Fallacies of Evolution

You've been given evidence. You hand waive it away and state "nuh uh". You make baseless assertions and are challenged to prove them. You ignore those challenges, for which we both know why.

 

Are you really saying there is no scientific evidence for toe? You may dispute the evidence; you may dispute the significance of the evidence; you may claim that the toe does not provide a comprehensive explanation of all the various questions about the origin of species. But saying that toe "is not scientifically evidenced" seems unsupported by the facts. I mean people provide evidence for a flat earth and string theory.... and for toe

 

Then my bold statement should be easy to refute. Provide what you consider to be 'evidence' for the ToE. We can examine it to see if it stands under scrutiny.

I have been consistent in asking for 'empirical, scientific' evidence. Not fallacies. Not assertions. Not long lists of books to read, or sites to visit. Not eye rolling incredulity. So how about it? Got any evidence?

 

Five hundred eighty three words. Not one reference to a textbook. None. Zero. Zilch. No quotes from none of the zero textbooks.

No quotes from no scholastic textbook that defends evolution by stating 'Given enough time, anything is possible.'
No quotes from no scholastic textbook that defends evolution by stating 'All really smart people believe in the ToE.'
No quotes from no scholastic textbook that defends evolution by stating 'evolution is true, because it has not been proven false'
(pardon the intentional bad grammar)

What was that you said about repeated lies & distortions? Care to make another post showing me making dishonest and false statements?

 

Do you have an example of an evolutionist claiming that evolution is true because everybody believes it? Yes or no? If you don't have the honesty to answer this very simple question then I don't see how we can possibly have an honest discussion about science.

 

usfan's MO is to make mere assertions and refuse to back them up with relevant evidence. Instead, he provides us with his opinions as to why his mere assertions are correct. He apparently believes that is all that is needed. Rinse. Repeat. Start a New Thread with the Same Mere Assertions.

 

I can't really believe that you have never heard this 'argument'. It is the bandwagon or appeal to authority. I have heard it for years, & it comes up often in these threads. I'll bite, for now, but suspect you are still just deflecting, so you don't have to show you have no evidence.

from wiki:
The overwhelming majority of the scientific community accepts evolution as the dominant scientific theory of biological diversity.[1][2] Nearly every scientific society, representing hundreds of thousands of scientists, has issued statements rejecting intelligent design[2] and a petition supporting the teaching of evolutionary biology was endorsed by 72 US Nobel Prize winners.[3]

So, yes.. on talk.origins, pbs, .edu sites, national parks, schools, & practically every human institution, the ToE is declared FACT, & the fallacies of the OP are demonstrated, sometimes in multiple fashion.

If you cannot see this, or believe there is actual empirical evidence for the ToE, then why do you (and others) not present it? Talk is cheap. Show me. Prove your fantastic claims about life & the nature of the universe. Otherwise, all you have are fantastic beliefs.. with no evidence to support them.

- - - Updated - - -

..yawn..
ok, more ad hominem.. cute. i'm not providing evidence for YOUR claims.. that is your job. My job is to scrutinize them.

 

This poster doesn't seem to know the difference between a criticism of his arguing/debating techniques (i.e., repeating mere assertions and using his opinions as supporting "evidence") and an ad hominem fallacy (i.e., attacking the character of the person). In this post note his attempt to distract with the common, "Hey look over there" misdirection.

 

You stated this fallacy very poorly in the OP. You said:
'Everybody believes this!' This is an attempt to prove something by asserting it is common knowledge. It is obviously not true, anyway, as many people do not believe in the ToE, in spite of decades of indoctrination from the educational system, public television, & other institutions intent on promoting this ideology.

From reading the fallacy it sounds like evolutionists are claiming that everybody believes in evolution, like the general public believes in evolution. This would be an ad populum fallacy by the evolutionists because the general public aren't necessarily authorities and can't be used as evidence.

You then provide a quote from an evolutionist:
"The overwhelming majority of the scientific community accepts evolution"

But the post you presented only says most scientists believe in evolution not the general public and is a valid argument called an appeal to authority not an ad populum fallacy because the people being referenced are experts. If you really meant an appeal to authority, you already talked about that in #2 and why are you repeating points?

 

Assertions and opinions that are usually heard from the creationist echo chamber.

 

I responded...

Five hundred eighty three words. Not one reference to a textbook. None. Zero. Zilch. No quotes from none of the zero textbooks.

