Alessandro,

Sorry I am just now getting back to you, as I am I finally catching up on email.

>Firts of all, I could only see you critisize evolution, but saw no
>proposal of yours. This can be maybe because I have read too little
>(only those two articles you referred Otavius to), but I wish you
>revealed what you believe in. In think that, if evolution is wrong,
>there must be another good and NATURAL mechanism to create life,
>otherwise we will begin to discuss God (the ones that dont believe in
>natural evolution rarely have another theory that is not God).

The reason they rarely have an alternative theory is because there cannot be one. There are only two logical possibilities: life arose naturalistically, or it did not (supernatural). There can only be variations of these themes.

So, evidence against one is surely evidence for the other. If I provide evidence that something could not arise naturalistically, then I have also provided evidence that the opposite is true. If I am sifting through a fire and find a gas can, this becomes evidence against a natural cause of the fire, which means I also found evidence for intelligence.

You also need to realize that evolutionists employ the same type of argument. Gould's famous claim that the pandas thumb is a "bad design" is one such example. An argument against design is certainly an argument for natural origins. So if Gould had proven his case it would have been valid evidence for evolution. Of course his "Panda's thumb" argument has since been shown to be vacuous (dealt in detail here: http://www.answersingenesis.org/home/area/magazines/tj/v13n1_panda.asp)

>Everybody who states evolution is wrong must create another
>satisfactory and TESTABLE (God is not testable, as far as I know)
>theory.

First, I submit that evolution is not falsifiable. The "tests" for evolution are typically phony, since evolution provides a smorgasbord of answers for every possible scenario. For example, finding out-of-sequence fossils is a phony test because out-of-sequence fossils *are* found, its just that evolutionists explains them away. When fossils are found that don't conform to the evolutionary timescale, they can pull various "solutions" from their grab bag of answers, such as "contamination", or "subduction", or "invalid dating". For example, skull 1470 was too modern to fit the date of the tuft it was found in, so it was re-dated to fit the evolutionary paradigm. This despite the fact that 4 independent dating methods originally had placed the tuft at the older date. So much for this independent verification of dates we hear from evolutionists (Lubenow, 1995).

As far as a "testable" theory for origins, its not reasonable to expect to re-create origins in a lab. However, creationist Walter Remine has developed a testable theory for intelligent design in his book "The Biotic Message". This is one of the top creation books out there, and anyone serious about the debate of origins should get it.

Let me also remind you that science is derived from the word "knowledge". To limit science to materialism is to suppress knowledge. Virtually all the founding fathers of the major disciplines of science, including Pasteur whom you mention below, where creationists. Were they being "un-scientific" when they argued for the evidences of a Creator? No, only modern day evolutionists deserve this label since they limit their scope to the naturalistic world.

>(and I prefer to believe in the intervention of aliens than
>in the intervention of God, as aliens are supposed to be, at least,
>something real).

Then all you have done is pushed the question out into space and back in time. How did the aliens originate?

>I dont know what kind of creationist you are, so I would like you to
>specify, for Pasteur has long demonstrated that life comes from life
>in our normal environmental conditions, that bacterias dont come from
>nothing suddenly. So, you, as a mathematician, must propose another
>form of creationism, like the one that God can only play with
>existing species.

I am a Biblical Creationist. I believe God created everything about 6K years ago. For 30 years I believed the earth was billions of years old. I wasn't thrilled finding out that I had been taught as fact something that was based entirely on improvable assumptions.  Now I realize the scientific evidence for an old earth is based on assumptions that have proven to be very flimsy or false, such as the assumption that there are no daughter elements when a rock is first formed. Why should I trust radiometric dating on rocks of unknown age if they can't date rocks of *known* age? Also, the majority of age indicators give an age less than advertised by the evolutionists (ie, short-term comets should have been long gone after some 10,000 years, but they're still here). There are many other evidences, but I realize I am not going to convince you, and you are not going to convince me. We both must rely on improvable assumptions to support our positions on the age of the earth/universe. I choose to trust the opinion of the one Guy who was there. :)

