Tag: PBS
Darwin’s Failed Predictions, Slide 12: “The origin of life remains a mystery” (from JudgingPBS.com)
[Editor’s Note: This is slide 12 in a series of 14 slides available at JudgingPBS.com, a new website featuring “Darwin’s Failed Predictions,” a response to PBS-NOVA’s online materials for their “Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial” documentary.] If, as Slide 11 suggests, human origins are a mystery to Darwinian scientists, the chemical origin of life presents a far greater challenge. As Gregg Easterbrook recently wrote in Wired Magazine, “What creates life out of the inanimate compounds that make up living things? No one knows. How were the first organisms assembled? Nature hasn’t given us the slightest hint. If anything, the mystery has deepened over time.”1 Origin of life theorists have struggled simply to account for the origin of pre-biological organic Read More ›
Darwin’s Failed Predictions, Slide 11: “Human evolution remains a mystery” (from JudgingPBS.com) (Updated)
[Editor’s Note: This is slide 11 in a series of 14 slides available at JudgingPBS.com, a new website featuring “Darwin’s Failed Predictions,” a response to PBS-NOVA’s online materials for their “Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial” documentary.] In 1980, the famed late evolutionary paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould noted that, “[m]ost hominid fossils, even though they serve as a basis for endless speculation and elaborate storytelling, are fragments of jaws and scraps of skulls.”1 PBS confidently asserts that our species, Homo sapiens, evolved from ape-like species, but the fossil record tells a different story. The fossil record contains two basic types of hominids: those that can be classified as ape-like and those that can be classified as modern human-like. But there Read More ›
Darwin’s Failed Predictions, Slide 10: “The myth of 1% human-chimp genetic differences” (from JudgingPBS.com)
[Editor’s Note: This is slide 10 in a series of 14 slides available at JudgingPBS.com, a new website featuring “Darwin’s Failed Predictions,” a response to PBS-NOVA’s online materials for their “Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial” documentary.] As if trying to suggest that those who question human-chimp common ancestry are ignorant, PBS asserts that “a schoolchild can cite the figure perhaps most often called forth in support of [human/chimp common ancestry]–namely, that we share almost 99 percent of our DNA with our closest living relative, the chimpanzee.” Such an argument raises two questions: (1) Is the 99% Human/Chimp DNA-similarity statistic accurate? While recent studies have confirmed that certain stretches of human and chimp DNA are on average about 1.23% different, Read More ›
Darwin’s Failed Predictions, Slide 9: “Saving the Tree of Life” (from JudgingPBS.com)
[Editor’s Note: This is slide 9 in a series of 14 slides available at JudgingPBS.com, a new website featuring “Darwin’s Failed Predictions,” a response to PBS-NOVA’s online materials for their “Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial” documentary.] PBS asserts that “shared amino acids” in genes common to many types of organisms indicate that all life shares a common ancestor. Intelligent design is not necessarily incompatible with common ancestry, but it must be noted that intelligent agents commonly re-use parts that work in different designs. Thus, similarities in such genetic sequences may also be generated as a result of functional requirements and common design rather than by common descent. In fact, PBS’s statement is highly misleading. Darwin’s tree of life–the notion Read More ›
Darwin’s Failed Predictions, Slide 8: “Why sexual selection?” (from JudgingPBS.com)
[Editor’s Note: This is slide 8 in a series of 14 slides available at JudgingPBS.com, a new website featuring “Darwin’s Failed Predictions,” a response to PBS-NOVA’s online materials for their “Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial” documentary.] According to PBS, the male peacock’s beautifully-colored tail is easily explained using sexual selection: females prefer the colorful “eyes” on the tails of males. Has the evolutionary origin of the peacock’s tail been explained? Sexual selection merely pushes the question back: why should female peacocks prefer male peacocks with tails that have “eyes”? Absent a linkage to survival and reproduction, sexual selection is now a circular argument: male peacocks have beautiful tails because females prefer such tails, and females prefer such tails because Read More ›