Darwinists have no arguments, just catchphrases
Why my commenters think that unsubstantiated statements of regurgitated Darwinist doctrine rise to the level of an answer? Snork all you like but one of these days you will have to answer the questions. One of you said, "...this post is also from the mind that defines "Information" as the weightless and massless, intelligent transmission of intelligence. I mean, how awesome is that?" I think it is awesome indeed, you are closer to the truth now. What do you think it is? Information requires a medium to be transmitted, but it does not comprise the medium itself. Think on that for awhile.
What do I know about archeopteryx? That reputable Darwinists do not even use it as a transitional form because it is not linear (in their view) to the "evolution" of birds. It is an outlier like the Platypus that is quite unlike any relatives known to exist.
Never have I shown polystrate trees going through many layers of rocks?
Or sudden burial evidences?
Here is a good one: "The theory of evolution is a description of what happened, not a prescription of the way things ought to be." Says who? Darwinists have completely failed to show that macroevolution ever happened. If you consider it to be testable, then it has been falsified as millions of generations of bacteria and thousands of generations of fruit flies can attest. In fact, non YEC people such as Midgley will tell you that Darwinism as an explanation for life has gone past the expiration date. Every time a Darwinist show us a bacteria that eats something new, scientists demonstrate that this is a result of a loss of information.
ID - Intelligent Design people are those who subtract the metaphysical from the equation and try to go strictly on scientific evidences and observable evidence. Start at the Discovery Institute and go from there.
~
Here is another whopper: "Added information and complexity through evolution/selection has been demonstrated, so design is hardly a foregone conclusion" Yagottabekiddin'! Never has one tiny bit of new information ever been shown to enter an organism. Time for actual science.
by David Tyler 10:05:00 am, Categories: Literature - Articles, 879 words 
~
by Robert Deyes 12:47:59 pm, Categories: Commentary - Announcements, 927 words 
This last portion is a long post so I will only begin the last article as a small portion of a very interesting assertion...
Never have I shown polystrate trees going through many layers of rocks?
Or fossils sorted by water flows?
Or sudden burial evidences?
Here is a good one: "The theory of evolution is a description of what happened, not a prescription of the way things ought to be." Says who? Darwinists have completely failed to show that macroevolution ever happened. If you consider it to be testable, then it has been falsified as millions of generations of bacteria and thousands of generations of fruit flies can attest. In fact, non YEC people such as Midgley will tell you that Darwinism as an explanation for life has gone past the expiration date. Every time a Darwinist show us a bacteria that eats something new, scientists demonstrate that this is a result of a loss of information.
Suppose I want to play stickball but have no stick. I can break off or unscrew or saw off the head of a broom and, voila, I have a stickball bat! But I will have lost the sweep functionality of what was once a broom. If citrase bacteria (a loss of functionality allows the bacteria to take in a less preferred source of energy in aerobic conditions, making it less likely to be viable in the wild) is the best you have, you have nothing.
While commenters chide me for not understanding Darwin, I chide them for not understanding the science behind Darwin and origins and genetic activities in general. Those who have gladly swallowed the propaganda dispensed by NCSE-friendly sources are simply brainwashed to the point they cannot have an intelligent discussion on the subject. Facilitated Variation and Genetic Redundancy. Do a search on my site for those and read the articles and tell me if they are simplistic or are they thorough? Have a shot at irreducible complexity, for that matter.
Speciation is not Darwinism. Darwin observed speciation and like others before him surmised that there was a "survival of the fittest" story there. But he was quite primitive in his understanding. He would be like a small child who rides with a parent and observes the following behavior: Open car door, put key in ignition, turn, and pull on a lever. What makes the car go? Is it the key or the lever? Both of them have a part in the process of turning on and operating a vehicle.
Now a pre-teen comes to know that there is a motor and a transmission. He understands that both gasoline and oil go into the automobile and sometimes other things like transmission fluid and antifreeze and brake fluid. He may even be taught by his father how to check levels on fluids and what fluids go in what containers or openings. Here he has come up to about the level of knowledge Darwin had about the cell.
