In February of 2006 I wrote an article in the GMU Broadside that "tweaked the nose" so to speak of Evolutionist Apologetics throughout the George Mason Campus and numerous websites. The tragically brief critical analysis of the Theory of Evolution eventually got a rebuttal piece written against it. It would not be for a couple months afterwards that I would find the James Randi Forum thread that had a series of postings amassing evidence against my case, and numerous insults along the way. Now in 2007, I finally have a vehicle of response to the many allegations made.

My prayer is that the posters who contributed to that thread do read this, and that my response be blameless.

Before I go farther, I would like to bestow my compliments on the man himself, James Randi. His wars against the hoaxers and deceivers of the paranormal and psychic communities mirror that of the labors of many Judges and Prophets of Ancient Israel, and so he more than deserves our gratitude. I hope that his benevolent endeavors continue to reap a bountiful harvest.

Where to begin, where to begin, where to begin…

First shall be covered a few details, which should be noted as interesting non-scientific shortcomings on the part of your Thread.

One issue covered extensively was that of my not-so-grammatically correct opening sentence. The Broadside Newspaper had some poor editors in the 2005-2006 academic year. This was not the first article of mine to be butchered in some way by the Broadside staff. For example, in the Fall 2005 Semester I had written an article about President Bush’s judicial nominees. The submitted article had a sentence that read as follows:

“Although many cite the pressure that came from conservative groups, the fact is she was not a judge and had little experience, especially compared to Alito, whose judicial experience is the best of any nominee for the Supreme Court in seventy years.”

It was distorted to read as follows:

“Although many cite the pressure that came from conservative groups, the fact is she was judge and had little experience, especially compared to Alito, whose judicial experience is the best of any nominee for the Supreme Court in seventy years.”

  A few of my articles had similar alterations for the worst. On one occasion, the editor of opinion columns at that time apologized via e-mail:

“The paper just came out and I noticed an unintentional error in your editorial. The first sentence mentions there was a debate "on campus." You originally wrote "off campus." I apologize for the mistake and will attempt to find out where it went wrong.”

  The opening sentence, which made many of you question my intelligence, is another example of their tampering. If you want to talk about grammar and writing, some of your postings weren’t exactly the apple of Merriam Webster’s eye:

“That was a good article very succint, Inotice you are an english major…”

--Dcdrac

“This is often a resulkt of timing in embryonic development- which is under both environmental and genetic control.”

--Soapy Sam

“One fallicy the author makes is to confuse The Theory of Evolution with the question of How Life Began.

--IIRichard

“I deeply hope that you will require Mr. Gryboski to take remedial classes, and show basic profiency, before allowing him to graduate.”

--Art Vandelay

  Unlike you, I am not going to use the occasional grammatical mistake to attack your integrity or suggest that you should take remedial classes to test proficiency.

   A minor fact that I do not blame you for not knowing: the article title was not mine. There are many editors out there that change the titles of their writer’s works before publishing them. I had an article published about the real Che Guevara in the Fall 2005 Semester. My title had been “Criminal and Totalitarian Celebrated”, but they changed it to “Che Guevara: Not a Hero but a Deceptive Rebel”. This was actually a bad title, since I never said that he was deceptive; if anything, he was brutally honest. This article was another example. I never actually say that Intelligent Design is compatible with the Scientific method. What I said was “Neither Intelligent Design nor evolution can be directly tested”. I technically said that both were lacking in scientific credibility, but that of the two ID was better.

  No surprise found that many of you would attack me for my major. But what I find amusing is your double standard. After all, an English major wrote the rebuttal piece. Where are his scientific credentials? This repulsion at my major is part of an overall stereotype regarding anti-evolutionists as a whole.

  Alfred Wegner, the man who discovered the Theory of Continental Drift, was not a geologist, but a meteorologist. Carl Sagan, the famous astronomer, wrote The Dragons of Eden, a book about the evolution of the human brain. Where were his credentials regarding biology? Did any of you or your peers write something like what The Black Fox posted:

‘Carl Sagan is an Astronomer. What a surprise. He's obviously highly qualified to talk about evolutionary biology and genetics then. Anyone with a biology A-level could refute his 'arguement'.’

   A new argument that I noticed amongst your postings was that of denying the whole matter of this being an origins debate. As IIRichard posted early in the Thread:

“One fallicy the author makes is to confuse The Theory of Evolution with the question of How Life Began. The two are entirely separate. No serious biologist claims to have solved that puzzle.”

