Especially since some of the creators of these ideas seem to have confused “theory” for “brain fart”. The latest example: Zygote Theory!
From the first sentence, you can tell the theory is crap. Anything that makes it’s accommodation to the bible a selling point is instantly recognizable as nonsense — the bible is not a scientific text, nor were its authors knowledgeable about biology.
ZYGOTE THEORY explains all the scientific data and fits with the Bible.
A zygote is the first cell of a new individual after a sperm and egg unite. God appears to have done most of His acts of creation of new species at the zygote stage. He changed only the genes he needed to or added genes needed for the next stage of life. It would have been born to an existing species which was able to care for it. God didn’t redo the entire genome and He may have allowed some mutation (micro evolution) so phylogenetic trees still work to show relationships.
Where “zygote” comes in or is at all relevant isn’t explained. It seems to be a cute buzzword to give the impression it’s all sciencey. All it really seems to be saying is that a god intentionally zapped the genes of propagating organisms to explicitly generate successor species; it’s a fairly standard creationist bias against the possibility that random events modified genomes. Boring!
The author does seem to like Neandertals.
Zygote theory explains the existence of pseudo genes and viral genes that we SHARE with other primates – because we had a common GENETIC ancestor – God, like a computer programmer, used existing genomes (subroutines) to build the next species. The Bible never says how old Adam was when he was created. Adam could have been a zygote (as Jesus probably was) born to a surrogate mother – probably a Neanderthal. Neanderthals have the physiology to give birth to a human with a large head and to care for him. Adam could have been born – and then God breathed into him the breath of life. He could be born AND be sinless just like Jesus.
Oh, and look, it explains a contradiction in the bible!
It explains WHO Cain was afraid of after he killed Able; a preadamic Neanderthal race with rules against murder!!
It also explains where Cain’s wife came from: she was a Neandertal. He doesn’t seem to dwell on the implication of kinky inter-species sex, though. I wonder why?
Now we get a bad probability argument. I’ve also got my hands on a powerpoint presentation this fellow has — it’s all nothing but the colossal argument from improbability against evolution.
Zygote theory is a form of special creation and Intelligent Design that fits all the data BETTER than evolution! Evolution can’t explain the high information content of genes – especially the odds against the first cell forming by chance. There have only been less than 10 to the 120th events in the whole universe (rolls of the dice) but the odds against getting the DNA of the first cell by chance exceed one out of 10 to the 5,000th power!! (to get 200 genes in the same place that work together to form a minimal cell).
Better than ID, huh? It seems to be a reversion to antique and fallacious probability calculations ala Gish or Hovind. Old, tired, and long since refuted.
Sorry, guy, try again. Zygote theory explains nothing.
Natural selection from a biblical point of view: John 15:1-2
Big deal. Tom Weller did this years ago in Science Made Stupid. And made it funny.
Money quote:
Some of these people should listen to St. Augustine of Hippo:
“Often a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens … about the motions and orbits of the stars … and this knowledge he holds with certainty from reason and experience. It is thus offensive and disgraceful for an unbeliever to hear a Christian talk nonsense about such things, claiming that what he is saying is based in Scripture.”
“to hear a Christian talk nonsense about such things”
Thats just another baseless attack on sophisticated believers by the militant ‘St Augustine of Hippo Noise Machine’.
The Bible promotes rishathra!
The world will never stop regretting the bastardization of the word “Theory”.
Aieeeee….
Not this one again. Please, please, just make it stop. Not being a biologist, I’ll admit an inability to fully appreciate the bang-head-on-desk psychological pain of constantly reading ignorant mutilations of biology, but man, this crap really hurts.
Am I a Neanderthal
On those long balmy summer nights when my children were young they would be blissfully asleep and I`d often sit for hours on the side of their bed looking at them, wondering wether they were mine or if it was just a cruel twist of fate. Now thanks to another leap foreward in creation science I have an alternative mechanism and explanation. Science a wonderful thing.
Its not just biology that’s attracting the brightest religious minds, I noticed they are moving into the field of aircraft maintenance. Remind me never to fly Nepal Airlines.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/6979292.stm
Well it sure doesn’t explain Chick’s dino extinction. Why woldn’t sky pappy tinker with the dino genes so they could breathe?
A biblical explanation for genetic mutations? Indeed.
From ChristianAnswers.net:
“Today, brothers and sisters (and half-brothers and half-sisters, etc.) are not permitted by law to marry because their children have an unacceptably high risk of being deformed. The more closely the parents are related, the more likely it is that any offspring will be deformed.
