Yuval Yaron (also known as Pem the Kabbalists) brings impressions from a conference of converts who dealt with the denial of evolution. The article was first published on the Free website and is presented here with the permission of the author
Yuval Yaron
On Tuesday, June 19.6.2001, 33, I went to hear Dr. (Medicine) Moshe Kapah's lecture "Evolution: Science or Faith". According to the notices pasted around Haifa, the lecture was intended for a secular, young and educated audience. In reality half of the people who came were religious, I (XNUMX) was one of the youngest in the hall, and the level of the lecture showed that an educated audience was the last thing the lecturer would want to see in the hall. I will use this lecture to demonstrate the tactics and arguments used by creationists, and to show how easy it is, with the proper knowledge, to refute all creationist arguments
The lecture included most of the usual Mahbat (Mahbat = repentant) arguments against evolution, which I will briefly summarize before describing the lecturer's arguments in detail:
1) Evolution is a sequence of improbable cases, which by chance led to the creation of the crown of creation, namely man.
2) The structure of the human body, both anatomically and biochemically, is very complex, so it cannot have been created by chance.
3) In addition, there is absolutely no evidence to support evolution. In particular, intermediate stages between different species are missing, and therefore,
4) Most of the scientists (physicists and chemists) in the world have already rejected the theory and only the biologists are still lagging behind them.
5) The reason why there are those who accept the theory of evolution is their unwillingness to accept God, which will force them to admit that they are sinners or to repent.
As will become clear from the description of the course of the lecture, and the explanation I will add after it about what the theory of evolution actually is and where the lecturer lied (my name and address for libel claims: Yuval Yaron, Kirit Amal Road 26, Tivon), the doctor did not want his listeners to know what the theory is that he claims to disprove.
Dr. Kapeh is not unusual among creationists: I have attended quite a few lectures by creationists, and I have read several of their books, all of them repeat the four main claims he made, and none of them give any idea what the theory is. Their method is to use a "strawman argument" in which they present their own "evolutionary theory", let the audience or readers understand that this is the evolutionary theory accepted by the scientists (or those of them who have not yet seen the light), and then pounce on that scarecrow in an overflow of foam and destroy it. If you ask them why they don't explain what evolution really is, they will explain that the shortness of time forces them to be brief.
At the beginning of his lecture, Dr. Kapeh singled out two concepts: one is mutation, a change in DNA that, according to Kapeh, is caused by radiation. The second is probability. Here the doctor performed a trick common among creationists, but if he had tried it in the statistics exam he would have failed the course:
Suppose we perform an experiment dividing the patient population into two groups. There is always the possibility that the results we got, even though they look like the treatment had an effect, were actually obtained by chance. (My example: if we flip a fair coin 5 times, there is still a 1:16 chance that the coin will land 5 times on the same side). The statistical test excludes the probability of getting a result that appears to be different from random chance. If this probability, denoted in statistics by the letter P, is lower than a certain threshold value that we set in advance, usually 0.05 or 0.01, we reject the hypothesis that the result we got is random. The threshold value is called "significance level". Even if we reject the same hypothesis (called the null hypothesis), it still does not necessarily mean that the null hypothesis is incorrect: there is still a chance equal to P that we rejected a correct null hypothesis and the result we got is indeed accidental. Such a rejection of a true null hypothesis is called a "type 1 error".
Type 2 error is accepting the null hypothesis, even though this hypothesis is not true, i.e. rejecting your theory even though it is true. The doctor didn't say a word about type 2 errors, and in fact he didn't say the words "type 1 error" either. One of the common mistakes is to assume that after the end of the experiment, the chance of making a type 2 error is equal to one minus the chance of making a type 1 error. This is also the impression that the doctor was trying to make: he repeatedly claimed during the lecture that if the chance of getting something by chance is, say, one in a thousand, then the chance That something not received by chance is 0.999.