   Isaac Asimov disagrees. He declares in a book entitled In Science and Creationism, page 182:

“Simple forms of life came into being more than 3 billion years ago, and have formed spontaneously from nonliving matter.”
 
  Writes Richard Dawkins in The Blind Watchmaker,

“I can't help feeling that such a position, though logically sound, would have left one feeling pretty unsatisfied, and that although atheism might have been logically tenable before Darwin, Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.” (p.6)

  If these are not claims on life origins, then what are they?

  And now the more scientific affairs. I like how CurtC set things up with one of the early postings on the Thread. It shall be the best way to, point-by-point, show the inaccurate reasoning found on the Thread at large.

 “* Missing links - what missing links? We have fossil transitional forms overflowing our museums.”

  ‘Overflowing’? Well, not according to New Scientist, 20th of May 1982 news item:

“The main problem in reconstructing the origins of man is lack of fossil evidence. All there is could be displayed on a dinner-table.”

   Writes Dr. David Raup, curator of geology at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, in “Conflicts Between Darwinism and Paleontology”:

"250,000 species of plants and animals recorded and deposited in museums throughout the world did not support the gradual unfolding hoped for by Darwin."

  Stephen Jay Gould, the famous Harvard scientist and Punctuated Equilibrium supporter, is on record stating:

“The absence of fossil evidence for intermediary stages between major transitions in organic design, indeed our inability, even in our imagination, to construct functional intermediates in many cases, has been a persistent and nagging problem for gradualist accounts of evolution."
   
    Gould is convinced that there are abundant transitional forms amongst larger groups of living things, but does concede that “[t]ransitional forms are generally lacking at the species level”.

    And the famous and infamous man himself, Charles Darwin, was concerned over this scarcity of transitional forms. As he wrote in The Origin of Species, 6th edition, p.413:

“Why is not every geological formation and every stratum full of such intermediate links? Geology most assuredly does not reveal any such finely-graduated organic chain; and this is the most obvious and serious objection which can be urged against the theory.”
   
    So, according to Gould, Darwin, Raup and New Scientist, the vast wealth of transitional fossils is actually a minor savings account at best. The overabundance is a testament to paucity.
  
“Hoaxes - there have been about three famous hoaxed fossils that I know of, but creationists are always mentioning them as if they were ever important.”

   One of the big reasons why, as touched upon with regards to Biogenetic Law and the peppered moths, is that since no one seems to correct these mistakes, they have to be repeated to an audience that still considers them true. The infamous drawings of Ernst Haeckel or some variation remain in many science textbooks, including Miller and Levine, Biology, Prentice Hall (1998), p.223. This was the textbook my 9th Grade public high school Biology class used.

“Evolution can't be directly tested - well, he's a history major, so point out that the idea that the US had a Civil War in the 1860s can't be directly tested either.”

  Added to this posting was a clever one from Dr. Adequate:

“Many have pointed out that the no-Empire theory, the great competitor to the Roman Empire theory, is not a theory in the proper context, a context long misused by popular society. Then again, neither is the no-Empire theory. Neither theory can be directly tested, for no one can observe anything happening thousands of years ago.

The closest we have to such is the observation of Western Europe in the present day, which is thoroughly democratic. This has led many historians, whose names I am for some reason unable to recall, to adopt the no-Empire theory.

Therefore the no-Empire is compatible with the historical method, which is the process of going from observation to validated theory, for it is a conclusion based off of continual observation. Evidence for the Roman Empire, however, is based largely off of presupposition.”

   Yet there is an obvious disparity between the evidence for the American Civil War and the Roman Empire and the evidence for Evolution. Of course it may be hard for someone who considers the evidence for evolution to be as abundant as dirt itself but the fact remains the amount of evidence for the existence of the Roman Empire and the American Civil War is overwhelming, whereas with evolution (as aforementioned) little can be found. Indeed, my complaints over the strong presupposition over amassing proof are not my own:

“Judged by the amount of evidence upon which it is based, the study of fossil man (palaeoanthropology) hardly deserves to be more than a sub-discipline of palaeontology or anthropology. The entire hominid collection known today would barely cover a billiard table.” (Anthropologist John Reader, “Whatever happened to Zinjanthropus?”, New Scientist, 26 March 1981, p.802.) 