We now know that a cell is far more complex than an automobile and better designed in the bargain. While carmakers lay out their initial blueprints for an automobile years in advance and then work with suppliers to haggle over price versus engineering advantages versus labor contracts versus delivery date deadlines, God just made a good basic model of a few baramin (kinds) that could adjust to ecosystems and fill every niche available.
I was in the auto business and saw the methods that caused designers to neglect to put an entry port in the trunk so that the gas-tank mounted pump could be accessed from above. They saved pennies in production while owners a few years down the road pay hundreds of dollars for a mechanic to lower the tank to get access and probably having to deal with the exhaust system in the process. But the biological machines made by God keep on going strong despite having to deal with accidents and disasters and mutations and the laws of thermodynamics. Just as an automaker stamps identifying numbers on various parts and puts an identifier label on the driver's side door, God has left his signature in DNA. Obvious to those who are willing to see.
It remains true today that the watch found while walking in the woods was designed and manufactured, it did not just pop into existence.
It remains true today that the watch found while walking in the woods was designed and manufactured, it did not just pop into existence.
Anyway, speciation is a design element built into the cell to allow for adjustments to environments and predation and so on. It is cell-driven, a series of choices made by the cell produce creatures and the ones that survive bring their genetic information back into production, so to speak. Darwin saw speciation and correctly surmised that it was a result of natural selection. What he did not and could not know was that the choices made by the cell are already present within the cell. Like a man browsing through a library for something to read, he chooses from the books available and does not kick a chair and expect new books to result.
One of the ridiculous claims by commenters is that I do not understand Darwinism. Notice that they say that without answering the questions posed to them. I understand Darwinism quite well and it simply fails the test. Mutation plus natural selection does not give rise to new information and cannot create new creatures. We have gone down into the cell to see how it works and it is obvious that the mother sets the template for the child and accepts pre-existing information from the father to go along with the information in the mother and the result is a child that inherits characteristics of both.
Never, not once, has a Darwinist observed one kind of creature become another. Never have they induced fruit flies or bacteria into adding new information over millions and thousands of generations, respectively.
Where does information come from? - (they have never answered this)
How did life arise from non-life? (no real clues either)
What about dating methods? I have shown that there are dating methods that yield young ages, old ages and ages that vary greatly from the same layers of rock. One cannot trust tree rings or ice layers beyond historical markers identifiable from, say, a volcanic event and they do not take a world-wide flood into account. Darwinists ALWAYS want to take you to an unobservable past where they can weave stories about what happened without having proof. But they take you to a place where it is difficult to disprove what they say as well. So recently I have concentrated on the things we can observe about the cell now, observable and testable things. These have proven favorable to the concept a Creator having designed all living things.
Darwinists blithely say that all paraconformities have been explained but when I have posted on paraconformities they have failed the test. There are too many paraconformities to explain away all over the world. Don't listen to them and don't listen to me, do your own research.
Stay away from talk origins and Dr Dino. Go to reputable sites on both sides of the questions and check out what the ID'ers say as well.
YEC - Young Earth Creationists. Creation.com is an example of these kinds of sites, run by scientists who are YEC and who present evidence for their viewpoints.
Darwinists - They own the airwaves and the academies so you do not have to go look for them. They are like Savoir-Faire and unlike Klondike Kat you probably will not take an entire episode of your life to track them down.
OEC - Those who somehow can mix the oil of Darwin with the water of God and get a tasty drink. My buddy Highboy is one, for instance. Who says we all have to agree on everything?
~
What Darwin Got Wrong by Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli Palmarini
Darwin is under fire again, but Mary Midgley feels that his ideas have been misrepresented
Charles Darwin complained quite crossly in his autobiography that, despite many denials, people still kept saying he thought natural selection was the sole cause of evolutionary development. "Great is the force of misrepresentation," he grumbled. Had he known that, a century later, his alleged followers would be promoting that very doctrine as central to his teaching, and extending it into the wilder reaches of psychology and physics, he might have got even crosser. Darwin's objection was surely not just that he could see other possible causes. He saw that the doctrine itself did not make sense. No filter, however powerful, can be the only cause of what flows out of it. Questions about what comes into that filter have to be just as important. The proposed solution bears no proportion to the size of the problem.
