisingly recent from their perspective, but old enough not to strain Darwinism too much). But then as widely reported including by Science magazine, when they dropped the chimp data and used only actual human mutation rates, that process determined that Eve lived only six thousand years ago! (See also RSF's Gorillas, Chimps, Baboons, Ann Gibbons.) In Ann Gibbon's Science article, "Calibrating the Mitochondrial Clock," rather than again using circular reasoning by assuming their conclusion (that humans evolved from ape-like creatures), they performed their calculations calculating with actual measured mutation rates on human DNA. This peer-reviewed report stated that if these rates have been constant, "mitochondrial Eve"¦ would be a mere 6000 years old." (See also the journal Nature and "A shrinking date for Eve" on creation.com and Walt Brown's assessment.) Expectedly though, evolutionists have found a way to reject their own unbiased finding (the conclusion contrary to their self-interest) by returning to their original method of using circular reasoning, as reported in the American Journal of Human Genetics, "calibrating against recent evidence for the divergence time of humans and chimpanzees," to reset their mitochondrial clock back to 200,000 years. Finally, I interviewed a molecular geneticist (Ph.D from Ohio State University) and we discussed that many such age chronometers typically yield a maximum age.

Creationist Example of Maximum Possible Age: Wikipedia says that manganese nodule "growth is one of the slowest of all geological phenomena, in the order of a centimeter over several million years." And a Texas A&M Marine Sciences technical slide presentation says, "They grow very slowly (mm/million years) and can be tens of millions of years old." Yet according to a World Almanac documentary, they have formed around beer cans said marine geologist Dr. John Yates in the 1997 video Universe Beneath the Sea: The Next Frontier. So, the creationist reasons: that particular nodule can be at most only a few decades old (dated by the beer can), and further, manganese can evidently precipitate more rapidly than claimed, not unlike the wildly rapid formation of many geological features on Surtsey Island).

Evolutionist Example of Maximum Possible Age: Skull 1470 was discovered by Richard Leakey, and according to the journal Nature, the rocks around it were dated to 220 Mya by Cambridge University and University of London. For the evolutionary timeframe, that doesn't work, since such a "human like" skull would have to be far more recent. So the unbiased scientists discarded the parts of the rocks that gave them older dates and re-dated the strata to 2.6 mya. That's much closer to what's needed to support the theory and made people happier, but not Donald Johanson. In his book Lucy I read this (p. 240): "Nearly everyone but [Leakey] w[as] convinced that the"¦ skull 1470 date would have to be corrected." Corrected? What? Did Johanson find an error in the radiometric dating methodology? No. All the scientific dating corroborated the older dates, but those dates conflicted with a comfortable hominid timeframe. The paleontology community agreed with Johanson and wanted to throw out the radiometric dating and go with their theory (just like with mtEve and Y-chromosomal Adam, forcing the data to fit the theory). For Johanson (p. 171) quoted Leakey, "Either we toss out this skull, or we toss out our theories on early man." So, because the hominid story is "too big to fail," guess what lost, the potassium argon, or the theory? Say goodbye to the argon. It didn't matter that independent labs using different techniques agreed on an "accurate" and "secure" date. That data was out and the theory was preserved. For as the political pressure began to build over the next few years, attention was being given to pig evolution in Kenya, for the evolutionists were confident that they had accurately dated the pigs. So to better calibrate their results, they didn't use more accurate half-life measurements, instead, they used pig evolution. And voilà . The Skull was younger still. (Aron, did I misrepresent the dinosaur soft tissue? If I didn't, consider that I'm not misrepresenting this example; I just don't have the time to document all this right now but as I recall it's all in Nature.) It went from 220 million years, to 2.9 million, to settle down into the pages of Wikipedia and TalkOrigins at 1.9 mya. So, 1470 was finally dated, not by uranium fission track dating, nor by rubidium decay, nor by potassium/argon. But by the pigs. As Johanson put it, for Leakey to accept a younger date "on the basis of some pig fossils would be shockingly difficult." There's only one part of all this that is logically valid, of course: that the youngest date typically provides a maximum age and therefore trumps older dates.

