I'm going to reply to both of your posts here Russ.

You seem to be expecting me to refute websites and videos because I spent a lot of time refuting the Williams chapters elsewhere here. I did that for several reasons. One, no one here seemed to want to enage in a discussion with me. Two, this post had been unchallenged by anyone and I wanted to point out that it contained factual errors. Three, I didn't have much else to do at the time and it kept me occupied. I do have a lot more to do now, and frankly it's a depressing experience to have to wade through so much pseudoscience. It makes me mad as hell that people think this is appropriate to teach to children. Many of them who could potentially grow up to make large contributions to science are instead raised in ignorance and taught not to question.

Anyway, as I said, there's no need for me to refute Hovind's claims. The 300 Creationist Lies site covers them pretty comprehensively.


Evolution is the change in the frequency of alleles over time. Reading any kind of philosophy or ideology into it is erroneous. It's like claiming that Newton described gravity in order to promote his nefarious political conspiracies.


I've read the Bible several times. I used to be religious. It's a religious book that is important to many people. But it is not a scientific work. If you choose to believe in it literally then you are by default declaring hundreds of years of scientific evidence and knnowledge to be invalid. You would need to present equally valid empirical evidence in order to support such a claim. That is what I've been asking for here. I haven't seen any yet that convinces me that evolution ought to be in doubt.

About bilateral symmetry. Yes, the information I gave you is scientific. Yes, I understand it. I said I was happy to clarify if you wanted. I can simplify too.

It's controlled by genes. That's essentially what the signalling molecules are. Two particular genes have been discovered that control bilateral symmetry, though they work in synergy with others. Scientists studied humans and mice with left-right developmental anomalies and discovered that these genes, which were largely responsible for those anomolies when they were mutated, were located on a small region of the X chromosome.

As for how it developed? We can see the stages in the fossil record. Before you declare any system to be mind-bogglingly complex you have to remember that it gained that complexity over a vast evolutionary timescale, bit by bit. The first unicellular organisms were evolving for billions of years, in itself a mind-bogglingly vast amount of time, plenty of time for innumerable mutations and natural selections to be occurring.

Most researchers agree that the first multicellular organisms had circular shapes that were radially symmetrical. Radial symmetry seems to be useful for organisms that are attached to something like the ocean floor and branch out in all directions above.

Through fossil and genetic evidence, scientists have discovered that bilateral symmetry seems to have appeared more than 500 million years ago, before the Cambrian explosion. There's good evidence from a recent gene study that flatworms may have been the first organisms with bilateral symmetry. You can see it evolving all through the fossil record, and you can examine relationships of organisms based on their genes. Bilateral symmetry is useful for animals that move around.

So: we can see how bilateral symmetry evolved, and we can see how it works down to a genetic level. Do you accept this, or is the whole science of genetics now in question as well?

Behe is simply wrong: irreducible complexity is not a valid argument for anything. Many things we know about now were once too irreducibly complex for people to understand. The circulatory system was irreducibly complex. Orbital mechanics was once irreducibly complex. The atom was once irreducibly complex.

But you see, we do make progress. We do try to figure out the complex part of whatever mechanism we are examining and after we are done it is no longer irreducibly complex. By saying something is irreducibly complex and therefore is an indication of design is like saying "God did it," and there is no further need to examine or question. We'd never learn anything that way.

You've mentioned DNA, reproduction, and roulette again. I've explained about the roulette elsewhere here. Evolution is not pure chance, and probability statistics cannot be applied to it in the way you attempt to do. Mutations are chance, yes, but then natural selection acts on them. If you have billions upon billions of organisms going through this process over billions of years, why is it surprising that evolution occurs?

Take a pack of cards. Draw five. What are the astronomical odds that you would have drawn that particular hand? Do it again. Draw your cards from five packs this time, or ten. The odds are even more astronomical that you would have drawn those five exact cards. Yet, you have. And you will draw an equally improbable combination every time.

Now give those packs of cards to every person in China. There are over a billion. See how long it takes one of those people to draw a particular hand of five cards. Now give them a few billion years in which to do it.

Probability is a double-edged sword. You have to be careful how you use it.

As for the unlikelihood of DNA evolving, self-replicators can be very simple -- as simple as a strand of six DNA nucleotides (Sievers and von Kiedrowski 1994). This is simple enough to form via prebiotic chemistry (which works with compounds like amino acids). Self-replication sets the stage for evolution to begin, whether or not you call the molecules "life."


Remember, also, that evolution describes what happened when the first life on earth appeared. It does not account for how that life began.

In your next post you talk about the eye. I've been over that, as well, elsewhere in this topic. You can find thorough explanations of how organs and systems evolved if you choose to look.

The following excerpt from TalkOrigins addresses the statement, oft presented by creationists, that the eye is too complex to have evolved.


You asked about rods as well, and how light is converted into electrical signals. Any argument from incredulity, or belief in irreducible complexity, is remedied with education. All you have to do is go find out what people know. Here is a link to an article about how color vision evolved, and how it operates down to the molecular level, which involves something called opsin genes: http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/vision.html It taught me a lot that I hadn't previously known. I wasn't aware of how any eye really works, in detail. I know now. So could you, if you were willing to read this. It explains what the simplest form of an eye is, which is a structure still used by some animals today.


The only people who decide that "mystical complexity" is going to stop them questioning further and declare "goddidit" are the ones who haven't learned their science. You can find out about how the liver works just as easily as you can find out about the eye if you want.

I'm having difficulty extracting any points from your writing about rules and transistors and cell phones. What rules about evolution do you not understand? Mutation. Natural selection. That's it, at its most basic. Complexity arises from initial simplicity. Remember, also, that evolution does not have a "goal." Those first unicellular organisms were not aiming to eventually turn into human beings. That is the direction evolution took on this planet. You can choose to believe that it was God's plan if you want.

I think you could have set out your ideas in a few paragraphs here to be honest. Brevity is the soul of wit as they say.