Since his time, biologists have discovered a huge amount that is really interesting and important about internal factors in organisms that affect reproduction. This powerful little book uses that material to challenge sharply the whole neo-Darwinist orthodoxy – the assumption that, essentially, all evolution is due to mutation and selection. Its authors do not, of course, deny that this kind of classical natural selection happens. But they argue strongly that there is now no reason to privilege it over a crowd of other possible causes. Not only are most mutations known to be destructive but the material of inheritance itself has turned out to be far more complex, and to provide a much wider repertoire of untapped possibilities, than used to be thought. To an impressive extent, organisms provide the materials for changes in their own future. As the authors put it, "Before any phenotype can be, so to speak, 'offered' to selection by the environment, a host of internal constraints have to be satisfied." Epigenetic effects, resulting from different expressions of the same genes, can make a huge difference. And genes themselves are now known not to be independent, bean-like items connected to particular transmitted traits, but aspects of a most intricate process, sensitive to all sorts of internal factors, so that in many ways the same genes can result in a different creature. Recent work in "evodevo" – evolutionary developmental biology – shows how paths of development can themselves change and can change the resulting organism. And again, forces such as "molecular drive", which rearrange the genes, can also have that effect.
Besides this – perhaps even more interestingly – the laws of physics and chemistry themselves take a hand in the developmental process. Matter itself behaves in characteristic ways which are distinctly non-random. Many natural patterns, such as the arrangement of buds on a stem, accord with the series of Fibonacci numbers, and Fibonacci spirals are also observed in spiral nebulae. There are, moreover, no flying pigs, on account of the way in which bones arrange themselves. I am pleased to see that Fodor and Piattelli Palmarini introduce these facts in a chapter headed "The Return of the Laws of Form" and connect them with the names of D'Arcy Thompson, Conrad Waddington and Ilya Prigogine. Though they don't actually mention Goethe, that reference still rightly picks up an important, genuinely scientific strand of investigation which was for some time oddly eclipsed by neo-Darwinist fascination with the drama of randomness and the illusory seductions of simplicity.
This book is, of course, fighting stuff, sure to be contested by those at whom it is aimed. On the face of things, however, it strikes an outsider as an overdue and valuable onslaught on neo-Darwinist simplicities. (The one thing I would complain of is the title, which is perhaps too personal. This isn't just a point about Darwin; it's a point about the nature of life.) As the authors note, the traditional story has been defended by extending it – by widening the notion of natural selection to include some of these internal processes. But they think – surely rightly – that this device merely adds epicycles which kill the doctrine by diluting it. The long process of repeated trials and errors which has always been claimed as a central feature of natural selection cannot be incorporated in this way.
If we now ask what will take its place, their answer is that this question does not arise. There is not – and does not have to be – any single, central mechanism of evolution. There are many such mechanisms, which all need to be investigated on their own terms. If one finds this kind of position reasonable, the interesting next question is, what has made it so hard to accept? What has kept this kind of dogmatic "Darwinism" – largely independent of its founder – afloat for so long, given that much of the material given here is by no means new?
The explanation for this might be the seductive myth that underlies it. That myth had its roots in Victorian social Darwinism but today it flows largely from two books – Jacques Monod's Chance and Necessity (1971) and Richard Dawkins's The Selfish Gene (1976). Both these books, of course, contain lots of good and necessary biological facts. But what made them bestsellers was chiefly the sensational underlying picture of human life supplied by their rhetoric and especially their metaphors. This drama showed heroic, isolated individuals contending, like space warriors, alone against an alien and meaningless cosmos. It established the books as a kind of bible of individualism, most congenial to the Reaganite and Thatcherite ethos of the 80s. Monod first showed humans in Existentialist style as aliens – "gypsies" in a foreign world – and, by expanding the role of chance in evolution, concluded that our life was essentially a "casino". Dawkins added personal drama by describing a population of genes which – quite unlike the real ones inside us – operate as totally independent agents and can do as they please. It is no great surprise that these images caught on, nor that they can now persist whether or not the doctrines linked to them turn out to be scientific.