There is a very sound genetic reason for such laws that is easy to understand. Every person has two sets of genes, there being some 130,000 pairs that specify how a person is put together and functions. Each person inherits one gene of each pair from each parent. Unfortunately, genes today contain many mistakes (because of sin and the Curse), and these mistakes show up in a variety of ways. For instance, some people let their hair grow over their ears to hide the fact that one ear is lower than the other — or perhaps someone’s nose is not quite in the middle of his or her face, or someone’s jaw is a little out of shape — and so on. Let’s face it, the main reason we call each other normal is because of our common agreement to do so!”
PZ, I am surprised you did mot mention the best kill-joy to this theory: mitochondrial DNA.
Hasn’t mtDNA demonstrated that there was a no interbreeding with Neanderthals and our nearest common ancestor was a rather long time ago, much more back that the emergence of either species?
So, if they even say it explains all the evidence, their most precious point of their “theory” totally contradicts a major piece of genetic evidence.
And that “fits with the Bible”. Aha. Interesting.
Doesn’t work. The idea is that God creates the whole zygote, not just a sperm cell.
Here’s the best killjoy:
It fails to explain stupid design. As usual.
And that “fits with the Bible”. Aha. Interesting.
Doesn’t work. The idea is that God creates the whole zygote, not just a sperm cell.
Here’s the best killjoy:
It fails to explain stupid design. As usual.
I’m surprised we don’t hear the “first cell forming by chance” problem more often. A cell is far, far more complex than an organism. Indeed, the rise of new species can easily be thought of as microevolution when variation in systems across all organisms (of which there are only a few “kinds” when you really think about it) are taken into consideration.
It also scores pretty highly in Demented Fuckwit Scrabble.
“She a bigfoot, Gus!”
— CV
when it comes to bizarre theories about God (not that any of them arent) my favorite is Frank Tipler’s Omega Point Theory.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omega_point_(Tipler)
Bad theology, heresy, and blashemy.
Some of these creos seemed to be so bored with their inerrant, always true, Book of God that they insist on rewriting parts of it, filling in the blanks, and adding whole new chapters.
Well if the bible is inerranty, and always true why do they insist on rewriting it and adding sequels?
Really need to hear from a smart fundie theologian on this point. Oh wait, that is an oxymoron. These people are so stupid they don’t even have theologians, much less smart ones.
“Zygote theory is a form of special creation and Intelligent Design that fits all the data BETTER than evolution!”
Well of course it fits better than evolution, you just took all the data you saw as not fitting and put it under a column marked “God did it.” Lazy, cheating bastards.
Also: thank you, Zarquon, for making the obligatory SciFi reference Niven.
Yes, we computer programmers are a lot like God and when I’m not writing in C# .NET, I often use existing genomes to build new species (in my parent’s basement).
“Antisupernatural bias?” ROFLMAO – these guys are comedians…
A zygote is a fertilized egg; i.e. the product of the union between an egg and a sperm.
But doesn’t the Bible tell us that Mary was a virgin when God knocked her up? So if we propose that God intervened at the zygote stage, this still leaves the source of the sperm to explain.
My reading of it was different. As I read it, God does not create the zygote, He intervenes by tinkering with an existing zygote.
So the omnipotent being couldn’t be bothered with sparking life? He just waited around for life to start on its own and THEN started messing with it?
Is god that lazy?
Of course God’s lazy. He can’t even be bothered to exist.
This smells like a parody. There’s only the one post on the entire site, and the author makes all kinds of crazy statements that are inconsistent with most creo worldviews (prohibitions against murder that predate Moses? But, but, all morality comes from God, not neanderthals).
The whole thing seems fishy to me. I call shenanigans.
What Bible has this guy been reading?
So Adam was formed out of dust from the ground, not from a Neanderthal zygote. And would the Neanderthals qualify as human or not? If a human, then Adam wasn’t the first human and the entire argument is meaningless. If Neanderthals weren’t human then they were made from dust after Adam already existed and so couldn’t have provided a surrogate mother for him.
Of course it isn’t possible that any theory could fit with the Bible since the Bible doesn’t even agree with itself on the particulars of creation, but I find it annoying that these people reject science to preserve their religion and then won’t even stay true to that theology.