>After this introduction, that you must consider seriously, I would
>like to speculate about some things I believe are failures in your
>arguments (and I expect you to show me they are not).
>Firt, when you say there are no fossile evidences about evolution
>when it comes to invertebrate and vertebrate-invertebrate conection
>and say that this is a evolution failure, I believe you are
>comminting a probability mistake, and you will have to help me with
>that because I have not the right numbers. How many are the species
>of insects today? One million, I estimate. And how many must have
>been the transitions that ocurred during evolution of so many
>species, how many must have been the brunches of its tree, all during
>a geologic period (some 100 million years)? Maybe some a thousand
>times more, 10^12. What this tells us is that we must have an
>astounishing great number of fossiles to record insect evolution.
>And, the fastest the mutation rate, the more fossils we must get. It
>is far too improbable to find two different species of insects in
>different times that are obvious "relatives".

You have provided yet another example from the evolutionist grab bag of answers. Darwin did not think your logic was valid. Only recently has such objections been proposed. Why? Evolutionists were forced to make this objection because the fossil record did not produce any discernible lineage of one organism evolving into another. The gaps are systematic and huge. So evolutionists explained them away by claiming they are supposed to be there. Gould went so far as to claim that his punctuated equilibrium theory would be falsified if gradualism was discovered in the fossil record! Some test that is! (Remine, 1993)

Gould's "labyrinth" or "bush" of evolution is simply not testable. It is set up to be unfalsifiable, as you have so eloquently demonstrated above. You essentially took 99.99% of the fossil record and locked it away, making any evolutionary claims about it unfalsifiable!

To further refute your argument above, if there are on order 10^12 or so insect species or transitionals, why are insects so rare in the fossil record? We should have plenty of examples of insects with features that are clearly in transition. Yet we come up with a big goose egg.

> Then it is
>comprehensible that evolution evidence is only found in vertebrates,
>for their number of species is much smaller, as well as the period of
>time they exist on Earth.

This is not logical. A smaller "bush" of vertebrates is actually still a very large bush, as there are at least 50,000 extant documented vertebrate species.

>You could say there is no evidence for
>fossil evolution even in vertebrates, showing that picture on the
>enclopedia. No, there is evidence for fossile evolution in
>vertebrates, what is missing are connection among ancient and new
>species, but you can see evolution acting in new species and in old
>species. Again, it is a great puzzle, and I think it is satifactory
>that many things are missing.

But the fossil record contradicted what the evolutionists of the 1800s expected, including Darwin. On the other hand, the fossil record is remarkably consistent with creation (sudden appearance, followed by stasis).

Evolutionist Quotes on the Fossil Record

>Even nowadays we see breakthoughs, what
>is natural when we deal with so great numbers, as are the numbers of
>species. We also dont know the natural catastrophes that could have
>happenned to destroy many fossils and make some fossils more probable
>than others. There could have been also lows and highs among species
>that, again, could change the probability of finding a determinate
>fossil.

I think we have a good idea what buried the vast majority of fossils. Online Britannica states that a primary criteria for fossil formation is “rapid burial to retard decomposition”, and that fossils are usually "buried in sedimentary deposits". Nobody disputes this. So, we have billions upon billions of fossils buried all over the world in hardened mud. I can go to a road cut in any state in the US and find a cache of invertebrate fossils. I can find fossils in the gravel at Home Depot. I can go to most any mountain range and find marine fossils. This is powerful evidence for some kind of worldwide catastrophe involving water, wouldn't you say?

>You didnt comment Dawkins results mentioned by Otavius. In his
>computational research, he was able to form an eye in half a million
>years, what is too little time. To see an eye evolving, we would have
>to find fossiles with a time gap of 100 thousand years betwwen them,
>otherwise we would not be able to see evolution. If our time gap was
>1 million years, we would only see something without an eye and then
>see a completely grown eye, suggesting the intervention of God. Once
>more, the real numbers (evolution time scale, number of species etc)
>MUST BE KNOWN for any solid argumentation.

