Are there any "problems" with the ToE that are generally not addressed?

Mr Foley I presume? Welcome to EvC! You are the second contributor to TalkOrigins to grace our boards. We hope that when Chris H.S.'s life gets back to normal he will return to the fold.

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Hi Jim:Milton simply points out that there are human beings nearby which plausibly explain away the missing link assertion.Page 206 of the book in question cites Dr. A.J. White [1989], "the habilines were so small in stature, so their brains were not small in relation to their body size, rather like modern pygmies." END MILTON QUOTE.Jim:What silences the criticism that homo habilis is not a Mbuti a few hundred miles to the east in the forests of Zaire ?Also, if you could offer an explanation as to why Milton, an atheist, 30 year science reporter, would grind an anti-evolution axe ?By the way, I have read major excerpts of your debate with Milton and I do own a copy of the book.thanks,sincerely,Willowtree

Please supply the details of the calculations that Milton or White made of brain / body mass ratio and show his comparison to modern humans.This is, remember, the Milton who made up false statments about the Thylacine skulls. I'm not inclinded to trust someone who has been demonstrated to be unreliable. I don't know why you would be.This is, WT, exactly like Rutherford's (that's who it was wasn't it? ) claim about the LLM. He was wrong and supplied no numbers.You've given up on that yet you continue to use poor quality sources.You seem to have trouble grasping why anyone would have trouble believing people who are so inclinded to get things so wrong.This message has been edited by NosyNed, 10-15-2004 06:31 PM

Why would anyone wanting to make such a dramatic scientific claim reference an obscure creationist book by someone with no expertise in the field? Fortunately, I do have a copy of White's book (Wonderfully Made), and can tell you that he supplies zip, nada, zilch, zero evidence in favor of his claim. Milton wasn't summarizing White's argument. That was White's argument, in toto. NosyNed hit the nail on the head when he asked for the details of the calculations. There aren't any; it's worthless handwaving.In contrast, when real scientists actually do the work with real numbers, they find that in relative brain size, Homo habilis and Homo erectus are intermediate between apes and humans. (e.g. an essay in the book The Nariokotome Homo erectus skeleton by Walker and Leakey, and a 1987 paper by Tobias in the Journal of Human Evolution, both of which I referenced in post 5c1 of the debate to which Milton never responded). The considerable anatomical differences between habilis and modern humans, as pointed out in post 3 of my debate with Milton (about halfway down the page). If you wish to argue that Mbuti are similar to habilis and equally different from typical modern humans, it would be incumbent upon you to actually provide evidence for such a dramatic claim. Milton never did so, despite repeated requests for his evidence.(Actually, the criticism didn't really need rebutting, because Milton provided no evidence for it - just like White's claim; what a coincidence, eh?) It's a bit of a mystery. He's said he's not a creationist, though I'm not aware he's ever said that he's an atheist (can't find my copy of his book right this minute). He appears to be grinding an anti-modern-science axe, maybe because modern science rejects a lot of stuff he appears to be interested in.Jim

Hi Robert,I'm going reply to comments from a few of your posts, blending them together as necessity and logic direct. No, Percy didn't. Read my six points from Message 189 again. To make it easy, I repeat them here: Nowhere do I mention timescale. You agreed with all the six points. You were the first to mention timescale in reply to these points in Message 203: To which I replied, "There is plenty of geological and physical evidence. We're more than happy to discuss this evidence if that's what you'd like."So, is that what you'd like? Would you like to discuss the dating evidence? I'm not going to invest time starting down this path unless you say this is what you'd like to do, because you kind of indicate you're really not interested when you say in Message 220, "Dating ideas isn't in my orbit anyway."So when you go on to say, "I see nothing wrong in my debate with Percy," this could only be true if you're willing to explore the implications of your position, which means exploring dating issues. But if you're determined to repeatedly state that ancient dating is impossible while declining to examine the evidence for ancient dating, then everything is wrong with your "debate with Percy" and you deserve [forum=-28].--Percy

Some good points:"Domain shuffling aside, it remains a mystery how the undirected process of mutation, combined with natural selection, has resulted in the creation of thousands of new proteins with extraordinarily diverse and well-optimized functions. This problem is particularly acute for tightly integrated molecular systems that consist of many interacting parts, such as ligands, receptors, and the downstream regulatory factors with which they interact. In these systems it is not clear how a new function for any protein might be selected for unless the other members of the complex are already present, creating a molecular version of the ancient evolutionary riddle of the chicken and the egg." - Thornton and DeSalle, Genomics meets phylogenetics, Annual Review of Genomics and Human Genetics 2000, p. 64Robert May is a UK Chief Scientist. In New Scientist magazine ( July 1, 2000 ) on page 5 he stated, "We share half our genes with the banana." This is an important quote, because it shows the evolutionist argument of 'people having 98% the same DNA as a chimp' (we don't) to be without scientific merit.

It's not really a mystery. As TalkOrigins says:

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Functional sequences are not so rare and isolated. Experiments show that roughly 1 in 1011 of all random-sequence proteins have ATP-binding activity [Keefe and Szostak 2001], and theoretical work by Yockey [1992, 326-330] shows that, at this density, all functional sequences are connected by single amino acid changes. Furthermore, there are several kinds of mutations which change multiple amino acids at once.

