Has Science and the Scientific Method been misused? That was a question asked in my blog Elusive Transitional Forms. The following is another excerpt taken from “Truth and Science – Is Real Science At Risk?”, an article by Dr. Arv Edgeworth*.  Ponder the questions he poses at the end and consider – are these viable questions that should be asked, and if they are being asked today or have been asked in the past?

The Origin of Life

Have you noticed lately the tendency in science books to no longer consider Biogenesis a Law of Science? Has any new evidence or experimentation given reason to question this as a law of science? No. Could it be because it is just in conflict with abiogenesis?  Is it possible that some educators just don’t want abiogenesis to be in opposition to a known Law of Science, so they attempt to downgrade Biogenesis from a “Law” status?  Is that what is happening? If it is, will that have a negative effect on the scientific process?

Are these reasonable questions that should be asked?

1.  “Isn’t Biogenesis a law of science?” (Life only comes from other life)

2.  “Is the hypothesis of abiogenesis (life from non-life) scientific?” (Has it ever been observed?)

3.  “If chemical evolution isn’t happening today, how do we know it happened in the past?”

Personally, whether it is the beginning of the universe, or the beginning of life, I think we should discuss “origins” in another venue, not the science classroom.  Why even have it in the textbooks?

Mutations and Natural Selection

Mutations are random chance happenings. They are not supposed to be directional.  One beneficial mutation is supposed to be extremely rare, and almost unheard of. But a series of these occurring that took an irritation on the skin of an early life form through a totally non-directed process until humans have two eyes, that depend upon about 40 individual subsystems, that all have to be connected to a brain, to allow us to see; is an occurrence that would seem to be mathematically impossible to say the least. Before this would occur, shouldn’t there be such an accumulation of non-beneficial mutations that the life form would already be extinct? 

Are these reasonable questions that should be asked?

1.  “Aren’t mutations almost always harmful?”

2.  “Don’t mutations usually cause a net loss of information over time?”

3.  “Wouldn’t mutations usually be the least likely to survive?”

Should scientists be looking for another possibility?  Are some perhaps allowing their philosophical worldview to affect their science perspective? Or is there another reason?

Once again, good questions to ponder.

*www.truthandscience.net - website of Dr. Arv Edgeworth.

Lanny Johnson

If you would like to see if an AOI seminar is right for you, or you would like to help the work of Alpha Omega Institute, please visit our website events page or our donate page. Keep up to date with what AOI is doing.  Thanks for your partnership.

Geologic Time Chart

Has Science and the Scientific Method been misused? That was a question asked in my blog – Scientific laws and the Big Bang.  The following is another excerpt taken from “Truth and Science – Is Real Science At Risk?” an article by Dr. Arv Edgeworth*.  Ponder the questions he poses at the end and consider – are these viable questions that should be asked, and if they are being asked today or have been asked in the past?

The Fossil Record

Consider the following statement:

“Working with an incomplete fossil record is something like trying to put together a jigsaw puzzle with pieces missing.  But after the puzzle is together, even with missing pieces, you will probably still understand the overall picture.”

Glencoe Biology 2006, p. 400

How incomplete is it?  2/3 of Earth’s land surface has only 5 or fewer of the 12 geologic periods in place.  80-85% of Earth’s land surface does not have even 3 geologic periods appearing in “correct” consecutive order.

Stephen J. Gould admitted: “The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as the trade secret of paleontology, the evolutionary trees that adorn our textbooks have data only at the tips and nodes of their branches; the rest is inference, however reasonable, not the evidence of fossils.”

Stephen J. Gould, Natural History, Vol. 86, pgs 22, 30

He also admitted: “The absence of fossil evidence for intermediary stages between major transitions in organic design, indeed our inability, even in our imagination, to construct functional intermediates in many cases, has been a persistent and nagging problem for gradualistic accounts of evolution.”

Gould, S. J., in Evolution Now: A Century After Darwin, ed. John Maynard Smith, Macmillan, New York, p. 140, 1982

Niles Eldridge said: “Paleontologists ever since Darwin have been searching (largely in vain) for the sequences of insensibly graded series of fossils that would stand as examples of the sort of wholesale transformation of species that Darwin envisioned as the natural product of the evolutionary process.  Few saw any reason to demur- though it is a startling fact that, most species remain recognizably themselves, virtually unchanged throughout their occurrence in geological sediments of various ages.”

Eldredge, Niles, “Progress in Evolution?” New Scientist, vol. 110 (June 5, 1986), p. 55

Are these reasonable questions that should be asked?

1.  “Is the actual fossil evidence anything like the chart?”

2.  “What about the absence of transitional fossils?”

3.  “Are there any fossils clearly in transition?”

Is there another explanation that should be explored?

These are again good questions Dr. Arv Edgeworth has posed.

*www.truthandscience.net - website of Dr. Arv Edgeworth.

Lanny Johnson

If you would like to see if an AOI seminar is right for you, or you would like to help the work of Alpha Omega Institute, please visit our website events page or our donate page. Keep up to date with what AOI is doing.  Thanks for your partnership.