Let's go back for a moment to the coin that is tipped 5 times. I take a coin out of my pocket now and toss it. The results I got are: Peli, Peli, Peli, tree, tree. Since the odds of getting 3 tails and then two tails is 1:32, the chance that my coin tends to land first on a tail and then on a tail is 31:32, or 0.969.
Of course I cheated here: if the results I would get were flip, tree, flip, tree, flip I would use the exact same calculation to claim that my coin "remembers" which side it fell on first, and makes sure to fall on the other side the next time. What helped me cheat was the fact that before I flipped the coin I didn't formulate the hypothesis I wanted to test. Each sequence of a Waffle tree has the same probability - 1 in 32. Therefore, if I had predicted this sequence in advance, I could claim that the hypothesis that the coin falling on one side or the other is completely random has been rejected. I will return to the coin, but I will continue with the lecturer's arguments in the order in which he presented them.
The theory of evolution, according to Kaph, was practiced by Darwin after he saw in the Galapagos Islands creatures that were similar to each other. From this he concluded that the similarity originated from a common origin. To illustrate how silly this idea is, the Doctor presented a slide showing planes from different eras. Just as the similarity between the Wright brothers' plane and the World War II plane does not show that one evolved from the other, so the similarity between a small fish and a large fish does not show that the big fish evolved from the small fish.
Of course, he gave Darwin a respect that he did not deserve, in this case: the idea according to which different creatures have a common origin had already been conceived by Mark before Darwin. Darwin proposed the mechanism of natural selection, although according to the empirical evidence he had at this point the theory still did not have any advantage over Lamarck's theory (Lamarck's theory, in short: an organ that is used a lot will be more developed than one that is not used. Therefore if you think a lot , you will have a bigger brain which you will pass on to your offspring, and if you do nothing with your tail it will degenerate and your offspring will not have a tail at all. This theory is called "inheritance of acquired traits).
Airplanes do not evolve because airplanes are built and designed, each one individually, by humans while living creatures give birth to other creatures, whose plans for building are in the DNA of their chromosomes. From time to time mistakes occur in the copying of DNA, called mutations. Most mutations are harmful, and only a small minority are beneficial. The creatures that have some DNA with beneficial mutations survive and leave more offspring than those with the original DNA, while those that carry harmful mutations leave fewer offspring. The result is that beneficial mutations spread in the population while harmful ones disappear from it.
If the Wright Brothers' airplane had spawned descendants, some with slightly different propellers or wings, and only the improved models survived, then Kaph's analogy had something to build on. It is not by chance that Kaph chose to leave natural selection, even in the simplistic and very abbreviated version that I brought here, out of his lecture.
From here Kapah continued and demonstrated the complexity of the human body. In the brain there are billions of cells connected to each other, in the eye there are millions of photoreceptors connected to nerve cells, etc. He showed a slide demonstrating the structure of the eye, and then gave us a parable: would we believe that a sheet of paper was dropped on the street. A cat came, walking in green (by chance) and then on the paper (by chance), followed by a frog walking in red (also by chance) and then (by chance, of course) also on the paper, and after a chain of such cases, wonder and wonder, we got on the paper the The picture he shows in the slide? And if we do not agree to accept such a miraculous chain of events, why should we agree to accept the hypothesis that a chain of events led to the creation of the eye, which is a much more complex structure?
The reason why I was not ready to accept Kapah's "cat script" is that it does not include natural selection. If we were to scatter millions of pages on the street, and choose among them the next day only the one that has a stain on it in the place corresponding to the Kapeh slide, photograph it in millions of copies and scatter it on the street in order to find among them the next day the one with another stain added to it in the place corresponding to the Kapeh slide to repeat the process several thousand times (The process will last several decades or hundreds of years and will consume millions of trees and billions of cats, which is why such experiments are done in computer simulations), I would certainly believe that the final image that will be obtained will be very similar to the structure of the eye.