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Emphasis added by me. Even Denton agrees that there's no mystery to novel protein function:

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"One of the most surprising discoveries which has arisen from DNA sequencing has been the remarkable finding that the genomes of all organisms are clustered very close together in a tiny region of DNA sequence space forming a tree of related sequences that can all be interconverted via a series of tiny incremental natural steps."

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Sorry for the quote fest but you didn't really give me much of your own to go on. Try making arguments in your own words, using quotes to illustrate and support, not as the body of your message. No, all it shows is that, if it's true, banana cells and human cells employ half of the same protein products. That's all genes do, after all - generate proteins, or control the generation of proteins.We do, in fact, share 98% (or more) of our genes with chimpanzees; most relevant to evolution, we share a number of nonfunctional sequences in the "junk" reigons of the DNA. Just like several identical errors between two people's homework assignments tell you that they cheated off of the same source, these identical plagarized errors in our DNA and theirs conclusively substantiates our common ancestry.

Hi Jim:I am in no position to challenge any of your response except the following: In other words, if a source is a creationist, then the evidence is somehow refuted by this fact alone. This is an "arguing the man" argument that should have no bearing on the ability to refute the claim.This type of approach, an approach which began your refutation, establishes the context of your refutation to rely on worldview superiority, which is, of course, a philosophic argument that according to scientific methodologies has nothing to do with their conclusions.sincerely,WT

While I agree that argument ad hominem is not appropriate, and that your respondent starts his post off with exactly that, that doesn't constitute the whole of his post. Instead, you appear to have used this single line to avoid addressing the substance of his rebuttals.While his dispersions about your source do not constitute a rebuttal, he made other arguments that do. You have a certain responsibility to defend your argument from those rebuttals; merely pointing out that one element of his post was not a rebuttal does not suffice.

I started out my response by saying:

I think it was a fair point to make that such an obscure source is not the most best source for documenting such an extraordinary claim. If I'd stopped there, yes, it would have been an ad hominem argument. But it was really just meant to be a side observation, before I got down to analyzing Milton's argument in detail.Since you didn't dispute any of my other evidence, does that mean you accept that Milton's claim is unfounded?

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In other words, if a source is a creationist, then the evidence is somehow refuted by this fact alone. This is an "arguing the man" argument that should have no bearing on the ability to refute the claim.

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It is not arguing the man, it is arguing a position. Creationism is a scientific position that has been shown to be falsified by the evidence. Therefore, if the author supplies no evidence and the argument he is putting forth is falsified by already existing evidence, then we can disregard his argument. For his argument to hold water he must first supply evidence that would support his overarching theory. Otherwise, the creationist offering the argument is using a falsified theory to arrive at his conclusions.

If a person is a creationist then any source which helps refute a claim perceived to disprove Genesis is anything but obscure.Dr. White pointed out that the habilines were ALSO of a stature comparable to modern pygmies. This is a logical observation that would come to mind for anyone subjecting the homo habilis claim to falsification.Logic is never obscure. I guess I will defend Milton's argument.Page 206 of his book, "Shattering the Myths of Darwinism":Homo habilis is the first time a new human species was claimed as such based entirely on a lower jaw with teeth, collarbone, a finger bone, and some small skull fragments. END MILTON CITE.IOW, a few scraps = the basis to prop up the "preexisting narrative structure" of hominid evolution.Milton says one of the hand bones is a piece of vertebra, and two other bones could belong to a tree dwelling monkey, and six others came from some unspecified nonhominid.And all of Milton's material on homo habilis is in the context of the convicts which found Eugene Dubois Java man - a known jigsaw puzzle of a fraud. (skullcap, femur, and two teeth = Java man)Milton's re-occurring point: So much (human evolution) based on so little (disputed scraps).

I didn't know creationism had been granted the status of a scientific position.What objective superior entity decided this ?What specific evidence falsifies a creationist scientific position ?

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Page 206 of his book, "Shattering the Myths of Darwinism":

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Homo habilis is the first time a new human species was claimed as such based entirely on a lower jaw with teeth, collarbone, a finger bone, and some small skull fragments. END MILTON CITE.

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IOW, a few scraps = the basis to prop up the "preexisting narrative structure" of hominid evolution.

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Milton says one of the hand bones is a piece of vertebra, and two other bones could belong to a tree dwelling monkey, and six others came from some unspecified nonhominid.

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And all of Milton's material on homo habilis is in the context of the convicts which found Eugene Dubois Java man - a known jigsaw puzzle of a fraud. (skullcap, femur, and two teeth = Java man)

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Milton's re-occurring point: So much (human evolution) based on so little (disputed scraps).

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Firstly Dubois' Java Man is not a fraud - and not Homo habilis either. It is the later Homo erectus. And for Homo erectus we have plenty more finds - such as the Peking Man specimens and the Turkana Boy.And there are more finds attributed to Homo Habilis than those Milton mentions (although those are quite adequate - for instance enough of the skull survived for an estimate of brain capacity to be made). OH8 - the second major find - is a near-complete set of footbones. Later finds include near-complete crania the first of those being OH24.