Now the Men: Geneticists call him Y-chromosomal Adam, although he should be called, Y-chromosomal Noah. According to PNAS and as reported by ABC News from the director of the Human Genetics Program at New York University School of Medicine, "Jews and Arabs are all really children of Abraham "¦ And all have preserved their Middle Eastern genetic roots over 4,000 years," and, also as expected from biblical history, Jewish priests share a genetic marker, according to a science correspondence item published in Nature titled, Y Chromosomes of Jewish Priests, by scientists from the University of Arizona, Haifa Technical Institute, and University College of London, who wrote: "These Y-chromosome haplotype differences confirm a distinct paternal genealogy for Jewish priests," many of whom, according to Dr. Jonathan Safarti, "have the name Cohen, [which is] the Hebrew for priest, or variants like Cohn, Kohn, Cowen, Kogan, Kagan, etc. "¦ [And] it is possible to identify the Levites, because they have names such as Levy, Levine, Levinson, Levental..."

But back up to the finding in the 1970s of evolutionist Maynard Smith and others that the human population must have passed through a period of drastically reduced size prior to the more recent rapid population increase. About this, the journal Nature published a letter, Noah's Haemoglobin, from Dr. Richard N. Harkins and others from the Oregon Health and Science University describing the:

• "reduction in the human population to eight individuals; Noah, his wife, their three sons, Shem, Ham, and Japeth, and the sons' wives. It seems entirely plausible that this small population could be homogenous for haemoglobin genes. Thus the book of Genesis documents a series of human population changes which are consistent with changes required from consideration of amino-acid sequences alone."

Then in 1995 as reported in Science, a study of 729 base pairs of 38 men sampled from around the world surprisingly showed ZERO difference from mutations. Of course evolutionists can re-calibrate Eve based on chimp data, and let pigs trump radiometric dating, ignore 14C in diamonds and dinosaur bones worldwide, and even Lawrence Krauss just told me that finding blood vessels in a T. rex is "perfectly consistent" with things that are 65 million years old. Yes, perfectly. So, it's not surprising that evolutionists can find a way to say that near identical male Y chromosomes worldwide show evidence of have diverged from a common ancestor 74,000, or 270,000 years ago (what's the difference really, when there's a theory to prop up).

As Dr. Walt Brown summarizes all this, "How likely is it that other men lived a few thousand years ago but left no continuous male descendants, and other women lived 6,000 years ago but left no continuous female descendants, and we end up today with a world population of almost 7 billion people?" Extraordinarily unlikely. Most astronomers uneasily came to admit that the universe had a beginning (but still they reject Genesis by holding to an increasingly untenable Big Bang theory). Likewise, evolutionists are acknowledging much of what the biblical creation model predicts about the human genome, while not realizing that the historic events recorded in Genesis help wonderfully to account for their data. For Jesus said that Adam and Eve were made "at the beginning of creation" (that is, not billions of years after a big bang) and that "Eve... was the mother of all."

On Aron's Refusal To Correct His Claim that Genetics Doubly Confirm Darwin's Tree: [Aron's 6th of 9]: Just like Aron wants the reader to believe that everything I've reported on dinosaur tissue has been unconfirmed or refuted, and that there are not a million nautiloid fossils in limestone at the base of the Grand Canyon, and that my reports of 14C everywhere it shouldn't be show only creationist confusion, likewise, Aron hopes to discredit all the genetic science in my previous post from dozens of scientists saying that genetic trees of descent contradict both themselves and Darwin's traditional tree, by claiming that I don't understand the difference between genes and an entire genome, and he's still promoting the canard comparing human DNA "to the chimpanzee genome" that "if we only include genes, the ratio is roughly close to 99%." And why would we do that, if not to provide an illusion? For humans and apes being about 99% similar is "too big to fail."

Aron, you omitted text from my brief quote so that you could then tutor me on the difference between genes and an entire genome. If you were correct, and I don't understand the difference, then of course, the reader will assume my points about sponges, chimps, and people were invalid. On the other hand, if I do understand the difference, and my observations are valid, than you are obscuring the alternative assessment of the data. You schooled me: "You should understand that sharing 70% of a gene set does not mean the same thing as having a 70% identical codon sequence..." You give that lesson in response to what you quoted from me, but your two ellipses left out the material that showed that I was not conflating genes with genomes. (We creationists are the ones who LOVE the non-coding regions; we'd never overlook all four million of them !