The eye itself also evolved in a similar process: again, I will write simplistically: a mutation that allowed a blind animal to distinguish between light and dark helped it survive (for example, hiding in a cave during the day and thus not being exposed to ultraviolet radiation). Another mutation that concentrated the light-receiving cells in the front of the body allowed him to receive information about where he was going (does he move from dark to light?). Creating a ripple in the concentrations of the light-receiving cells allowed him to get a picture - albeit a blurry one - of his surroundings, and so on. Although the mutations themselves are random, the selection process is not random at all.
Kaph's argument is not new at all: as early as the nineteenth century, Reverend William Paley said that if we were to find a clock, we would not imagine that a structure so complex and precise as a clock could not have been created by chance. And if a watch cannot be created by chance, how can the human body, which is much more complex than it, be created by chance? This argument is brought up in every lecture by evolution deniers in one form or another. There was never a reason to accept it, but it has been brought up again and again for more than a hundred years.
The human body, so complex, is built accordingly. Here Kapeh returns again and shows how complex the cell is, and how improbable it is that it was created by chance. But this time there is an addition: cells, according to the doctor of medicine, do not live by themselves. That is, they somehow accumulated mutations that resulted in the creation of cells and then the cells united to build the body of some ancient creature. How dare a doctor make such an argument? Does he not know about the existence of bacteria and unicellular organisms?
The plan according to which each cell is built as well as the whole body is in the DNA. The doctor who wanted to impress the audience asked if anyone knew how many DNA bases there are in the human genome. By chance there was someone in the audience who knew the order of magnitude (me) who answered that it was approximately 3*10^9 base pairs. Here Kapeh repeated the same argument of chance: what is the chance that we will get the human genome by chance?
The lie here is twofold. First, as I have already mentioned, the theory of evolution does not claim at all that human DNA was created by chance. On the contrary, it is a long chain of mutations accompanied by selection. Second, as I showed in my example with the coins, we look at a final result and ask what is the chance of getting it by chance. In the world today, according to estimates, there are about thirty million different species, each with its own unique DNA. I don't know how many billions of species existed in the past (in fact, I don't even know the order of magnitude of the number of extinct species!), but I do know one thing: all those species and DNA sequences are but a small fraction of the number of species and DNA sequences that could have existed, and there is also no A reason to assume that the genetic code of living beings should be based on DNA.
I will not alienate the reader who stayed awake until this stage in the list of all those "impossible coincidences" brought up by the lecturer. The principle is the same in all cases. The listener must be given the impression that that "something incredibly complex" was created through a series of coincidences, and that there is a single ideal plan for that "something", which is the plan that the lecturer presents to us.
Now the lecturer moved on to the next favorite argument of creationists: gaps in the fossil record, what is sometimes called "missing links". The difference between the human DNA and that of the chimpanzee (the doctor, true to his method which forbids too precise nomenclature, made sure to use the phrase "monkey". A chimpanzee is not a monkey but a great ape. In English there are separate words for "monkey" and "great ape" ”, in Hebrew there is no such separation for some reason) is about 1%, or, if we remember the number of nucleotide pairs in human DNA, about 3*10^7. We would therefore expect to find thirty million transitional forms between the "monkey" and man. In practice, there are a small number of fossilized hominid species, which, according to what I know today, belong to three types: Homo (man), Australopithecus, and Paraanthropus (formerly the robust Australopithecus, of the species Robustus and Boissei). Where are all the missing vertebrae?
At this point I could no longer resist the lecturer's demagoguery. I dismissed his words, and with the help of some other people in the hall who were fed up with the flow of lies, I started an argument with him, including mentioning some things he wanted to forget.
Let's start by reducing the number of mutations needed: only about 99 percent of human DNA codes for proteins. Regarding everything else, there is a debate as to whether it has any survival value, or is "junk DNA". In any case, this DNA accumulates mutations that do not affect the phenotype at all. I will therefore assume that XNUMX% of the mutations (in reality the number is even greater, because of "synonymous" codons and because natural selection eliminated some of the mutations in the active DNA) have no effect on protein production.
We are left with 300,000 missing links. what about them The number of these can also be reduced. Usually what you find in fossils is bones and teeth. Skin color, male penis length, blood type, and the ability to taste a chemical called PTC are not preserved in fossils. To be as generous as possible to Kaph, I'll assume that only half of those mutations didn't affect the non-fossilized parts at all.