You could probably select and reject particular bits from the two biblical creation myths to cobble together a biblical creation story which is compatible with this “theory” but that is making the Bible fit the theory not making a theory which fits the Bible. If you are going to that, then why not just go all the way and discount the entire mythology in favor of science?
You know, if you’re going to selectively pick what you’re going to believe from the Genesis story, why not just go the distance and admit that it’s a myth passed down to us from a primative culture trying to explain where they came from? Once you’ve admitted that part of the document is not meant to be read literally it’s a very short step to admitting that the whole thing is mythic.
I mean, if you’re going to decide that there was some “pre-Adamic” race of neanderthal pre-humans here before God made us, why not just go the crazy-weird Zachariah Sitchin route and postulate that the gods used them as a stock to create a human slave race to mine for gold for them. I mean, it fits just as well AND you get the benefit of a whole bunch of gods who have the technology to genetically manipulate a group of people but don’t have the technology to perform adequate unmanned mining operations. At least that makes for some fun science-fiction.
Do all of these kooks make it a point to never read?
Hilarious! Zap-a-zygote, get new creatures! Sounds like chia-pets gone wild . . . .
The complete Science Made Stupid section on human origins is online here:
http://www.besse.at/sms/descent.html
It’s also something most of us remember from high school biology as being related to sexual reproduction, so it’s also vaguely sexy. I think it’s partially a case of “sex sells” in a sciencey way and without being too suggestive of actual, sinful, you know, sex.
The same reason they don’t dwell on Lot and his daughters so much.
How convenient that it can’t be empirically tested!
Um…. huh?
God does his creating as zygotes and puts them in surrogates? Uh, how did the surrogates come to being? The only way this could work is that god must have created the surrogates as zygotes in “simpler” surrogates and wait for them to achieve adulthood. In this way God’s zygotic creations would have to mimic the ol’ fashioned “evolution tree” back to simple cellular life that, I guess, wouldn’t need surrogates. Admitedly this would be much faster than 4 billion years but it’d take a lot longer then the one day the bible gives for creating all the animals.
So it doesn’t fit the bible at all!
If it doesn’t fit the bible what’s the point?
=====
Glances up to #28.
Oh, I guess that’s entirely my point.
It’s weird what folks can cobble themselves into believing (and that goes for the poorer narrow-minded scientists and well as the kooks but it goes for kooks a lot more). Making a theory to fit an assumtion and then cobbling the assumption to fit the theory until nothing fits either evidence, orthodoxy, or anything they where trying to believe.
Theory that fits the bible? THat’s actually pretty easy as the bible is very vague on details. God could come from anywhere and create the universe in any possible method in six days. The difficulty is coming up with such a theory that fits *any* scientific evidence. Say what you will, but “God put all the evidence there to lead to a false conclussion” is probably the best, if not only one.
I mean, if the rules are the game that a theory has to fit the bible, that is.
Otherwise….
Um…. huh?
God does his creating as zygotes and puts them in surrogates? Uh, how did the surrogates come to being? The only way this could work is that god must have created the surrogates as zygotes in “simpler” surrogates and wait for them to achieve adulthood. In this way God’s zygotic creations would have to mimic the ol’ fashioned “evolution tree” back to simple cellular life that, I guess, wouldn’t need surrogates. Admitedly this would be much faster than 4 billion years but it’d take a lot longer then the one day the bible gives for creating all the animals.
So it doesn’t fit the bible at all!
If it doesn’t fit the bible what’s the point?
=====
Glances up to #28.
Oh, I guess that’s entirely my point.
It’s weird what folks can cobble themselves into believing (and that goes for the poorer narrow-minded scientists and well as the kooks but it goes for kooks a lot more). Making a theory to fit an assumtion and then cobbling the assumption to fit the theory until nothing fits either evidence, orthodoxy, or anything they where trying to believe.
Theory that fits the bible? THat’s actually pretty easy as the bible is very vague on details. God could come from anywhere and create the universe in any possible method in six days. The difficulty is coming up with such a theory that fits *any* scientific evidence. Say what you will, but “God put all the evidence there to lead to a false conclussion” is probably the best, if not only one.
I mean, if the rules are the game that a theory has to fit the bible, that is.
Otherwise….
#32
OMIGOD!!!!!
Science Made Stupid is one of the funniest and intelligent books I ever read. What great pleasure to find it on the web.
See also the chapter on evolution in general: http://www.besse.at/sms/evolutn.html
A line that still cracks me up:
One of the mammals’ evolutionary advantages was that they bore their young alive. As research has conclusively shown, animals that bore their young dead generally got nowhere.