Readers might notice a difference in content between my posts and Aron's, which is characteristic of the wider creation/evolution debate. Here's what I don't do that Aron does: he repeatedly posts the conclusions of people on his side of the debate, saying that they agree that their position is correct! If you removed that kind of content from Aron's posts and videos, they would virtually disappear. For example, I quote the geneticists in New Scientist, hostile witnesses to a creationist, saying that evolutionary lineages based on genetics significantly contradict both themselves AND the traditional trees based on fossils and anatomy. You offer to me and the readers in Round Five the rebuttal that I should have read the "editorial" in that issue, which assures everyone that all is well in the Darwinian camp; and that evolutionist Metzinger assures us that "8% of human DNA is actually old virus DNA", yet she's the same evolutionist you quoted as saying that other than the "3%" that codes for protein, the "rest of our genome is called non-coding or junk DNA. Despite the fact that there is so much junk"¦" You quoted that in 2012, and Carrie wrote it in 2011, yet such claims, that most of our DNA is junk, are a decade out of date. The latest study, by 440 researchers working in 32 laboratories around the world (affirming what creationists have been saying for decades), published in Nature that so far, they've been able to identify function for 80 percent of the human genome! In contrast to your continuous citing of the opinions and conclusions of those you agree with, regardless of what you think of my position, even many evolutionists should be able to acknowledge that in this debate, I have presented mostly evidence, like:
- Grand Canyon nautiloids
- Soft-tissue in dinosaurs
- A hundred million years of missing deposition and erosion in the Grand Canyon between smooth and regular strata boundaries.
- Short-lived 14C in gas, dinosaurs, diamonds, etc. (with you dismissal by quoting your friend Claire1 claiming, completely in error, that all the modern carbon is a "margin of error", all of which is decades out of date).

When debating, when I quote conclusions to make my point, it is not virtually always from people on my side, like Aron and the evolutionists do; but it is almost always from hostile witnesses, like from:
- Leading Big Bang cosmologists who admit that their model of a universe without a center is not based on scientific observations but on ideology
- The discoverer of the whale "ancestor" Rodhecetus, Dr. Philip Gingerich, concluding that he severely misrepresented (in all the biggest whale-like features) what the creature was really like, learned when the rest of its skeleton was found (see below)
- The many evolutionary geneticists I offered who openly argue that trees based on genetics frequently and significantly contradict the traditional Darwinian lineages built from fossils and anatomy and that they significantly contradict one another (i.e., the mutually exclusive proposed histories that arise from trees based on RNA, and other trees based on protein sequences, and yet other trees based on DNA). Aron, in your final (Ira Flatow) post, you say that your 10th Foundational Falsehood, "explained the very point [proteins, DNA, etc., contradictory trees] you just mentioned. It's right there in the beginning, so how did you miss it?" Perhaps Aron, because your video was done years before these hard-hitting studies were published, and because you spoke in code, with probably 99% of your viewers having no idea that you had just told them to expect extreme contradiction in the phylogeny data as compared to traditional Darwinian trees.

I still call on Aron to correct his 10th Foundational Falsehood video in which he wrongly says that: "the phylogenetic tree of life is plainly evident from the bottom up to any objective observer who dares compare the anatomy of different sets of collective life forms. But it can be just as objectively doubly confirmed from the top down when re-examined genetically." hear it

On Millions Mammoth Remains in the Arctic, on Frozen Mammoths, and Tropical Seeds: [Aron's 7th of 9]: Aron brought up this topic on air as an example to my audience of how they can't trust what creationists say. He rejected my defense that the remains of millions of mammoths are known in the northern latitudes, saying, "there were 51 mammoths, not millions." He said that if we were having a written debate, we could actually document the evidence, so that the readers would know who was reliable. So, now that we are in that debate, it would have been nice of Aron to acknowledge that he was wrong about the number of mammoths. But instead, he dropped that error of his, and pressed these other disagreements:

• I challenged Bob to show that there were [n]ever any mammoths found frozen with tropical flora anywhere near them. "¦ Bob also said mammoths could not possibly survive in the environments where millions of them are known to have lived and I refuted his claims about those conditions too."