The fossil record is far from perfect. There are only a few paleoanthropologists engaged in the exhausting work that requires great knowledge and enormous patience in the terrible heat of Africa. These also have a problem: there are not many sites where hominid fossils can be found. There are a very small number of such sites, among them the Oldubai Canyon in Tanzania, the Dar in Ethiopia and Lake Turkana in Kenya where layers from the corresponding periods have been exposed.
Not only that, but not all the parts of the fossilized bodies are found at all. "Lucy", the famous skeleton of Australopithecus afarensis found by Donald Johansson only included about 40% of the bones. I will once again be generous to Dr. Kaph: I will assume that half of the important fossils have already been found.
We are left with 75,000 missing links whose absence must be explained. What did Dr. Kapah forget? Natural selection, of course.
This time I will go a little deeper on this topic. Natural selection does not act on individual genes, but on individuals. Most of the traits of the same individuals are affected by many genes, so they appear to be continuous. For most of the time, most details are centered around some equilibrium point. In male humans, for example, the average height is about 1.75 meters. There is also variation between individuals. I guess everyone knows men who are 1.85 meters tall, and also some who are 1.65 meters tall. In good times the selection is "tolerant" towards deviations that are not too large from the average, therefore for relatively long periods the average remains the same average.
But when there is a major environmental change, for example an ice age or the population migrated to a warmer place, selection can suddenly work against the extremes on the one hand. In this way, the average of many traits in the population can change in a short period of time to the extent that it will turn it into a new species. How big should the environmental change be? i don't know The fact is that humans have migrated for the past 200 years to every possible climatic region on Earth, and although this has created a great deal of variation between populations (even in features preserved in fossils such as height, ratio of body length to leg length, etc.) the variation is still not sufficient to justify the division H. sapiens give species. It is possible that man's high intelligence allowed him to adapt his environment to him instead of the opposite, or that the rapid rate of development of the human lineage left us with too little genetic variation to allow the development of new species.
Paleontologists Niles Eldredge and Stephen J. Gould proposed in 1972 a theory that for most of time species do not change morphologically. These periods are called "stasis". Periods of the formation of new species are very short on a geological scale (thousands to tens of thousands of years), so they called them "revolutions". The whole theory is called "Punctuated Equilibria", or according to the opponents of the theory, Punk-ik.
Creationists, including Kaph, of course, know that they cannot hide the variation within species. It is enough for someone to look at a wolf from Europe and a wolf from the Negev to see that the two, although they belong to the same species, look different from each other. Noah only took two wolves on his ark, so the source of the variation must be evolution. For this reason, creationists "allow" microevolution, that is, evolution within "basic creature types" (Kinds), while they "forbid" macroevolution, that is, the change of one "basic creature type" to another. It is possible, for example, that populations of ancient dogs evolved until one population became a population of poodles, and the other a population of rottweilers, but it is not possible that populations of an ancient carnivore evolved so that one became the species we know as "dog" and the other became the species we know as "cat". Less sophisticated creationists, including Kaph, identify the "basic creature type" with the species. The logic behind this identification is that a species is defined as all individuals capable of mating and producing fertile offspring with each other. Sex therefore has clear boundaries. The more sophisticated creationists are reluctant to put clear boundaries between "basic creature types". It is true that they have to give up the ability to identify which "basic creature type" each individual belongs to, but if someone comes along and demonstrates a sequence of fossils leading from a primitive cat to the domestic cat on the one hand, and to the saber-toothed cat on the other, he will have no problem declaring that the domestic cat and the saber-toothed cat are belong to the same "basic creature type".
Eldredge and Gould became creationists' darlings thanks to several provocative sentences from their article published in 1972, for example "the absence of fossils of transitional forms is a professional secret (of paleontologists)". To the absurdity, they and especially the theory they proposed are also hated by the creationists, because they "steal from the hands of the creationists the evidence for the incorrectness of evolution" (Gish, 1986. Evolution: Challenge of the Fossil Record).
