I reviewed the guy's web sites and didn't see any creationism or even anti-evolution stuff. It does seem mostly an extensive and rigorous scientific questioning of the Darwinist mechanism of evolution. Scientific questioning is good, right? And if your theory satisfactorily addresses the questioning, then its stronger for the effort. Religions are beyond scientific questioning, and that seems to be the category that Paulsen puts Darwinism in.

Umm, that doesn't mean that he isn't a creationist or that his "scientific questioning" isn't motivated by a desire to discredit theories he views to be in conflict with creationism.

I've always taken the creationists to be the wacko 6000 year old earth crowd, and I didn't see any of that here. But whatever the motivations, scientific arguments have to stand or fall on thier own, i.e. the evidence and logic presented.

Oh yeah, very scientific:

"The point that Darwinists ignore, however, is this: Living things were created! There is no such thing as evolution in the history of life. God is the Creator and Lord of all things. It is He Who creates matter and gives life to any entity. There is no other Creator than God, and no other power but Him. Therefore, there is nothing but proofs of the fact of Creation on Earth."

"Evolution has been demolished with countless proofs. One of the greatest of these proofs are the "living fossils," whose numbers are being added to with every passing day. The fact that a life form has remained the same for 150 million years, never changing over even 300 million years, definitively eliminates the evolution scenario. Millions of living species, about which countless evolutionary scenarios have been produced, show fossilized evidence that they never evolved. What we now observe are living things that, according to Darwinists, should have undergone evolution. Yet the fossil specimens of those identical species document the fact that they have never undergone any evolution at all."

This is not scientific questioning. The first paragraph is typical religious guff and can be dismissed as such. The second is also nonsense; it ignores that the principle of evolution is 'survival of the fittest'. If an organism hasn't changed in 150 million years it simply demonstrates that it's perfectly adapted to its environmental niche. Any changes so far have resulted in it being less fit and so they haven't survived. The rest of his websites are much the same as any Christian creationist sites, filled with selective information and half-truths.

If this is what passes for "rigorous scientific questioning" in your mind then I'm not surprised that you find the idea of all forms of life being created in their current forms by a mysterious supernatural being – despite there being absolutely no proof of this whatsoever – a credible alternative to a bona fide scientific theory which can be tested.

People who accept Darwin's theory (and it's not an '-ism' any more than modern physics is 'Einsteinism'; it is not an ideology, it is empirical reasoning based on factual, testable observation) generally do not view it as "beyond scientific questioning", only that, so far, scientific questioning has failed to disprove it. If Yayah's level of discourse is the standard for disproving Darwin then I can't see the theory being brought down any time soon. Unfortunately it looks like Creationism is also here to stay; as a religious doctrine it is indeed beyond scientific questioning.

As an academic, I got one of his 13 pound books, "The Atlas of Creation" in the mail. I sit my printer on top of it. Most outrageously pointless use of paper I have ever encountered.

celtic6:

I've always taken the creationists to be the wacko 6000 year old earth crowd, and I didn't see any of that here. But whatever the motivations, scientific arguments have to stand or fall on thier own, i.e. the evidence and logic presented.

Of course, but your original assertion was that this wasn't about creationism, and I think you're wrong. I don't think what he's doing really comes under the heading "scientific questioning." He's not looking at the body of evidence as a whole, he's just trying to pick apart evolution. Consider all this nonsense about how evolution must be false because the fossil record indicates that some species haven't changed much over extremely long time periods. That evidence is not contrary to the theory of evolution. Not all species have to evolve into different species; species evolve in accordance with changing environmental pressures. Therefore it's not surprising that some species don't change very much throughout history; or, in other cases, different populations of the same species may be exposed to different environments, and one population evolves (forming a new branch) and the other does not.

celtic6:

I've always taken the creationists to be the wacko 6000 year old earth crowd, and I didn't see any of that here. But whatever the motivations, scientific arguments have to stand or fall on thier own, i.e. the evidence and logic presented.

By the way, not all creationists are young earth creationists.