Sigmund Freud would have enjoyed this segment of our radio debate (Part 5, just fast-forward to 15:30). Aron is bothered that he was mislead "since I was a little kid"¦" So here's how it actually went:

Aron: "There were 51 mammoths." Bob: "There are millions."

• Aron: "I found that there were 51 mammoths, not millions. And that none of them, not one, was found with tropical flora in their mouths"¦ so when you look into the data, if this were a written discussion"¦"
  
  BE: "I've got the data. The tonnage of mammoth tusks, that were sold on the worldwide market, indicate that there were millions of mammoths that were buried in Siberia, and at the Arctic Circle, and north of the Arctic Circle. And there were mammoths that had the seeds of tropical plants, the seeds, in their digestive track."
  
  Aron: Wrong.
  
  Enyart: We'll, I could give you the data.
  
  Aron: I challenge you.
  
  Enyart: Do you thing I'm wrong"¦
  
  Aron: Yeah I do.
  
  Enyart: "¦about [there being] over a million mammoths buried.
  
  Aron: Yeah. Yeah, I definitely do. And it's a formal challenge.
  
  Enyart: How about a $500 bet to your favorite charity, that the documentation shows that over a million mammoths have been buried?
  
  Aron: With tropical flora in their mouths?
  
  Enyart: No, no. There was just one like that.

So here is the documentation I promised:

New York Times: Trade in mammoth ivory"¦ flourishes, "The Siberian permafrost blankets millions of square kilometers"¦ Hidden in one of the upper layers of this mass, corresponding to the Pleistocene epoch, are the remains of an estimated 150 million mammoths. Some are frozen whole, as if in suspended animation, others in bits and pieces of bone, tusk, tissue and wool." Aron, this information had been in the Mammoth article on Wikipedia until I linked to it for our radio program, and then within 24 hours, one of our atheist RSF fans removed it. That's not a unique phenomenon.

Smithsonian publication: Frozen Mammoths from Siberia Bring the Ice Ages to Vivid Life, "Nikolai Vereshchagin, Chairman of the Russian Academy of Science's Committee for the Study of Mammoths, estimated that more than half a million tons of mammoth tusks were buried along a 600-mile stretch of the Arctic coast. Because the typical tusk weighs 100 pounds, this implies that about 5 million mammoths lived in this small region." (quoted by Walt Brown, p. 68)

Creationists are excited about this data. But the hard scientific data that atheists prefer to ignore (just Google this stuff) includes millions of mammoths buried in permafrost, 14C everywhere, Grand Canyon nautiloids, and dinosaur soft tissue!

Dr. Walt Brown's map along with his Table 8 presents the locations and documentation for each of the 58 sites shown where frozen mammoth and rhinoceros remains have been discovered.

Just like 14C in diamonds, and tissue in dinosaurs, if you want to find buried mammoths in permafrost all you have to do is just go look.

Aron: No tropical plants near mammoths in Arctic. Bob: Yes there were.

In fact, there's a lot of tropical flora buried near the mammoths in the Arctic.

With earthquake expert and graduate of the U.S. Naval Nuclear Power program, Kevin Lea, we recently aired realsciencefriday.com/mammoths. The following two references were part of our show prep, courtesy of Dr. Walt Brown:

Geophysical Research Letters: "[Canada's Ellesmere Island, well inside the Arctic Circle, was] warm enough throughout the year to sustain palm trees and other tropical flora and fauna." Daniel B. Kirk-Davidoff et al., "On the Feedback of Stratospheric Clouds on Polar Climate", Vol. 29, 15 June 2002, p. 51.

Natural History: "On eastern Axel Heiberg Island [in the Arctic Circle in Canada], ... fossil forests are found. ... just 680 miles from the North Pole. The stumps of ancient trees are still rooted in the soil and leaf litter where they once grew. ... many trees reaching more than a hundred feet in height." Jane E. Francis, "Arctic Eden,", Vol. 100, January 1991, pp. 57-58.

The strange loess hills that Siberian mammoths are often found in contain, "two and a half times the amount of carbon that's in all the world's tropical forests."