What the creationists themselves would like to keep as a "professional secret" is the fact that fossils of intermediate forms have been discovered. Also intermediate forms between species (among other things, Richard Leakey, in his book Origins Reconsidered says that the fossils classified as Homo habilis belong to two species - but it is difficult to decide which fossil belongs to which species.), also intermediate forms between genera (and again I will return to Homo habilis - its original name was Australopithecus The bilis, that is, they attributed it to a type from which, probably, the type Homo developed), and also between departments and even systems.
After Dr. Kaph finished showing that evolution is scientifically unacceptable, he had to explain why the scientists who study it disagree with him. I won't go into too much detail here, I'll just mention the three steps:
1) Bringing quotes from evolutionists according to which they accept the theory against the evidence. The method is to take things out of context. As the hegemon Rishliya said: "Give me six sentences that an innocent man said, and I will find among them a reason to hang him."
2) Quoting from scientists in other fields, mainly physicists and chemists, that deny evolution. Physicists and chemists can do well in their profession even if they have misgivings about a theory they have never studied in depth, just as a geologist or biologist will have no problem at all if they decide they don't believe in the theory of relativity because when they drove to work this morning, time went by fast as they drove but slowly when they were standing in traffic.
3) Bringing quotes from elderly evolutionists who state that they have supported evolution throughout their professional lives out of a desire to avoid acknowledging the existence of God. The highlight is usually a quote, such as that of Aldous Huxley (Kaffee attributed the quote to Julian Huxley), according to which he did not want to believe in God for fear that doing so would compromise his sexual freedom. Kapah would probably like us to believe that every unmarried girl, before she loses her virginity, reads a chapter in "The Origin of the Species", and every prostitute puts the same book under her pillow. It is hard for me to believe that religious scientists who study evolution, or geologists who studied events that contradict the Bible stories before them (Charles Lyell, a priest, published the book "Fundamentals of Geology" in which he shows that the world is much older than what is written in the Bible. Adam Sadag Vic, also a priest, found evidence of glaciers in Scotland. Instead of interpreting them as proof of a flood, as he was inclined to do at first, he proposed the accepted theory of ice ages to this day.
There are two other questions waiting to be answered. One is why does Dr. Kaph want so much to convince his listeners that the theory of evolution is not true? After all, many religious people have no problem with the theory. The saying "The Bible does not tell us how the heavens go but how to go to Heaven" became a cliché long before Prof. Leibovich said "The Bible is not a book of history but a book of laws". The idea according to which if someone decides to reject evolution he will be forced to believe in the God of Israel is also improbable. What is wrong with Buddhism? Or in Shinto? Or shamanism? And if Aldous Huxley was so anxious for his sexual freedom, why didn't he choose Islam, which allows him to marry four wives, or the Mormon religion, which does not restrict him at all? And why didn't he discover the light immediately after his marriage?
Accepting the evolutionary theory therefore does not lead a person to become an unbeliever primarily, while rejecting it does not lead him to become a believing Jew.
The second question is why creationists lie. Even if we assume that the goal, the conversion of secularists, justifies lies, it is still surprising that they choose this method. What will be the result? After all, the repentant person may come across one of the contradictions of a true opinion or simply decide to check for himself if what the pantheon told him is true, and then the pantheon will be in danger of being denounced as a liar by the religious population. Are the Mahbatites so convinced that it is impossible to convince a person to believe in God without telling him lies?
Up to this point I have criticized the behavior of the creationists. From here on I will try to show that their devious actions could not have been successful without the cooperation of the seculars, mainly due to our inaction.
According to one of the Sage's stories, in one city there was a theft problem. The residents turned to the local sage, who gave them a demonstration: he took a mouse, scattered wheat grains on the ground and the mouse took them and brought them to the hole. When he just closed the hole, the mouse no longer collected the grains of wheat. The wise man's conclusion was "not a thieving mouse, a thieving bastard", and the parable is that if they don't buy stolen goods from the thieves, they will stop stealing.