I can’t remember if the book went past chapter five. Still the five chapters are all there on the links! Oh, you guys *all* have to read it! Oooh. oooh. ooooh. *giggles and wets self in childlike exitement*
More about the Science Made Stupid web homage: It’s a pity he used CENTER tags throughout and it’s a pity the cover and the back page of ads (“Build a nuclear reactor in your basement”) isn’t included.
But seriously… this is *great* stuff.
Anything that makes it’s accommodation to the bible…
Hey, PZ, what does “…makes IT IS accommodation…” mean, anyway…?
Gilgamesh –
Yes, and the nuclear story seems to be the same, despite early claims to the contrary. It seems that there were no interracial Plio-Pleistocene discos.
Zygote Theory ever said Cain married a Neanderthal – Bible doesn’t say where his wife came from –
Neanderthals and humans apparently didn’t interbreed (according to mitochonrial DNA evidence) or their offspring were infertile.
I see a lot of mocking but this Hypothesis or Theory needs SCIENTIFIC critique – the lazy way out is to insult and mock. It’s not lazy to look for every possible physical cause for the information content of DNA and the origin of the first cells and run into such huge dead ends (probability wise) that one considers that something else besides random chance and natural selection must be going on.
I meant to say
Zygote Theory NEVER says Cain married a Neanderthal – typo
Math rules out pure chance and natural selection as the source of 200 plus genes needed for a first cell all at once – if any are missing it dies = irreducibly complex. This infers intelligence – the only thing we know that can overcome astronomical odds to produce large amounts of information.
The Intelligent Designer does not have to be supernatural – it could be an alien species (theoretically, for the sake of argument). This should be acceptable to philosophical materialists who want to keep the supernatural out of science.
The people who propose a multiverse to explain the fine tuning of the universe (rather than simply accepting a supernatural intelligence)seem to be grasping for straws. However – where would you place a being or race of beings that “evolved” somehow in another universe that were so advanced that they could create a universe like ours? They would technically be supernatural but if atheists are proposing other universes and calling that untestable idea “nature” then these beings would be “natural” too!!
Read the Bible closely and you will see that it does not demand a certain time for each day – in fact the sun is said to appear on the 4th “day”. The Hebrew word for day;’yom’ can mean an age. However, more likely, the text was not even addressing the time question. It was more an organization to show there was ONE creator – not many gods or chaos. The first three days are spaces and the next three fill them – sounds organizational or poetic, not meant to be read “literally”.
Adam made from dust – but if the days are not 24 hours then he could have been made over a period of time. How old was he when created? – it doesn’t say. If you say he was an adult – or any specific age, then you are reading between the lines.
We are said to be dust – yet we were born too.
God could have cared for an infant Adam – but so could a pre existing NONHUMAN (not OUR species) race of Neanderthals.
This fits the geologic time of Neanderthals and modern humans – Neanderthals first.
Wow. You still don’t understand how evolution works.
Or are you being obtuse.
The bible explains nothing. It has only a tenuous grasp of reality.
I don’t have a problem with evolution – I understand the theory and it’s weaknesses. I got the top grade in my class on evolution. GOd commanded the EARTH to produce living creatures – it doesn’t say how, could have been evolution. My problem with evolution is not religious – it’s mathematical, fossil and complexity of structure questions.
The Bible has a ton of accurate history – and the incredible teachings of the greatest teacher of all time – Jesus. The empty tomb resurrection cannot be explained has never been explained apart from something supernatural. 12 Disciples don’t die for a lie – they claimed to see a risen Christ.
If you don’t believe in supernatural – where did the big bang come from – you can’t use nature to explain it’s own origin.
Others have recognized the huge probability problems with producing DNA for a first cell by random mutations. They then invent a multiverse where anything that can happen will happen and since we are here – our universe looks lucky for life. First of all, if you have to invent an infinite number of universes to avoid considering a higher intelligence, then you seem desperate or biased against a God. Ironically, if anything that can happen will – then the miracles and resurrection of Christ could be explained as highly improbable events but ones that happened in our lucky universe. Multiverse is untestable and unfalsifiable thus it is not science but metaphysics. Although, the fact that probability works and actuary insurance tables work – tell us that we may not be in an unusually luck or improbable universe – thus improbable events or specific complex information may be evidence of intelligence, not luck.