No quotes from no scholastic textbook that defends evolution by stating 'Given enough time, anything is possible.'
No quotes from no scholastic textbook that defends evolution by stating 'All really smart people believe in the ToE.'
No quotes from no scholastic textbook that defends evolution by stating 'evolution is true, because it has not been proven false'
(pardon the intentional bad grammar)

What was that you said about repeated lies & distortions? Care to make another post showing me making dishonest and false statements?

Still waiting to see a scholastic textbook that defends evolution by stating ...

 

Alright. If the ruse here is to parse the OP, & look for technicalities to divert attention to wording, prepositions, & 'gotcha!' phrases, it will not work.. not with me, anyway. This is merely another deflection, to divert attention from the COMPLETE LACK of evidence provided. I provided some evidences of bandwagon, appeals to authority, & 'correlation indicates causation' fallacies, as well as the others. There is no disputing the variety of fallacies used to 'defend' the ToE, here, as that is all there is. Where is some actual EVIDENCE for this belief? How can you deflect from this obvious gorilla in the room, & strain out gnats? Quibbling over definitions, or parsing sentences looking for technicalities does not solve your problem. You may succeed in diverting attention from the dearth of evidence, but you do not help your own cause. You still have NO EVIDENCE for your beliefs.

I have continually called for facts, evidence, scientific arguments, & reason in this 'debate' over the ToE. The obvious constant substitution of fallacies only confirms the OP, that the ToE relies ONLY on logical fallacies, & has no scientific evidence for the core beliefs.

My challenge remains, unrebutted. there have only been a handful of topical replies in this thread, while most of them have been deflections & fallacies to divert from the topic.

IF there is any evidence for the claims of the ToE, why not present it? If there is not, but there is only logical fallacies, assertions, & mandated beliefs, then continue to display those. It will become obvious to anyone when no arguments are presented. So the ad hominem, poisoning the well, appeals to authority, & other fallacies continuously on display here will be the only 'arguments' presented for the ToE, which confirms the OP.

 

Claiming you have not been given evidence in this thread is an easily demonstrated lie. Knowing this, why do you continue to make the claim?

 

Parse?
Technicalities?

The very essence of your OP is BS. You have not been able to provide one textbook or even an .edu link to support your outrageous claim.

You have provided NO evidence to support your claim about what is actually taught.

Pointing out that your OP is BS is not deflecting.

If you want to start a thread asking for "evidence for the claims of the ToE", then do so.

This thread, which you started, is not in pursuit of "evidence for the claims of the ToE".

This thread, which you started, makes a completely false allegation regarding the teaching of TOE. It then uses that false allegation to vainly try to make an argument against TOE.

Ridiculous.

 

If you could do that, would you be some other species than Homo Sapiens?

Hardly impressive absent cell differentiation - to say nothing of continued propagation of the multicellular, cell-differentiated organism.

Get real, even if it proved anything about the particular species that were jumbled together, it wouldn't prove anything about the evolution of Homo Sapiens from other species - which of course is the only thing about the ToE that makes it a more compelling topic than the mating habits of the duck-billed platypus, let's face it.

IOW, the fact that it's impossible for experts in the field to know what they're talking about makes it undeniable. Pretty much got that bang on, haven't I?

 

No, not even close.

 

Too close for comfort, is more like it.

 

New complex information isn't the same as a new species, where was I walking about new species? I am confused.

Its still an example of new information, sorry its not cool enough for you.

I don't know what "jumbled together" has to do with real science. What do you mean?

So you only care about science only as it related to humans. What do you want to know about the evolution of humans?

Its one thing to go onto an internet forum and talk a big talk about how dumb experienced professionals are, its another to actually present evidence that they are wrong, and that your position is right.

 

Didn't say you were, but speciation is obviously the bare minimum for anyone who is the least bit skeptical.

Yeah, well I don't know what an untestable hypothesis has to do with real science, so I guess we're even.

I'm talking about species the fossils of which might be found jumbled together.

That's nothing like what I said, obviously.

I want to know how evolution can possibly account for the uniquely human faculty of self-awareness, which is the most elementary aspect of the uniquely human faculty of insight.

Evolutionary biologists may be experienced at a great many things, but providing clear and compelling evidence of their putative knowledge of human origins is clearly not among them.

The skeptic doesn't need a position, only reason to doubt; and I've sure as Hell got that.

 

This is obviously true....each individual is completely free to ignore the data available, dismiss the experts, deny the science, and refuse to expand understanding. Each individual however, is also free to consider said person a fool and relinquish them into the debris pile of useless humanity.