The creationists steal people's minds, and put nonsense in their heads. Here too, in order for the mice to stop stealing, the hole must be plugged, and the hole is a hole in education, and the hole arises for many reasons.
First, social. Like all academics in the natural sciences, I am also aware that in our society to be considered an educated person you must have knowledge in the fields of society and human culture, but not in the natural sciences. For example, in the matriculation exams, the student must pass, in addition to the math exam (which is also a pure human creation), the Bible, literature, language, essay, English, history and citizenship exams. Those who do not have a basic knowledge of these will be considered, and rightly so, ignorant. But it is not required to know almost anything about the physical world around us. A person can be considered educated even if he does not know what noble gases are, what the theory of relativity is or that rabbits are not rodents.
In a social climate it is no wonder that the pseudo-sciences of which creationism is only one of them are enjoying incredible prosperity. The only "science" that receives regular sections in all common newspapers (apart from "Haaretz") is astrology. The advertising sections are full of grandmother's stories about magic mushrooms that turn white hair black and healers using "positive energy" that comes from crystals. A little knowledge on the part of the public would cause all the astrologers and snake oil sellers to go bankrupt, but we do not demand it and the press whose role is to protect the public's right to know is not reluctant to deal with these issues, which may also result in a loss of advertisements.
I suggest to stop being tolerant towards ignorance in science. Ignorance in science is ignorance just like ignorance in the Bible, but for some reason it does not shock us at all. When Yossi Sharid was appointed Minister of Education in Barak's government, the foreheads of the Sips trembled: the newspapers were filled with articles and letters to the editor that went against his intention, which was not and was not created, to cancel Bible studies. But when a question was inserted into the matriculation exam in physics asking the student to calculate the "speed of the universe" in order to reconcile his age with what is said in the Torah, that the world was created in six days, the matter passed with deafening silence. I read a total of two articles on the subject, one broad and one short in "Haaretz", one letter to the editor, also in "Haaretz", and two items on the "Freedom" website. Professor Enoch Gutfreund, who came out in an article against the ignorance of the author of the physics exam, shamefully discovered that he was also ignorant of evolution. According to him, life on Earth has existed for "hundreds of millions of years". If a flame fell on the cedars, what would the wall mosses say?
My request to show the same attitude towards ignorance in the Bible and ignorance in science means requiring everyone who intends to become a teacher in Israel to learn a certain amount of science. Not much. It is not necessary that they know the mathematics of the theory of relativity, but that they know what it is, what the big bang is, who are the ancestors of Homo sapiens and other scientific facts. To get a degree in science in the State of Israel it is necessary to first pass a matriculation exam in literature, so there is no reason for a person to be able to teach literature if he has no knowledge of science. This might prevent situations like the one I encountered once, when I was a laboratory instructor in a zoology course at the university, and one of the students amazed me when he thought a dolphin was a reptile.
Second, the academy. Scientists these days see their main role in research and passing on their knowledge to their students, which leads to the creation of a limited elite of those who know science. But the scientists' knowledge does not belong only to them but to society as a whole, if only because we all, with the taxes we pay, finance a significant part of their research and salaries.
Thomas Henry Huxley, known as "Darwin's Bulldog" and one of the greatest scientists of the nineteenth century in his own right, used to give free lectures to an audience of workers. It was appropriate that our scientists also went out to the general public, not only to those who can afford to buy a subscription to a series of lectures in Bar Shira Hall at Tel Aviv University, but also to the mythological restaurant Mishdrot. Masouda is neither stupid nor narrow-minded, she is poor. She won't be able to afford to go to university, but it is certainly possible that if scientists come to her, to Sderot, she will come to hear them. The profit will not be only for the restaurant. If and when, for example, creationist studies are introduced into the school curriculum (and I predict that this will happen in the near future), scientists will need the support of the public to fight against it, and if they patronize it and alienate it today, then when that happens the public will not understand at all what it is about. Apart from that, I don't understand why some of the students and potential scientists of the future should be given up in advance just because, due to their parents' financial situation, they don't have access to information about science.