I cannot stress enough how lame Dawkins argument is. It is so blatantly ridiculous, even many evolutionists reject it. For starters, he ignores the irreducible complexity of the biochemistry behind even the simplest level, such as the "light-sensitive spot", which was Dawkins starting point. Behe points out the cascade of factors required to make just this "simple" layer function (Behe, 1996, p 38). I strongly recommend Behe's book, as it clearly dispels Dawkin's myth.

>Second, about the female having to have 40 children to be able to
>pass its beneficial genes, I am really confuse because I think this
>argument is very strange. It is not necessary for the female to
>generate a mutated son and a mutated daughter to continue species,
>just because it that she generates is not a new species, but
>something that can still reproduce with the species of the mother. In
>other words, evolutionary steps are not so big that the son is a new
>species (evidence suggest that they are not very small either, but
>they are not so big).

I'd be very curious as to what evidence suggests evolutionary steps are not "very small either". To be honest, I know where you are going. You are walking right into a big trap! :) But that's OK, it helps demonstrate to the reader just how flimsy the theory of evolution is. I anxiously await your answer!

> Again, this is a unknown point, we simply dont
>know the size of the evolutionary step, but it is obviously not so
>big that two species are formed in one generation. I am not really
>sure if I understood your argument.

The problem is that a female would need to produce 40 offspring to produce one without a new mutation. If she produces less than 40, each generation the genetic load will increase, which means the species would be on a ramp to extinction. How quickly extinction occurs depends on the average number of offspring produced. The fewer offspring, the faster the genetic load builds and the sooner extinction occurs.

In reality, she would need to produce quite a few more offspring than 40 to maintain genetic equilibrium in the population (ie, keep the population from deteriorating). There is still a cost that must be paid for random genetic deaths. For example, some surviving offspring, perhaps the one without a new mutation, may get hit by a falling rock. Or it may be a stuck-up prude and doesn't reproduce! :)

The mutation rate studies arrive at their results by assuming simian/man ancestry. They are comparing DNA between the two. I submit that this assumption is flawed, because the comparisons are yielding mutation rates that are far too high for a mammalian species such as humans to tolerate.

>Besides, I believe you know there are evidence that living systems,
>as physical systems, are critical systems, thay are self-organized,
>they are optimized, they exist in the edge between chaos and order.
>It is not unresonable to say that even the rate of mutation is
>optimized. There should be mechanisms to avoid some genes from being
>mutated, a kind of conservation of the essential, what would diminish
>the probability of a very bad mutation (this would conserve essencial
>characteristics in superior animals, like a central nerve system, for
>example). It is very much plausible that the mutation rate be a
>function of the gene.

There is no evidence to support your hypothesis above, but you'll soon see it doesn't matter. These studies produce a "deleterious" mutation rate. That means the mutation changes an amino acid in a protein. Mutations to highly constrained genes (ie lethal mutations) would not be detectable in these studies, which renders your argument above moot (regardless of your argument's lack of evidence).

>To sum up, you say that information cannot be created if there is no
>sender. Information is something intimately connected with entropy.

It depends on your definition of entropy. In the context of thermodynamics it means one thing, in the context of information science it means something else.

>And, as we know, life can exist espontaneously because it is a LOCAL
>decrease of entropy (or creation of information), but a global
>increase (or destruction of information), for life increases the
>entropy of its surrounding medium more than it decreases on itself.
>So, there is no paradox about information creation (or entropy
>decrease).

I agree that the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics does not rule out evolution, because the 2nd law does not prevent a low-entropy state to persist so long as the sum entropy of the entire system is a non-decreasing function of time.

