PragerU viser Stephen Meyer i ny video: Evolution - bacteria til Beethoven

Andrew McRiarmid
Evolution News
man, 21 okt 2019 16:53 UTC

Darwins teori om evolution ved naturlig udvælgelse har i det sidste århundrede med nogle ændringer af den videnskabelige verden været anset for ungribelig.. Så meget, at evolutionsbiolog Richard Dawkins berømt har udtalt, at 'Hvis du møder nogen, der hævder ikke at tro på evolution, er den person uvidende, dum eller sindssyg.' Men er det rigtigt?

I en ny PragerU-video besvarer Stephen Meyer dette spørgsmål ved at præsentere to stærke grunde til at tvivle på den evolutionære beretning om livets oprindelse - den kambriske eksplosion og DNA-gåden. Den animerede video er et godt sammendrag af Meyers behandling af disse to problemer i bogform. Og på under 6 minutter er videoen en god samtalestarter!

Se det nedenfor, og sørg for at dele det med dine venner og familie. Bemærk også, at der findes en studievejledning samt en udskrift af Meyers kommentar. Du kan endda tage en quiz med fem spørgsmål efter at have set den for at sikre, at du var opmærksom. God fornøjelse!

Kommentar: Delvist oversat af Sott.net fra PragerU features Stephen Meyer in new video: Evolution - bacteria to Beethoven

For mere om, hvorfor læren om evolution er død, se SOTT's fortløbende serie af Mandatory Intellectomy:

• The Theory of Evolution is Anti-Science
• The Probability of Evolution
• Evolution - A Modern Fairy Tale
• Evolution's Struggle with Complexity and New Genes
• Darwinism, Creationism... How About Neither?

Teksten fra transskribtionen:

Evolution.

You learned about it in high school.

It goes like this: Life started out with very simple forms and then gradually, over hundreds of millions of years, morphed into all the forms we see today. Bacteria to Beethoven. Not a straight line, of course...but that's roughly how it went.

This was the theory proposed by Charles Darwin in 1859, and, with some modification, it has been embraced as unassailable by the science community over the last century. As evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins says, "If you meet somebody who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is either ignorant, stupid or insane."

But is that right? Are there no scientific reasons to doubt the evolutionary account of life's origins?

In November 2016, I attended a conference in London convened by some of the world's leading evolutionary biologists. The purpose: to address growing doubts about the modern version of Darwin's theory.

Let's look at just two scientific reasons to doubt this theory.

First, the Cambrian Explosion. A weird and wonderful thing happened 530 million years ago: A whole bunch of major groups of animals — what scientists call the "phyla" — appeared abruptly within a geologically short window of time — about ten million years.

These novel animal forms — exhibiting proto-types of most animal body designs we see today — emerged in the fossil record without evidence of earlier ancestors.

Did you catch that? A huge number of diverse animals appeared, with no discernible antecedents.

So where did they come from?

This question really bothered Darwin. And he acknowledged that he could give it "no satisfactory answer." Nor can scientists today.

The renowned biologist Eugene Koonin, of the National Center for Biotechnology Information, describes the abrupt appearance of the Cambrian animals and other organisms such as dinosaurs, birds, flowering plants and mammals as a pattern of "biological Big Bangs."

So what caused all these new forms of life to arise? That question leads to a second big doubt: the DNA enigma.

In the 1950s, James Watson and Francis Crick made a startling discovery: The DNA molecule stores information as a four-character digital code. Strings of precisely sequenced chemicals inside the DNA helix store the instructions — the information — for building the crucial proteins that cells need to survive. Unless the chemical "letters" in the DNA text are sequenced properly, a protein molecule will not form. No proteins; no cells. No cells; no living organisms.

Bill Gates has said, "DNA is like a software program." Let's think about that for a second. For computers to run faster and perform more functions, they require new code. Well, the same is true for life: To build new forms of life, the evolutionary process would need to produce new genetic information — new code.

But this raises questions about the creative power of natural selection and mutation. Natural selection is a simple sorting process. Species keep favorable mutations that allow them to survive but eliminate bad mutations that cause their members to die out. No one doubts that natural selection is a real process and that it produces minor variations, but many biologists now doubt that it produces major innovations in biological form.

To see why, think again about software. What happens if you introduce a few random changes into computer code? You'll likely mess it up, right? Though it might still work — if you don't make too many changes. But if you make enough random changes, your program will stop functioning altogether. You certainly can't keep doing this and expect some cool, new program to pop out. There's a mathematical reason for this. In all codes and languages, there are vastly more ways of arranging characters that will generate gibberish than there are arrangements that will generate meaningful sequences.