A comprehensive popular book on evolution has not yet been written in Israel, and the little that has been translated into Hebrew mainly includes attempts by various scientists to present their personal theories. Nor has a single book been written that deals with exposing the lies and deceptions of the creationists, compared to at least two books that I know of that were written by the creationists.
In the United States, creationists encounter tough opposition from scientists, both in lectures, in books, and in public confrontations. In Israel they do not encounter any opposition.
The abandonment of the public arena to creationists is already bearing fruit today. It is not too late to repair the damage.
Third, you. If I have updated you in my explanations of statistics and natural selection, you are a potential victim of the creationists. In this case you should read books and websites about evolution. You don't have to accept everything you read as Torah from Sinai. Scientists who write popular books have different and often conflicting theories about the mechanisms at work in evolution. For example, Dawkins, the author of the books "The Blind Watchman" and "The Selfish Garden" mentioned in almost every article on evolution vs. creationism on the freedom website, expresses in his books a monistic position (according to which only one mechanism works in evolution, natural selection at the kindergarten level) and his books are superficial and demagogic. Other scientists claim that natural selection works at different levels, starting at the level of the individual and ending at the level of the species. But thanks to Dawkins' ability to invent "exploded" titles for his books and his theory (actually not his but GK Williams') today "The Selfish Garden" is the book most associated with evolution, at least in Israel. If you have only read "The Selfish Gene" and you think you understand the theory of evolution, you are wrong. You will not do your duty to yourself until you also read a book or two of his opponents (eg Gold's "Panda's Toe") and decide critically which arguments of both sides you accept.
On the other hand, it is quite possible that when you read what I have written so far, you found my explanation of why the creationists' arguments are not true to be annoyingly superficial. Here I admit "guilty". In order to understand evolution, a much deeper explanation is needed than the one I have given here, the sole purpose of which was to prove that the creationists are lying.
Even in this case you are not exempt from responsibility for the success of the creationists. Why is your voice not heard? Why when I go to a creationist lecture, am I the only one arguing with the lecturer?
I will finish my words with a number of tips for those who want to argue successfully with creation:
1) Don't be polite and don't wait until the end of the lecture to bring up your mistakes while the lecturer is assigning questions. He slurred his words, became insolent, demanded explanations about his lies. In creation, he has a number of participants in the audience who ask "convenient" questions to the lecturer (for example: Why do biologists, if they know that evolution is not true, not abandon it? Answer: It is not convenient for them to stop believing in their favorite theory, just as doctors are well aware of the harm of smoking but Many of them continue to smoke). It will be difficult for you to ask your difficult questions, and even if you succeed in asking a question, the Creator will give you an evasive answer and then turn to the next partner.
2) The creationists recycle the same arguments over and over again, which will allow you to prepare and make sure that you can refute any argument that the lecturer brings up.
3) Despite the lecturers' bragging about their doctorate degrees, their knowledge of the subjects they talk about is not particularly broad or deep. They just quote each other, and don't even bother to read the original articles. The citations they cite in such abundance can be found on the website of the Creation Research Institute (http://www.icr.org). An example of Kaph's profound ignorance: in my debate with him I mentioned the ER-1470 fossil skull found by Richard Leakey. The doctor "corrected" me - not Leakey, Dawkins. There is nothing to fear from a knowledge contest on evolution with someone who does not know how to distinguish between the author of books on selection in Ramat Hagan and one of the world's most famous paleoanthropologists.
4) In order to acquire knowledge in the "science" of creation, it is useful to surf the Internet to the websites of creationists (such as the website of the Creation Research Institute that I mentioned earlier) and especially to the discussion group talk.origins (news:talk.origins) to the website of the University of Ediacara (http://www .ediacara.org) has answers to many of the creationists' arguments. This university does not exist in reality and does not award degrees. It is named after the earliest known fauna of multicellular animals.
