On Mon, 30 Dec 1996 20:45:47, Glenn Morton wrote:
JB>However, the Evolutionist Party is much larger, much more united,
>much more powerful in the culture. ANY challenge, be it from YECs
>or biochemists like Behe, and they tar their critics with the same
>brush (e.g., Nature mag calling Behe a fundamentalist
>apologist). They hold the power, too, in the academy and in the
>journals. And when was the last time the ACLU represented ICR?
Good point. There is no real comparison with the name-calling that
YECs dish out and the real power to silence dissent that the
Naturalists have.
GM>I have posted my ideas on Talk origins and got no flack at all and I
>was arguing for a historical Genesis 1-11. Maybe the problem is not
>that evolutionists hate the Bible, but that they hate factual error.
>The anti-evolutionists really don't get their observational facts
>correct.
I saw Glenn's post on t.o. From memory they just labelled it
"creationist". I would have thought that if "evolutionists...hate
factual error" they would have criticised Glenn's claim that a
5.5 mya Homo erectus built a 3-decker Ark! :-)
[...]
GM>By the way, Johnson does indeed speak as a priest of the high church
>of anti-evolutionism. And he too gets his facts wrong. I have
>posted this several times. Johnson writes:
>
>"By what Darwinian process did useful hind limbs wither away to
>vestigial proportions, and at what stage in the transformation from
>rodent to sea monster did this occur? Did rodent forelimbs
>transform themselves by gradual adaptive stages into whale flippers?
>We hear nothing of the difficulties because to Darwinists unsolvable
>problems are not important."~Darwin on Trial, 2nd ed. 1993,p. 87
>
>Whales are believed to have come from Mesonyx, a Creodont mammal in
>the order Carnivora. Rodents have their own order, Rodentia. No
>scientist believes that a rodent gave rise to a whale. Johnson's
>lawyer training is showing. Yet as one of the High Priests of
>anti-evolutionism, people in the creationist camp defend this
>obvious sophmore level error in his science.
Johnson is writing popularly, and therefore he uses the words
"rodent" and "sea monster" metaphorically. Before Glenn's above
quote, in the same book Johnson wrote:
"Nobody is proposing that an ancestral rodent (or whatever) became a
whale or a bat in a single episode of speciation...Many intermediate
species would have had to exist..." (Johnson P.E., "Darwin on
Trial", 1993, pp53-54).
Elsewhere, before a more scientifically literate audience, and
writing 3 years earlier, Johnson shows he is fully aware of the
scientific literature by using the correct term "rodent-like":
"For example, if Darwinism is true then the bat, monkey, pig, seal,
and whale all evolved in gradual adaptive stages from a primitive
rodent-like predecessor." (Johnson P.E. "Evolution as Dogma: The
Establishment of Naturalism", Foundation for Thought and Ethics,
1990, p35)
It is interesting that when Darwinists write popularly and commit
scientific inexactitudes, it is defended as the need to "dumb-down"
for the general reader. But when an anti-evolutionist does it, it is
a "sophmore level error in his science".
In any event, Johnson takes the word "rodent" from the evolutionists
themselves! On page 51 of DOT, Johnson quotes Steven Stanley:
"Let us suppose that we wish, hypothetically, to form a bat or a
whale...[by a] process of gradual transformation of established
species. If an average chronospecies lasts nearly a million years,
or even longer, and we have at our disposal only ten million years,
then we have only ten or fifteen chronospecies1 to align, end-to-end,
to form a continuous lineage connecting our primitive little mammal
with a bat or a whale. This is clearly preposterous. Chronospecies,
by definition, grade into each other, and each one encompasses very
little change. A chain of ten or fifteen of these might move us from
one small RODENT LIKE FORM to a slightly different one, perhaps
representing a new genus, but not to a bat or a whale!' (Stanley
S.M, "The New Evolutionary Timetable". 1981, Basic Books, NY, p.
71. My emphasis).
Other evolutionists also speak of the first mammals in this way:
"The conviction on the part of Crompton, Jenkins, and Hopson that the
mammals did constitute a monophyletic group stemmed from studies of
newly discovered Upper Triassic fossils and reexamination of others
of approximately equivalent age. The new material..consisted not
just of teeth but of skulls and postcranial bones belonging to
animals eventually named Erythrotherium and Megazostrodon. From the
structure of their teeth these animals proved to be mammals...A
reconstructions shows Erythrotherium to have been rather similar to a
RAT in its appearance and far too small to have attracted the
attention of the prosauropod dinosaurs that shared its territory."
(Stahl B.J., "Vertebrate history: Problems in Evolution", 1985, pp411-412.
My emphasis)
"Typical Mesozoic mammals were, on the average, no bigger
than A RAT OR MOUSE and may have resembled these living forms in
general appearance (although not in structure). Their teeth were
sharp; they were seemingly flesh-eaters in their tendencies, as had
been their reptilian ancestors, but most of them were too small to
attack other vertebrates. Probably insects and worms were their main
diet, eked out by buds, eggs, and whatever came to hand." (Romer A.S.,
"Man and the Vertebrates", 1960 reprint, Vol. 1, p127)
God bless.
Steve
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