  Obviously we have more than a billiard table’s worth of evidence for the Roman Empire and the American Civil War. Furthermore, these events stopped. The Roman Empire fell in AD 476 and the American Civil War ended in April 1865. Are you implying with your Thread that evolution has stopped? Going back to presupposition, a senior research fellow from the Zoological Society of London wrote these damning words in the August 4 1977 New Scientist:

“In recent years several authors have written popular books on human origins which were based more on fantasy and subjectivity than on fact and objectivity.”

    And let’s not forget the quote that got into my Broadside article, except this time I’m showing it in full:

“Ever since Darwin’s work inspired the notion that fossils linking modern man and extinct ancestor would provide the most convincing proof of human evolution, preconceptions have led evidence by the nose in the study of fossil man.”

    Moving from these other major scientific issues I had with your Thread, I shall now cover the big issue, since many of the postings dealt with it:

“* Mutations don't add information - either he doesn't understand what mutations are, or doesn't understand the concept of information. Mutations add information just as easily as they reduce information. Surely anyone can see this, since anything a mutation can do, a mutation could undo.”

--CurtC

   It is with regards to my claim that no new genetic material is ever produced by a mutation; instead material is either removed or resorted. Many claimed that there is no need for new genetic material to show up anymore than new letters need to be created to write original books. Clever, but still missing the point. According to the model, the first forms of life were heterotrophic prokaryotic single-celled microorganisms. There is no way that they could have had the genetic components to have arms, legs, reproductive organs, fully-formed brains, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. So there is a necessity for additions in the genetic code.

   If scientific observation had turned up examples of this phenomenon then my claim would be false and feasibility for evolutionary progression restored. In your Thread you attempted to give examples, and I admire that, but they were insufficient. I shall go through them one-by-one:

“Point out the Mosquitos amazing ability to adapt to each new repellent used against it.”
                             
--Dcdrac

  The source of the mosquitos’ ability to adapt to repellents is found in mutations in its genome. But it is still a mosquito and no new body parts have been found. This amazing ability is identified as natural selection, not Evolution. No new species are arising from this and furthermore older pesticides can remain effective, especially if a new generation of mosquitos are not exposed.

“How about bacteria developing the ability to digest nylon?”  

--Huntsman
 
   In the 1970s a team of Japanese scientists did come across a bacterium that was able to digest nylon. Yet again, its not exactly the vindication required. The mutation that caused the bacterium to do this was not found in the chromosomes, meaning that it could never be transferred during binary fission. Also to note is that the plasmids in the bacterium have been noted for their ability to adapt to new diets. This would mean that the bacterium adapted; it didn’t evolve.

“…Temperate lambda bacteriophages inserting their DNA into a bacteria's chromosome,”

--The Black Fox

    This is an example of a symbiotic relationship, the bacteriophage establishes lysogeny with a host. This relationship is noted for being mutually beneficial. Its not evolution.

“…a bacterium recieving a plasmid during copulation…”

--The Black Fox

   The reception of plasmids during bacterial conjugation is not sufficient, as nothing new is being added, it is merely an exchange of preexisting plasmids, much in the same way that genes are combined in sexual reproduction.

“…the addition of repeat CAG sequences causing Huntington's chorea,”

--The Black Fox

   Once again, it is merely duplication of preexisting proteins and nothing new has been added. Indeed, the very fact that a slight alteration in the protein is sufficient to cause cell death should only prove that minor changes required to advance evolution cannot take place without termination of the organism.

“…analysis of the human genome showing that 5% contains duplications of identifiable gene segments”

--The Black Fox

   Once again, duplication not evolution. More of the same does not produce anything new. Just ask any politician.

   I understand that your words were going to be more partisan, less objective, and at times mean due to the simple fact that this was a Thread comprised of postings of ideological peers. Groupthink is noted for producing contempt for those outside of the group and your Thread showed extensive groupthink generally at the risk of accuracy and fairness.

   In your efforts to produce a sound rebuttal all you did was perform a cycle of citations, quoting only your peers and relying little on other sources. In the end your contempt produced a waste of space in the Broadside op-ed section, continued misunderstandings in an over-heated argument, and the blessing of finally giving me a strong personal reason for creating a website.

  And for what? The only real error found by you was that of viruses not being killed off by antibiotics. When I realized that mistake of mine, I e-mailed the editor of op-eds to print a correction, which for whatever reason he never did. (By that time relations between myself and the Broadside were not that pleasant.) If you want to respond to this go right ahead. Engagement is my public policy and if I have made any genuine errors I want to hear about them.

 This time around, try and be nice. And a little accuracy wouldn’t hurt, either.

A Response to 'Answering James Randi Forum'