 

Empirical evidence for evolution... sort of like demanding empirical evidence for Adam and Eve

Evolution is proposed as "the best explanation for the data"

So, that means collecting data, and trying to see which explanation best fits the evidence at hand
Collecting that evidence is based upon science... like exploration of the fossil record
Since the toe was first proposed.... mountains of data have been unearthed
This data was collected by lots of scientists... from many different countries... and various fields of study

So, for example... when you dig up a fossil... and use science to date that fossil... the result is scientific evidence... and that evidence conforms to toe... and does not conform to any other hypothesis
And so THAT is scientific evidence.

Likewise science can examine DNA. And we can identify mutations, and how they accumulate over time
And that scientific inquiry confirms that mutations do occur in DNA. And given the function of DNA, such mutations would in some cases alter the life form. And in some cases that alteration would be beneficial and therefore be propagated

Science has also been part of selective breeding
Which we observe can considerably change the life form
these changes can situationally change the ability of a life form to survive
If a life form is subject to a natural change through mutations
That change might alter the organisms survivability
Beneficial changes would tend to propagate
Hence evolution over long periods of time

 

Yeah, but my examples were showing that evolution can create complexity and new information. If you want examples of speciation you can just google it, I have one link with examples:
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/science-sushi/evolution-watching-speciation-occur-observations/

Why do you think evolution is untestable and is just a hypothesis?

How does fossils being jumbled together refute evolution? Evolution can be true, and some river flood or meteor comes in and buries a bunch of animals jumbling them together.

How do you know self-awareness is uniquely human?

We don't really understand what self-awareness even is or how it works so we can't explain how it evolved. In the same way, if we found some distant star orbit we couldn't explain it wouldn't disprove physics.

Science is finding evidence. When you write a science paper you are making an argument that what you discovered is real and show the experiments and observations. So basically you are saying that professional evolutionary scientists aren't very good at their jobs. How do you know this?

Many who claim to be evolution skeptics will for some reason totally buy the earth being made in 6 days, women being made from a man's rib, the talking snake, a global flood, and an ark carrying the land animals for a year. They were taught mythology when they were kids and will accept it without evidence or just make up weak evidence, and when they hear real science they will suddenly pretend to be skeptics and raise the bar of evidence really high and try to find reasons to not believe it instead of fairly researching it.

 

What the hell would I want that for when I've been assured by your illumined comrades that nobody knows what the hell that even means?

Because macroevolution can't be observed in real time within any reasonable time frame.

Actually I'm pretty sure "hypothesis" is too charitable, but I won't go into that now.

OK, I'm gonna give you a chance to reread your #737 and then walk this back.

No sense asking this question...

...when you don't even know what it is you're asking about.

Then one cannot help but wonder why the hell "science" has been keeping it under wraps lo these many decades.

No, I'm saying precisely what I said.

What the hell do I care?

 

It appears to me as if the theory of macro evolution is the consensus but really lacks the evidence which would allow replication of what they believe happened naturally. It is not even close to what we see in the theory of relativity or quantum theory which can be tested which verifies the theories. ToE is not in this ballpark.

Since we cannot replicate what happened naturally, the change in genetic makeup, drastic changes, even if it does seem nice and predictable, we are doing nothing more than assuming that it happened in the way biologists believe. Believing this, we then look for fossil evidence that it happened like this. If something doesn't fit, we set it aside as an anomaly that we will settle later, and then these pile up, seldom addressed. For this is the way research tends to work and not just in biology.

Fact is, if we understood the genetic mechanism responsible for the arise of a new species, we could certainly replicate it. So we do not know the mechanism. Unlike physicists who knew the mechanism and could use it to do something. Yet evolutionists want you to believe they just as legit in their theory as physicists are of theirs. LOL.

So, show me the money. Or show Usfan the goods. Do like the physicists have done with their theories. They gave us technology, high technology. I want a new species. Physicists gave me the atomic bomb using their theories. Biology needs to catch up. We may need something like what happened in physics with quantum physics. And it end up like physics finds itself in. Two very strong theories that cannot be united. Macro and micro evolution may end up like this. And unknown is involved in macro theory. HOW did the genetic changes occur. For if we knew we could replicate it. We not replicate it, so we do not know.

Usfan is right. But true believers cannot accept it. That is how powerful the conditioning is. So much so, it has created dogma. I just wonder if we will ever discover the mechanism which we can then replicate? And if a major discovery has to be made first, a paradigm changer as we saw with physics? I think it may involve a change in paradigm. Which may find more resistance in evolutionary biology than it did when it happened in physics. Why? Philosophical beliefs of the biologists. The materialistic mindset.

 

Where is the "magical" line that organisms cannot cross?
At what point do they hit this invisible wall that prevents them from evolving any further?
That is a question that you must answer if you are going to say that macroevolution is impossible.