Mary Midgley's Beast and Man: The Roots of Human Nature is published by Routledge.
~
1) The information in the cell codes for replication, repair, functionality and somehow transfers traits and behaviors as well.
2) Never has new information been shown to enter in, nor has a viable source for this information been identified.
3) Mutations are usually harmful but most of the time they do have an effect on an organism they simply turn a preexisting switch on or off. The cell is full of redundant information that helps conserve and stabilize the population.
Here you go....the link from which the Guardian article was obtained.
Post details: Scientific Consensus is sleep inducing
06/09/10
by David Tyler 10:05:00 am, Categories: Literature - Articles, 879 words Scientific Consensus is sleep inducing
Today, there seem to be many vested interests in scientific consensus. Universities and science associations often make use of the concept when explaining the importance of science in society and in making pronouncements on issues of public significance. Consensus is relevant to funding agencies, who focus their awards on science that appears to be building on an existing knowledge base. It is a factor in peer review, for it is much harder to get unorthodox ideas past the journal review processes. It influences the media: who is regarded as an 'expert' and who should not get exposure because of their unorthodox ideas. How refreshing, then, to find the Royal Institute of Philosophy offering some cautionary words in an editorial:
Popper "called for a clear demarcation between good science, in which theories are constantly challenged, and what he called "pseudo sciences" which couldn't be tested. His debunking of such ideologies led some to describe him as the "murderer of Freud and Marx". [Some of us think the name of Darwin should be added to this list]." (Source here)
Even more welcome are the two examples selected of modern-day scientific consensus: "critics of the theory of evolution and of the reality of climate change". Although the public has been assured time after time that the "science is settled" on these issues, the guardians of these consensus positions will not be pleased by these cautionary words, nor by the judgment offered that the critiques "are not all or entirely without weight".
Scientific Consensus
Editorial
Philosophy, April 2010, 85(2), 181 | doi: 10.1017/S0031819110000161
[Much of the text of this editorial is cited above]
"One of the most striking aspects of Karl Popper's philosophy of science is his insistence that scientific consensus is sleep inducing, intellectually speaking. He did not actually put it quite like that. What he pointed out was that the most successful scientific theory ever devised turned out to be false, even though it had been treated as scientifically practically unquestionable for nigh on two centuries. Popper was thinking of Newton's theory, whose refutation (as Popper saw it) in 1917 was a key moment in his own intellectual life."
Popper "called for a clear demarcation between good science, in which theories are constantly challenged, and what he called "pseudo sciences" which couldn't be tested. His debunking of such ideologies led some to describe him as the "murderer of Freud and Marx". [Some of us think the name of Darwin should be added to this list]." (Source here)
Even more welcome are the two examples selected of modern-day scientific consensus: "critics of the theory of evolution and of the reality of climate change". Although the public has been assured time after time that the "science is settled" on these issues, the guardians of these consensus positions will not be pleased by these cautionary words, nor by the judgment offered that the critiques "are not all or entirely without weight".
"Popper's lesson is little heeded to-day. Critics of the theory of evolution and of the reality of climate change are not so much argued with as vilified, excluded and marginalised in polite scientific and even political circles. It is what one might expect from a very powerful institution, like the medieval Church, but not perhaps from one ostensibly committed to critical rationality and the pursuit of falsification. The criticisms which are made of the theory of evolution and of climate change, as these things are currently and consensually understood, are not all or entirely without weight."It appears to me that the philosophers are not making a judgment on the science, but on the quality of the debate. There are real issues to discuss - the philosophers can recognise that. Furthermore, they are not impressed by the way the defenders of scientific consensus are treating the critiques: ad hominem arguments, straw man arguments, much handwaving, smokescreens and even a refusal to engage with the real issues. Even saying there should be a proper debate can be dangerous:
"We hope that saying that will not bring a heap of opprobrium on our heads. But even if the criticisms were off the wall, those who take Popper seriously may still occasionally catch a whiff of the falsifying rat behind the painted and perfumed consensus."A recent example of the lack of real debate can be found in the reception ofWhat Darwin Got Wrong by Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini. Here is Douglas Futuyma in Science (7 May 2010) in a review entitled: "Two critics without a clue".
"Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini show little familiarity with the vast literature on genetic variation, experimental analyses of natural selection, or other topics on which they philosophically expound. They are blithely agnostic about the causes of evolution and apparently uninterested in fostering any program of research. Because they are prominent in their own fields, some readers may suppose that they are authorities on evolution who have written a profound and important book. They aren't, and it isn't."Another example is the ID prediction of functionality for Junk DNA, and the establishment Darwinists defence of Junk. An interesting report on some recent exchanges is by Jonathan Wells. This concludes:
"If one overlooks the nastiness, it is clear that there are some interesting issues in this debate. Conceptually, what does it mean to say that a segment of DNA has function? Empirically, what does the evidence show? One might think that professors Matheson, Hunt and Moran would address the conceptual issue calmly, rationally, and collegially. But they don't; instead, they stoop to misrepresentation and ridicule. And one might think that they would address the empirical issue by citing published scientific evidence. But they don't; instead, they simply proclaim themselves the only authorities on the subject."What we are seeing is a warped science. Instead of championing empiricism and testing of hypotheses, the consensus scientists end up appealing to authority and treating the evidence lightly. They are making the same mistake as the Medieval Church.
Scientific Consensus
Editorial
Philosophy, April 2010, 85(2), 181 | doi: 10.1017/S0031819110000161
[Much of the text of this editorial is cited above]
~
Yep. A strange twist of fate.
We who are YEC/ID proponenents based on the science and the observable evidence find ourselves in the position of being Martin Luther tacking our theses on the door of the Church of Darwin. Despite the fact that Darwinists show no source for information and no cause for the breath of life and no proof that macroevolution ever happens or has happened the Priests of Darwin have declared what the Orthodox view will be the only view and prepare their tortures and trials for those who will not repent and recant!
Post details: K'necting The Dots: Modeling Functional Integration In Biological Systems
06/11/10
by Robert Deyes 12:47:59 pm, Categories: Commentary - Announcements, 927 words K'necting The Dots: Modeling Functional Integration In Biological Systems
By Robert Deyes
ARN Correspondent
In 2001 Stephen Meyer, Paul Nelson and Paul Chien wrote a lengthy discourse that explored the scientific challenges that the Cambrian Explosion of life poses to the Darwinian account of animal origins (1). Central to their arguments was the idea that biological processes in the organismic context are so tightly integrated that changes in one process invariably require compensatory changes elsewhere (1). Their illustration of this basic premise seemed intuitive enough:
"If an engineer modifies the length of the piston rods in an internal combustion engine, but does not modify the crankshaft accordingly, the engine won't start. Similarly, processes of development are so tightly integrated temporally and spatially that one change early in development will require a host of other coordinated changes in separate but functionally interrelated developmental processes downstream" (1)
Drawing from examples cited in the biological literature and comments made by opinion leaders, notably geneticist John McDonald and zoologist Soren Lovtrup, the verdict they arrived at was that "those genes which govern major changes, the very stuff of macroevolution, apparently do not vary, or vary only to the detriment of the organism" (1).
In an effort to model the tight integration of biological processes my sons and I teamed up to assemble a functional multi-component machine better known as the K'Nex Drop-N-Swing. Not only did we successfully demonstrate how the operability of the 'Drop-N-Swing' mechanism was dependent upon the components having precisely the spatial dimensions that they display but we also showed how adjustments to any one of these required concordant adjustments elsewhere in the machine.
The layout of the Drop-N-Swing resembles the sky drop and swing carousel rides one finds in modern amusement parks (seehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=udr-RxcnUFU).