Yes, that was the position of Scientific Creationists from the 80's- to pick apart the theory of Evolution (and tacitly avoiding the picking apart of religious theories). I guess the more modern movement is the Intelligent Design theory. Instead of replacing evolution in the textbooks, these guys just want the religious view to be given equal time in the Biology textbooks.

So Turkey is stuck in the 80's? Ah well...better than stuck in medieval times anyway.

C-Tips:

People who accept Darwin's theory (and it's not an '-ism' any more than modern physics is 'Einsteinism'; it is not an ideology, it is empirical reasoning based on factual, testable observation)

C'mon now, when was the test performed that confirmed Darwin's theory? You know its not testable like other scientific theory's given the long time periods needed to confirm. Sure species can change over time (selective breeding was known about and practiced hundreds of years before Darwin) but the big question is if evolution could have happened the way Darwin theorized ( since updated to include mutations). Sort of left, in large part, with probabilities and a lot of the analysis I've seen indicates extreme improbabilities it could have happened Darwin's way. I'll note that the probabilities of life beginning from the elements and conditions of earth are such that Francis Crick (Nobel for DNA) and even Richard Dawkins have resorted to speculating about life originating from outer space! Yeah, I know Darwin comes in after life, but I'm guessing that you're not willing to accept that consciousness was initially involved in life creation (and then just sat back to let randomness take over).

A friend of mine got one of those. He said it was extremely useful when he ran out of a vital supply at his cabin. :)

"C'mon now, when was the test performed that confirmed Darwin's theory?"

>>By definition scientific theoriess cannot be proven, only falsified. It's no more possible to 'confirm' evolutionary theory than it's possible to confirm the theory of gravitational attraction or the heliocentric model of the solar system.

This isn't a problem, of course (for evolution or any otehr theory), since scientific theories don't derive confidence from some possibility that they might one day be 'confirmed' or otherwise proven to be true: confidence in scientific theories derives from that they comprehensively and predictively explain observations within their scope.

"You know its not testable like other scientific theory's given the long time periods needed to confirm."

>>Evolutionary theories are just as 'testable' as are other scientific theories, as like all other scientific theories they're predictive (i.e., identify observations sufficient for their falsification). A few examples off the top of my head: direct observation of a species arising without descent; any observation that violated the fundamental unity of life (organisms that did not use DNA as the molecular basis for inheritance); any observation that violated a nested hierarchy of species (if we observed living organisms that exhibited combined features from different hierarchic groupings: nonvascular plants that bore seeds or flowers like vascular plants, non-seed plants like ferns exhibiting woody stems (only some angiosperms have woody stems), birds with mammary glands or hair, mammals with feathers , a fish or amphibian with cusped teeth (only characteristics of mammals), etc.; fossil evidence of contemporary and ancestral forms that exploited the same environmental niches stratigraphically associated (dolphins with icthyosaurs, cetaceans with pleisosaurs, great white sharks with cacharadon megalodons, etc.); independent phylogenies derived from genetic or peptide homologies which did not converge; fossils found out of chronological sequence (e.g., finding avian fossils that predate the origin of theropod reptiles or mammalian fossils that predate therapsid reptiles.)

"Sure species can change over time (selective breeding was known about and practiced hundreds of years before Darwin) but the big question is if evolution could have happened the way Darwin theorized ( since updated to include mutations)."

>>Evolution can result in much more than species changing over time: it can also result in entirely new species arising by evolutionary descent from parental ones. We've directed observed this happening in the wild, which by definition means we've directly observed macroevolution occurring.

For example:

Dobzhansky, Th., and O. Pavlovsky, 1971. "An experimentally created incipient species of Drosophila", Nature 23:289-292.

Mosquin, T., 1967. "Evidence for autopolyploidy in Epilobium angustifolium (Onaagraceae)", Evolution 21:713-719

Rabe, Eric W.. Haufler, Christopher H.. Incipient polyploid speciation in the maidenhair fern (Adiantum pedatum; Adiantaceae)? The American Journal of Botany. V79. P701(7) June, 1992.