And this applies to DNA.

Remember, natural selection only "selects" sequences that random mutations generate. Yet experiments have established that DNA sequences capable of making stable proteins are extremely rare — and, thus, really hard to stumble on randomly.

How rare? While working at Cambridge University, molecular biologist Douglas Axe showed that, for every DNA sequence that generates a relatively short functional protein, there are 10 to the 77th power nonfunctional sequences.

Now consider that there are only 10 to the 65th power atoms in our galaxy. So finding a new DNA sequence capable of building a functional protein is like searching blindfolded for a single marked atom among a trillion Milky Way galaxies. Talk about a needle in a haystack!

As I show in my book Darwin's Doubt, even 4 billion years of life's history is not enough time to overcome a search problem this big.

So, two serious doubts about modern Darwinian theory: The Cambrian Explosion — the sudden appearance of new animals, which evolutionary theory has failed to explain; and the DNA enigma — the implausibility of random mutations producing the information needed to build new forms of animal life.

Scientists who know about these problems are not "ignorant, stupid, or insane;" they are just appropriately skeptical.

I'm Stephen Meyer, senior fellow at the Discovery Institute, for Prager University.

I undervisningssystemet i Danmark er Darwin stadig i høj kurs, som man kan se af Naturvidenskabes ABC hvor erkendelse 5 er at "alt liv har udviklet sig gennem evolution". Her fremhæver man først Darwin og dernæst nævnes det at der har været gentagende hændelser i jordens historier med masseudryddelser. Læser man imidlertid Darwin oprindelige værk fra 1959, The Origins of Species er det helt tydeligt at Darwin helt forkaster denne tankegang. "

"The old notion of all the inhabitants of the Earth having been swept away by catastrophes at successive periods is very generally given up,"

Derimod har han tillid til at alt udvikler sig gravist:

"We have seen in the last chapter that the species of a group sometimes falsely appear to have come in abruptly; and I have attempted to give an explanation of this fact, which if true would have been fatal to my views. But such cases are certainly exceptional; the general rule being a gradual increase in number, till the group reaches its maximum, and then, sooner or later, it gradually decreases."

I kapitle "14 Recapitulation and Concusions", skriver han;, hvilket man åbenbart i 2020 ikke ser nogen udfordringer i:

"That many and grave objections may be advanced against the theory of descent with modification through natural selection, I do not deny. I have endeavoured to give to them their full force. Nothing at first can appear more difficult to believe than that the more complex organs and instincts should have been perfected, not by means superior to, though analogous with, human reason, but by the accumulation of innumerable slight variations, each good for the individual possessor. Nevertheless, this difficulty, though appearing to our imagination insuperably great, cannot be considered real if we admit the following propositions, namely, - that gradations in the perfection of any organ or instinct, which we may consider, either do now exist or could have existed, each good of its kind, - that all organs and instincts are, in ever so slight a degree, variable, - and, lastly, that there is a struggle for existence leading to the preservation of each profitable deviation of structure or instinct. The truth of these propositions cannot, I think, be disputed."

Selv om man i Naturvidenskabes ABC nævner masseudryddelser, er den herre der forslog dem ikke omtalt i listen af nævneværdige videnskabsfolk, så lad os citere artiklen "Darwin's theory of gradual evolution not supported by geological history, scientist concludes" hvor man kan læse:

"Matthew discovered and clearly stated the idea of natural selection, applied it to the origin of species, and placed it in the context of a geologic record marked by catastrophic mass extinctions followed by relatively rapid adaptations," says Rampino, whose research on catastrophic events includes studies on volcano eruptions and asteroid impacts. "In light of the recent acceptance of the importance of catastrophic mass extinctions in the history of life, it may be time to reconsider the evolutionary views of Patrick Matthew as much more in line with present ideas regarding biological evolution than the Darwin view."

Matthew (1790-1874), Rampino notes, published a statement of the law of natural selection in a little-read Appendix to his 1831 book Naval Timber and Arboriculture. Even though both Darwin and his colleague Alfred Russel Wallace acknowledged that Matthew was the first to put forth the theory of natural selection, historians have attributed the unveiling of the theory to Darwin and Wallace. Darwin's notebooks show that he arrived at the idea in 1838, and he composed an essay on natural selection as early as 1842 — years after Matthew's work appeared."

See also: Bechly: The Demise of the Artifact Hypothesis