On one side a centrally-located motor drives a series of four sequential gears each of which has just enough gear teeth to crank a chain-linked chair lift up a two foot-tall tower. Because a defined portion of the circumference of the largest gear lacks teeth and can therefore not crank up any weight, the chair drops down immediately upon reaching the top of the tower. This 'rise and fall' cycle is made possible through 86 chain links that form a closed chain circuit around two sprockets located at the bottom and top of the tower. The bottom sprocket is connected to the gear system that consequently turns the chain and causes it to lift up the chair.
As my sons toyed around with the Drop-N-Swing they found that they were unable to decrease the chain length and tower height without cutting down on the number of gear teeth. That is, if they were to maintain the rise and fall capabilities of the chair lift, concordant adjustments were needed at more than one location (otherwise the chair would get irreversibly stuck on the top sprocket). Even the tower height could not be facilely altered since the repeating unit of the tower struts did not correspond to an integral number of chain links.
Newsworthy cases in biology testify to the underlying charge brought by Meyer et al that major evo-morphing of structure and anatomy could not have been brought about through random piecemeal changes to already-extant body plans. Famously Nobel Prize winning biologist Ed Lewis elucidated crucial details about the genetics of embryonic patterning in fruit flies (2-4). Focusing on a group of genes known collectively amongst drosophila geneticists as the Bithorax Complex, Lewis built on the pioneering work of his predecessors who had identified homeotic (developmental patterning) mutants in the Bithorax gene that produced insects with an extra pair of wings (2-4). These appeared appended to the front portion of sophisticated flight balance-mediating organs called halteres situated on either side of the flies (2-4). The Bithorax mutant broke thorassic segment identities (ie one segment was replaced by another). But most importantly the mutant larva died early in development (2).
Meyer et al note how this additional wing pair "innovation" was viably unsustainable for the largely self evident reason that "the developmental mutation was not accompanied by the many other coordinated developmental changes that would have been necessary to ensure the production of the appropriate muscles at the appropriate place on the fly's body" (1). Renowned Cambridge developmental biologist Peter Lawrence made his position clear in a review of the overall findings of homeotic mutation research:
"Homeotic mutations are encouraging because they raise the clarifying prospect of a class of controlling genes responsible for large chunks of the body pattern. They also impress because the mutations produce massive anatomical transformations; it was even thought such mutations could allow the sudden generation of new animal groups during evolution - an idea that looks increasingly implausible (individuals produced by such mutations are very unfit!)." (4)
One cannot help but acknowledge the futility of a story that claims that evolution could have brought about beneficial large scale changes to body plan architecture. The evidence speaks for itself. And simple attempts at modeling do nothing less than support the science.
Further Reading
1. Stephen C. Meyer, Paul A. Nelson, and Paul Chien (2001) The Cambrian Explosion: Biology's Big Bang, Seehttp://www.discovery.org/articleFiles/PDFs/Cambrian.pdf, p.36, This article also appears in the peer-reviewed volume Darwinism, Design, and Public Education published with Michigan State University Press
2. Vidyanand Nanjundiah (1996) The 1995 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, Resonance,http://www.ias.ac.in/resonance/Mar1996/pdf/Mar1996ResearchNews.pdf
3. Stephen Jay Gould (2002) The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press Cambridge, Massachusetts, p.1096
4. Peter Lawrence (1992), The Making of a Fly: The Genetics Of Animal Design, Blackwell Scientific Publications, London, p.211
ARN Correspondent
In 2001 Stephen Meyer, Paul Nelson and Paul Chien wrote a lengthy discourse that explored the scientific challenges that the Cambrian Explosion of life poses to the Darwinian account of animal origins (1). Central to their arguments was the idea that biological processes in the organismic context are so tightly integrated that changes in one process invariably require compensatory changes elsewhere (1). Their illustration of this basic premise seemed intuitive enough:
"If an engineer modifies the length of the piston rods in an internal combustion engine, but does not modify the crankshaft accordingly, the engine won't start. Similarly, processes of development are so tightly integrated temporally and spatially that one change early in development will require a host of other coordinated changes in separate but functionally interrelated developmental processes downstream" (1)
Drawing from examples cited in the biological literature and comments made by opinion leaders, notably geneticist John McDonald and zoologist Soren Lovtrup, the verdict they arrived at was that "those genes which govern major changes, the very stuff of macroevolution, apparently do not vary, or vary only to the detriment of the organism" (1).