Gottlieb, L. D. 1973. Genetic differentiation, sympatric speciation, and the origin of a diploid species of Stephanomeria. American Journal of Botany 60(6):545-553

Solano, E., Castiglia, R., Corti M. 2007 A new chromosomal race of the house mouse, Mus musculus domesticus, in the Vulcano Island-Aeolian Archipelago, Italy,

Hereditas 144 (3), 75–77

There’s an interesting case of multiple new species of mice, all reproductively isolated from themselves and their ancestral parent speeies, arising from a common parental population of mus musculus domesticus occurring as the result of Robertsonian fusions altering karyotype as reported in "Chromosomes and speciation in Mus musculus domesticus", E. Capanna, R. Castigli, Cytogenetic and Genome Research 2004;105:375-384 .

"Sort of left, in large part, with probabilities and a lot of the analysis I've seen indicates extreme improbabilities it could have happened Darwin's way."

>>Can you identify those improbabilities, showing you're math (how you've calculated them and from what starting assumptions)? I'm aware of no argument from probability that is sufficient to undermine the conclusion that the biological diversity we observe is the result of evolution—most in fact start from completely false starting assumptions (like the misuse of Borel's Single Law of Chance) or model something that evolution does not in fact predict (the idea that a specific protein, or all the genes necessary for a primitive living cells, would have to arise as a single event in a completely random manner (see Hoyle and Wracksmasinghe for an example of such a flawed argument))..

" I'll note that the probabilities of life beginning from the elements and conditions of earth are such that Francis Crick (Nobel for DNA) and even Richard Dawkins have resorted to speculating about life originating from outer space!"

>>Uhhh… you are aware that evolutionary theories make no statements or predictions about how life arose from non-living precursors? Evolution doesn't address how the first living organisms arose—they only address change in the genetic composition of populations of already living organisms over generations. You're conflating biogenesis with evolution.

"Yeah, I know Darwin comes in after life, but I'm guessing that you're not willing to accept that consciousness was initially involved in life creation (and then just sat back to let randomness take over)."

>>If you've got credible evidence to support the premise that consciousness was initially involved in life creation of course I'd consider it. If you don't, however, what exactly would I gain by considering the involvement of a speculative consciousness?

celtic6:

C-Tips:

People who accept Darwin's theory (and it's not an '-ism' any more than modern physics is 'Einsteinism'; it is not an ideology, it is empirical reasoning based on factual, testable observation)

C'mon now, when was the test performed that confirmed Darwin's theory? You know its not testable like other scientific theory's given the long time periods needed to confirm. Sure species can change over time (selective breeding was known about and practiced hundreds of years before Darwin) but the big question is if evolution could have happened the way Darwin theorized ( since updated to include mutations). Sort of left, in large part, with probabilities and a lot of the analysis I've seen indicates extreme improbabilities it could have happened Darwin's way. I'll note that the probabilities of life beginning from the elements and conditions of earth are such that Francis Crick (Nobel for DNA) and even Richard Dawkins have resorted to speculating about life originating from outer space! Yeah, I know Darwin comes in after life, but I'm guessing that you're not willing to accept that consciousness was initially involved in life creation (and then just sat back to let randomness take over).

I don't really follow what your problem is. You accept that animals can change over time i.e. evolve. Presumably then you accept that over millions of years they can diverge in to different species from common ancestors. There is a vast amount of empirical evidence to support this and it has been observed to happen in laboratory conditions. So if you accept this then you accept Darwin's theory of evolution.

As for how life first originated, why do you find the notion of some unknown supernatural being reasonable, yet exclaim about Dawkins' or Crick's speculation as if it's absurd? I'd be willing to accept that a consciousness was initially involved if there was a shred of evidence supporting the idea. So far there isn't. Incredulity that, gosh, things like life just couldn't happen randomly does not count as evidence, and that's basically the ID argument. It's no more scientific than the 6,000 year old earth camp, and that's why it should be kept firmly in the theological text books and not the biological.

Ba-zing.

I don't know - at least in Medieval Times (TM) you get to wear a cardboard crown and eat a big turkey leg while watching the jousts. That's more fun than the 80's. :)

Thank you, sir. :)