However, "informational" entropy is NOT thermodynamic entropy! Many evolutionists realize this, including evolutionist (and socialist) Dr Tom Schnieder of NCI:

Information is not uncertainty (entropy)

>I conclude saying that I expect a free discussion, of ideas. Great
>part of what I said are speculations about your arguments, with the
>intention of showing you they are so fragile as are evidences
>favouring evolution, only to show you that there are other
>speculative paths to protect evolution. Evolution is something very
>difficult to prove, but there are strong sugestion about its truth.
>The strongest, I think, is the DNA structure that is common to all
>life forms

Interestingly, I think this is the greatest argument AGAINST evolution! Finding a genetic code was absolutely devastating to the evolutionist position. It moved it from the highly improbable to the impossible. I repeat, you cannot have a code without an intelligent sender. Throughout mankind there are countless observations that have confirmed this fact of nature. There is not one single counter example to overturn this law (Gitt 2000).

When Francis Crick co-discovered DNA, soon thereafter he rejected the modern theory of evolution. To remain true to his desire to remain unaccountable to a Higher Authority, he latched onto "panspermia" which essentially says that life was seeded by either aliens or meteors from outer space. Essentially all Crick did was push the problem back into space and time.

> and the little fossil evidence that do exist.

I have an article that shows the fossil record is in stark contradiction to evolution, and in solid favor of creation:

The Great Fossil Illusion

>Maybe some rates of mutation are wrong, there are many things we dont know.
>Other strong evidences: the presence of a great quantity of genes
>that seem to be evolutionary thrash,
>Also the resemblance of the human fetus in its
>early stage of development in the mothers womb with fetus of
>primitive animals.

This is based on fraudulent data. See:

http://www.answersingenesis.org/docs/1339.asp

>That is why your work is important, to continue
>research. But you cannot say evolution is wrong, because you also
>have no proof, and I believe (I wait your answer) have no better
>model.

There is overwhelming evidence for the creation model, the genetic code for one, as I mentioned earlier. I list other evidences in my opening argument of my debate with Budikka:

http://www.evolutionfairytale.com/articles_debates/bdka_myopening.htm

>Evolution is strong more because of its natural character than
>because of evidences. It is something that happens naturally,

You have just used a tautological argument and a circular argument rolled into one. Such redundant circular statements do not explain anything.

>it is a
>property of a physical system with determinate initial conditions. It
>is a system that reproduces, and changes, and only the changes that
>permits the system to have advantage survive in time. There is no
>God, no strange force acting on particles. And, if someone defended
>that God created humans and all life forms, I think it would be
>required to find another evidence of God, otherwise it becomes a
>self-explanatory theory, and no one likes such a thing.

Ironically, this is what you just did above!

Again, I have cited many compelling, undeniable evidences for a Designer. I also pointed out that the criteria for such evidence was espoused by all the great scientists of the past. Modern day skeptics try to remove the possibility of supernatural from "science" because then they can claim belief in God is anti-science!

>God, my friend, is not something to be discussed: it is the
>personification of the intimate desire of each man to be something
>that makes sense, God is as many as are the men - if there is no God,
>life has no purpose. What is inside the Human mind should not be
>confused with the physical reality, that is logic, cold and not
>human.

If your mind is the result of random mutation and blind selection with no cosmic purpose, then why should we even care what you have to say? :)

To conclude, you provided no tangible evidence for evolution, only just-so stories. Specifically, you cited the fossil record, which I have shown contradicts what evolutionists originally expected,  you cited DNA, which information science refutes as evidence for a naturalistic origin and actually demands an intelligent designer, and you cited embryonic similarities, something that is based on a fraud.

Renowned British physicist Lord Kelvin said it best: "Overwhelming strong proofs of intelligent and benevolent design lie around us ... The atheistic idea is so nonsensical that I cannot put it into words."

Sincerely,
Fred Williams

---

Lubenow, M. 1995, Bones of Contention, p 247-266

Remine, W. 1993, The Biotic Message

Behe, M. 1996, Darwin's Black Box

Gitt, W, 2000, In The Beginning was Information. Dr Werner Gitt is an information scientist and a Director at the German Federal Institute of Physics & Technology