Roller

Hello!

Can someone point to me the flaws of these statements?
(They were written by a creationist)

-"if Darwin knew the complexity of DNA he would abandon his theory"

-"if I would disassemble my watch and put it in a box, then shake the box, I would never be able to get the functional watch"
(I pointed to him that he set the goal in advance and that life is not evolving by mere chance)

[B]-"water prevents formation of more complex molecules, therefore they couldn’t have formed in water"

-"DNA replication process involves 2000 different enzymes, therefore it's too complicated to evolve by chance"
anyone for a straw man?

-"which came first, DNA or the proteins needed by DNA-which can only be produced by DNA?"

-"from little over 100 amino acids only 20 of them constitute living proteins. They (100 of them) all come as "right handed" or "left handed". The ones necessary for life are all "left handed"

-"scientist can not find out how and why living organisms die. How will they find out how in ancient history life begun?"

Well, that’s a small list. He had more and I found out that source of his quotations of scientist come from “Life -- How Did It Get Here? By Evolution or by Creation?
(Brooklyn, NY: Watchtower Bible and Tract Society of New York, Inc.)”
So I shot down in flames those quotations, but could you help me with these?

Thanks!

pz

How does he know?

You might want to note the response many people had when Watson & Crick published the structure of DNA in 1953 -- it clarified matters considerably. It was suddenly so obvious how the logic of replication worked, that they only had to comment briefly on the apparent implications.There is a great deal wrong with this analogy. No one claims that life evolved by the correct assembly of preformed parts, parts that were designed for only an ultimate, completely constructed modern organism. Now if we started with sticks and dirt, and asked how often they could spontaneously assemble into a structure that would work as a sundial...Dang. I guess we're all dead, then. We're mostly water, yet somehow complex molecules assemble themselves all the time in us.DNA was last. He's got it wrong if he thinks proteins can only be assembled by DNA. For one thing, they aren't -- proteins are assembled by other proteins using an RNA template. Even without that, though, a peptide bond between a couple of amino acids isn't something magical.An amino acid is just a side group sandwiched between an amino group and a carboxyl group. There are many more than 100 potential amino acids.

What is a "living protein"? How is it different from a dead one?

All the amino acids used by life have the same handedness because they are synthesized by enzymes, which have a high degree of steric specificity. I've never really understood the point of this argument by creationists. There are also lots of sugars and proteins that are not synthesized by any known organism -- how does the existence of a narrow band of specificity within a broad range of potentiality argue against the existence of something?We know quite precisely how and why organisms die. For instance, we know how cyanide interferes with mitochondrial biochemical pathways. What is the mystery here?Yikes. I've got that book -- it's a hideous piece of flaming crap. It leads me to think that JWs must get a significant chunk of their brain excised in order to practice their weird religion.

Godless Dave

Until a creationist shows me a watch giving birth to another watch, this question is meaningless.

Craig

That book is so full of shit I can smell it from 10 miles away. I grew up as a JW and had to study that thing. It's full of fraudulant claims and really, really bad science. Oh, and a ton of misquotes.

Search some of the Ex-JW sites around for more info on how bad that book is.


Misquotes in the Creation book

Misinterpretations in the Creation book

A somewhat hard to read but good critical look at the Creation book

BioBeing

The description of Mendelian genetics described a mechanism wherby evolution may occur, which was confirmed by the structure of DNA. Darwinian theory itself makes no prediction as to the nature of the mechanism of evolution (although, as pointed out, is stengthened by the fact that such a mechanism can be proven). The argument as presented appears to be a plea to emotion/ignorance: "life is too complex to have evolved"....

...and here it that argument of "Intelligent Design".

There are NOT 2,000 individual enzymes that are required to replicate DNA. That would require almost the entire genetic content of some bacteria to code for those proteins! If you count every single factor that may be required in a human, there may be about 200(? not actually done the math).

Intelligent Design usually comes down to personal incredulity "I cannot believe that something so complex exists, therefore a super-being must have done it". Of course, if this super-being is so complex, it must have been created...

Many good explanations can be found at www.talkorigins.org

Albion

Francis Crick is a strong supporter of evolution. I assume he knows how complex DNA is.

lpetrich

(some creationist's comments
-"if Darwin knew the complexity of DNA he would abandon his theory"

The DNA molecule itself is not overly complicated, but it can be arranged in patterns with formidable complexity. However, much of this complexity provides clues as to its origins, like gene duplication and diversification.

-"if I would disassemble my watch and put it in a box, then shake the box, I would never be able to get the functional watch"

However, I can speed up the process in a simple way. Every time some pieces fit together properly, I glue them together and put them back in. Repeating this process gives bigger and bigger sets of properly-fitting watch pieces, with the end result being a set with all the pieces fitting properly -- the whole watch.

-"water prevents formation of more complex molecules, therefore they couldn’t have formed in water"

Bull feces. All that is necessary is to do some drying out; that will tip the balance from hydrolysis to polymerization.

-"DNA replication process involves 2000 different enzymes, therefore it's too complicated to evolve by chance"
anyone for a straw man?[/b]

First, it does not require so many enzymes. Only one enzyme is really needed for replication -- extra enzymes are for doing proofreading and the like, to improve replication fidelity.

Such systems are necessary for maintaining large genomes, but small genomes, like those of RNA viruses, seem to do OK without such systems.

-"which came first, DNA or the proteins needed by DNA-which can only be produced by DNA?"

The "RNA world" solves this problem by positing some RNA molecules that acted both as information storage and as enzymes. DNA is a specialization of RNA for master-copy duty, and proteins emerged from amino-acid cofactors that gradually became bigger and bigger until only a few bits of RNA now act as enzymes -- ribosomes, transfer RNA's, and certain cofactors.

-"from little over 100 amino acids only 20 of them constitute living proteins. They (100 of them) all come as "right handed" or "left handed". The ones necessary for life are all "left handed"

And how are these 100 counted? Were they assuming some maximum size of side chain?

And as to the selection of handedness, that may simply be a frozen accident, with the molecules of the proper handedness then being selected from the Primordial Soup.

-"scientist can not find out how and why living organisms die. How will they find out how in ancient history life begun?"

Death is a relatively trivial biological phenomenon, one which can come about in a variety of ways.

Some aspects of it, however, are less well understood, like senescence (old age). Is it a side effect of reduced selection pressure resulting from having successfully reproduced? Or is it a way of getting oneself out of the way to let one's offspring have some room?

Farren

-"if I would disassemble my watch and put it in a box, then shake the box, I would never be able to get the functional watch"

I don't feel this one's been adequate covered by previous posts. Certainly you won;t get watch that way, but you do get simple life if over hundreds ofmillions of years you combine trillions of molecules in trillions of different ways. There is no comparison.

The circumstances under which Uraniam or pure Rubies will form are incrdably rare, but no-ones seeing them as a case for intelligent design.

Roller

Thank you very much for these replies!

Now, he trotted something about George Wald saying how spontaneous decomposition happens a lot faster than spontaneous synthesis. And how thats the one of the biggest obstacles in finding how life arose spontaneously.

I was not able to find that quote, so could you explain me how is this the problem?
But again, he's saying how life arose spontaneously. Isn't that a wrong assumption?

Thanks!

lpetrich

Ask that creationist to track down that quote. I suspect that he had gotten it from some creationist quotebook.