And in Alaska, where today the nearest forests are hundreds of miles away:

• "Though the ground is frozen for 1,900 feet down from the surface at Prudhoe Bay, everywhere the oil companies drilled around this area they discovered an ancient tropical forest. It was in frozen state, not in petrified state. It is between 1,100 and 1,700 feet down. There are palm trees, pine trees, and tropical foliage in great profusion. In fact, they found them lapped all over each other, just as though they had fallen in that position." -Lindsey Williams, The Energy Non-Crisis, Worth Publishing Co., 1980, p. 54, quoted by Walt Brown!

The most well-studied frozen mammoth is Berezovka, with its mouth and tongue well preserved, and according to Nature, its "mouth was filled with grass, which had been cropped, but not chewed and swallowed." And the grass was frozen so quickly that, "it still had the imprint of the animals molars," wrote Lister and Bahn in Mammoths on page 46. However, its mouth Its stomach contained three seeds from plants that produce delicate, yellow buttercups. Fragments of other flowers were in its stomach. No large flowers were in its mouth.

As summarized by Dr. Brown, "Its stomach contained three seeds from plants that produce delicate, yellow buttercups. Fragments of other flowers were in its stomach." Aron denied that these creatures would have frozen quickly, and he offers that one particular mammoth was buried while eating a tulip from Denmark. However unless frozen rapidly, vegetation would digest in an animal's stomach and intestines. And in all, "Twenty-four pounds of undigested vegetation were removed from Berezovka and analyzed by Russian scientist V. N. Sukachev. He identified more than 40 different species of plants: herbs, grasses, mosses, shrubs, and tree leaves. Many no longer grow that far north; others grow both in Siberia and as far south as Mexico."

Aron says that such mammoths were eventually buried when they fell into a hole, broke a leg, and froze to death in the cold. But, millions of them? In the Arctic? Aron denied that there were millions of mammoths in the Arctic, that any tropical flora were found near mammoths, and he denied my point that all those giant creatures would have a problem finding sufficient food and liquid water, needing more than 100 gallons a day each. Consider that a recent 150-pound, 7-foot tusk was found 110 miles north of the Arctic Circle where, today, for five months of the year the high temperature is lower than freezing, and for six months of the year the low is less than 0 degrees F. But during the ice age at those latitudes almost all year long it would have been a lot colder! These all didn't wander into pits; they died catastrophically.

On MSds: [Aron's 8th of 9]: Aron says that evolutionists have identified "the ancestry of turtles"¦ flowering plants, backbones, bats, fish"¦ trees"¦ and"¦ turtles."

For an example of what AronRa considers to be evidence, look back up at his Round 5 post and search for: flowering plants. He presents quotes that he perceives as strong evidence that evolutionists *know* what creature it was that fish evolved from. And that they *know* what organism it was that flowering plants evolved from. We can repeat this same exercise with any evolutionist's claims about the ancestry of bats, backbones, trees, and turtles. I'll stand on my argument earlier in this post regarding Aron's item #3 of 9 above, that evolutionists have developed a system of illusions to obscure the truth that they have not in any kind of rigorous scientific way established evolutionary lineages for such creatures.

On MSds: [Aron's 9th of 9]: Aron wrote, "In the 7th and final segment of our discussion, Bob accused me of not knowing why Rhodocetus and Pakicetus were considered related to whales. He said this even after I explained about the diagnostic traits in each of their skulls. Bob accused paleontologist, Phillip Gingrich of 'recanting' this fossil,which he did not, and of rendering this animal as a fish,which he did not."

Aron makes his assertion. I'll give you actual quotes from Dr. Philip Gingerich. This discoverer of Rodhocetus now admits, "I speculated that it might have had a fluke [whale-like tail], I now doubt that Rodhocetus would have had a fluked tail." And regarding the imaginative whale-like flippers he had included in his reconstruction of the partial fossil, Gingerich also admitted: "Since then we have found the forelimbs, the hands, and the front arms of Rodhocetus, and we understand that it doesn't have the kind of arms that can spread out like flippers on a whale."

I've seen Dr. Gingerich say these things and I've transcribed them myself. You could see him say these things too Aron if you subscribed to more reliable science video and interview services and science journals, like the resources that are available in our young-earth creation circles. But in the meantime, you can find out more at realsciencefriday.com/Rodhocetus-whale-of-a-tail.