In an effort to model the tight integration of biological processes my sons and I teamed up to assemble a functional multi-component machine better known as the K'Nex Drop-N-Swing. Not only did we successfully demonstrate how the operability of the 'Drop-N-Swing' mechanism was dependent upon the components having precisely the spatial dimensions that they display but we also showed how adjustments to any one of these required concordant adjustments elsewhere in the machine.
The layout of the Drop-N-Swing resembles the sky drop and swing carousel rides one finds in modern amusement parks (seehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=udr-RxcnUFU).
On one side a centrally-located motor drives a series of four sequential gears each of which has just enough gear teeth to crank a chain-linked chair lift up a two foot-tall tower. Because a defined portion of the circumference of the largest gear lacks teeth and can therefore not crank up any weight, the chair drops down immediately upon reaching the top of the tower. This 'rise and fall' cycle is made possible through 86 chain links that form a closed chain circuit around two sprockets located at the bottom and top of the tower. The bottom sprocket is connected to the gear system that consequently turns the chain and causes it to lift up the chair.
As my sons toyed around with the Drop-N-Swing they found that they were unable to decrease the chain length and tower height without cutting down on the number of gear teeth. That is, if they were to maintain the rise and fall capabilities of the chair lift, concordant adjustments were needed at more than one location (otherwise the chair would get irreversibly stuck on the top sprocket). Even the tower height could not be facilely altered since the repeating unit of the tower struts did not correspond to an integral number of chain links.
Newsworthy cases in biology testify to the underlying charge brought by Meyer et al that major evo-morphing of structure and anatomy could not have been brought about through random piecemeal changes to already-extant body plans. Famously Nobel Prize winning biologist Ed Lewis elucidated crucial details about the genetics of embryonic patterning in fruit flies (2-4). Focusing on a group of genes known collectively amongst drosophila geneticists as the Bithorax Complex, Lewis built on the pioneering work of his predecessors who had identified homeotic (developmental patterning) mutants in the Bithorax gene that produced insects with an extra pair of wings (2-4). These appeared appended to the front portion of sophisticated flight balance-mediating organs called halteres situated on either side of the flies (2-4). The Bithorax mutant broke thorassic segment identities (ie one segment was replaced by another). But most importantly the mutant larva died early in development (2).
Meyer et al note how this additional wing pair "innovation" was viably unsustainable for the largely self evident reason that "the developmental mutation was not accompanied by the many other coordinated developmental changes that would have been necessary to ensure the production of the appropriate muscles at the appropriate place on the fly's body" (1). Renowned Cambridge developmental biologist Peter Lawrence made his position clear in a review of the overall findings of homeotic mutation research:
"Homeotic mutations are encouraging because they raise the clarifying prospect of a class of controlling genes responsible for large chunks of the body pattern. They also impress because the mutations produce massive anatomical transformations; it was even thought such mutations could allow the sudden generation of new animal groups during evolution - an idea that looks increasingly implausible (individuals produced by such mutations are very unfit!)." (4)
One cannot help but acknowledge the futility of a story that claims that evolution could have brought about beneficial large scale changes to body plan architecture. The evidence speaks for itself. And simple attempts at modeling do nothing less than support the science.
Further Reading
1. Stephen C. Meyer, Paul A. Nelson, and Paul Chien (2001) The Cambrian Explosion: Biology's Big Bang, Seehttp://www.discovery.org/articleFiles/PDFs/Cambrian.pdf, p.36, This article also appears in the peer-reviewed volume Darwinism, Design, and Public Education published with Michigan State University Press
2. Vidyanand Nanjundiah (1996) The 1995 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, Resonance,http://www.ias.ac.in/resonance/Mar1996/pdf/Mar1996ResearchNews.pdf
3. Stephen Jay Gould (2002) The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press Cambridge, Massachusetts, p.1096
4. Peter Lawrence (1992), The Making of a Fly: The Genetics Of Animal Design, Blackwell Scientific Publications, London, p.211