Scientific Evidence Strongly Supports the Theory of Evolution by Common Descent

As I have a BoP, I will not refute the Pro argument now. Instead, I will present arguments of mine own. I will assume that everyone reading and participating in this debate is familiar with creationism. Like I said when accepting, Pro must show that common descent has occurred that contradicts creationism. This, in my opinion, he has not done. I will expand on this in the next round. Pro has committed several fallacies which I will point out now as I wish them not to be repeated. This will not be considered a rebuttal. (Just because I cite something, does not mean I agree absolutely with it. This includes creationist sources. ) 1. Creationists deny speciation. False. Creationists deny evolution, and speciation in terms of evolutionary changes contrary to the very old creationist teachings. Speciation, in terms of limiting genetic variety and sorting to prevent reproductive interchanges, is very much encouraged. As such, creationists do accept a form of evolution. It is just not called evolution. 2. Affirming the consequent. This perhaps is his most glaring and most oft repeated fallacy. Pro must show that the other alternatives fails as an explanation before announcing the victory of one particular interpretation. C1: Genetic Degradation The genome is known to be highly degradational. In fact, the vast majority of mutations is known to be degradational. Nachman has shown that [1:R4:4: (Link fail. Here: . http://www.genetics.org...)] mutations, although there be a higher number of beneficial mutations than bad, is still overwhelmingly degradational. Even without accounting for noise, most degradational mutations cannot be selected against. This is because the degradational effect of each single nucleotide is so small as to be almost negligible. This is much like small single letter changes in the above paragraph. Individually, they do not much degrade the information I am presenting. Combined, however, their effects is devastating. So much so that evolutionary geneticist researcher has estimated just from mutation and recombination rates in the genome that humans would die out in the next 20 million years (Starting 2006) [1:R2:8]. If one were to consider only the coding regions of the DNA, including recombination during reproduction and excluding regulatory DNA regions, the time to extinction for humans rapidly approaches a vanishingly small period. This factual evidence forces us to consider the only two logically possible conclusions. I. There is a retarding factor on this degradation. This would rescue evolution. There are many major problems with this. Firstly, there is no experimental evidence. This is patently obvious to anyone. The second major problem is that all hypothetical situations involve unrealistic parameters that are not in keeping with the facts. II. Humans have not actually been around for so long. This would fall right into the ballpark of creationism. I will leave it to Pro to discuss the problems. Needless to say, it is a much more plausible answer which is much more in line with the facts. With that, I will move on to another argument. C2: Fast Speciation is in line with creationist predictions This is such an obvious fact. “[A]ll the modern varieties of land vertebrates must have descended from comparatively few animals that disembarked from the ark only around 4,500 years ago. ” [2] This is a simple statement of fact. As such, we should expect to see fast speciation if creation is correct. Indeed we do! I don’t even need to give an example. Pro has already given one! As can be seen, some interpretations of evolution do not collide with “opposing theories” such as creationism. However, some interpretations do. As a tie-in to my previous argument, genetic degradation actually gives rise to new species because of the well known fact that speciation is a specialization event. That is, the genetic material becomes less and less diverse. This even becomes a problem sometimes. For example, some fruit flies have become so specialized that an increase in global temperature might cause them to go extinct [3]. For evolution and creationism to become incompatible, and as such allow for this particular debate, Pro must show that the change due to speciation actually leads to greater genetic diversity leading to the addition of unique information that can lead to evolutionary common descent, as opposed to creationary common descent. Not new, unique. With that, I will stop. I will add more arguments, if that is allowed, in the next round. Right now, I’m going out of space. 1. . http://debate.org... (Whenever I cite this debate, I will cite it as [1:Rn:x], where n=round number, and x=source number, throghout this debate if needs be. Hence, I will in future not have a [1]) 2. . http://creation.com... (J Sarfati, Refuting Evolution 2: Chapter 4) 3. . http://phys.org...