Finally, AronRa's Phylogeny Challenge: Aron's Phylogeny Challenge asks creationists to identify dozens of created kinds as they diversified on the earth. As a creationist, I'll quote below the evolutionists who oppose us to give a more objective assessment of our attempt to do this. First realize however that Aron's phylogeny challenge is an Evolution of the Gaps argument. If creationists can't answer all our questions about life, then obviously, evolution did it.

The creation movement has a careful effort underway, the discipline of baraminology, to lay the groundwork to answer many such questions. At realsciencefriday.com/creation-orchard-vs-evolution-tree, I interviewed Dr. Roger Sanders of Bryan College about baraminology, which is a furtherance of Adam's first task (to name the animals), into a classification of living things within the framework of the created kinds as described in Genesis.

The Assessment of Our Enemies: Eugenie Scott's anti-creationist National Center for Science Education begrudgingly states, in an article by Alan Gishlick, that researchers, such as Dr. Sanders, "practice a form of systematics, called 'baraminology', and for creationist science it is surprisingly rigorous and internally consistent." Gishlick, Scott, and Ra disagree with the motivation and findings of this work (being done by various scientists including at Bryan College (founded after the Scopes Monkey Trial) and separately, at Answers in Genesis by geneticist Dr. Prudom and others). But hopefully, Aron can acknowledge that there are people who disagree with his worldview but who, nonetheless, can make careful scientific observations and draw conclusions consistent with the data. For my part, I'm happy to accept Gishlick's compliment on behalf of creationists. Just as evolutionists are beginning to turn away from their longtime Junk DNA claims and in increasing numbers, begrudgingly side with the view, long held by creationists, that non-coding regions are not junk, so too, related to baraminology, is the study of the dispersion of animals around the world, called biogeography, where evolutionists are beginning to emphasize aspects of the creation model, regarding the transport of countless animals across ocean currents on floating log mats.

An Example of the Creationist Perspective Predicting a Genetic Observation: I asked Dr. Sanders if there is evidence of a genetic bottleneck among land animals. I predict that such a pattern will become increasingly evident over time. Why? Because a global flood destroyed almost all land animals and birds only thousands of years ago. So I asked if marine animals have been shown to have greater genetic diversity than bird and land animals. Dr. Sanders recalled that a study done on land and marine turtles showed greater genetic diversity among sea turtles. This is expected by creationists. However, evolutionists believe that sea turtles evolved from land-dwelling creatures, so if evolution were true, genetically we would expect to see greater genetic diversity among land-dwelling turtles, the opposite of what apparently is reality. This reminded me of one of our recurring themes (which both evolutionist Stephen Jay Gould and creationist Dr. Carl Werner agree with), that the fossil records documents stasis rather than evolution, regarding turtle fossils. Bob Strauss, on turtle evolution, wrote: "the basic turtle body plan arose very early in the history of life (during the late Triassic period), and has persisted pretty much unchanged down to the present day... Paleontologists still haven't identified the exact family of prehistoric reptiles that spawned modern turtles and tortoises, but they do know one thing: it wasn't the placodonts."

Aron, baraminology is the creationist effort to answer our own phylogeny challenge of sorts, as Kepler is paraphrased, said, to glorify God by thinking His thoughts after Him.

My Assessment: It's sad to assess the life's work of studied evolutionists including Aron. He is like a renowned Star Wars trivia buff, able to distinguish between a juvenile Wookiee and a mature Ewok, and explain from geology what froze the oceans on Hoth and how Tatooine was covered by dessert. But degreed evolutionists are like science fiction fanatics who gradually convince themselves that it's all real (not unlike the unbelievers who started a fiction to mock Christians only to realize that today, quite a few atheists actually do believe in the Flying Spaghetti Monster). One day, Dawkins will join Dobzhansky and Darwin in their current realization that it was all wrong. Yet for him, and PZ, and AronRa, there is still hope. And I pray for them.

That's 9 of Aron's 9 challenges plus his phylogeny question. This debate has raised many other great science questions that we will address overtime by updating the record at realsciencefriday.com/aronra. So, thanks again Aron and League of Reason!

And remember the nautiloids!

In Christ,

-Bob Enyart
Real Science Friday

 

[australopithecus]

As both parties have posted their closing statements this debate is ended.

The disscussion of the debate will continue here: http://www.leagueofreason.org.uk/viewtopic.php?f=16&t=9321&p=143314#p143314