As I stated prior, I started out initially to troll. I then focused in on one commenter as he seemed genuine and avoided religious mumbo-jumbo. God-of-the-gaps is always present in these types of discussions but my adversary did not make it the focus of our discussion. Hopefully I laid out some good science in my responses.
The juicy bits,,,
By 1947, what was once considered a "miracle drug" - penicillin, the first resistant strain of staph was discovered. By the 1960s, 80% of staph isolates were resistant; now, virtually all the strains are resistant to penicillin. A recent study on resistance,
Bacteria that are susceptible to antibiotics can survive when enough resistant cells around them are expressing an antibiotic-deactivating factor. This new take on how the microbial context can compromise antibiotic therapy was published by a team of microbiologists from the University of Groningen microbiologists, together with colleagues from San Diego, in the journal PLOS Biology on 27 December.
The entire paper is summed up nicely in a short video clip of a crucial experiment in the study. We see Staphylococci bacteria, which have been labelled with a green fluorescent protein, expressing a resistance gene for the antibiotic chloramphenicol. Next to them are black Streptococcus pneumoniae bacteria that do not have the resistance gene. In a medium containing the antibiotic, the green cells begin to grow and divide whereas the non-resistant black cells don't. After a time, individual black cells begin to divide and they even outgrow their green companions.
But, I could have used one of many examples of evolution in action - that is observable - but my personal favorite is the Kettlewell Peppered Moth Experiment. [Darwin's Finches is the classic example and is still under study:: Bmp4 and Morphological Variation of Beaks in Darwin's Finches and How Darwin’s finches got their beaks as well as two recent studies involving E. Coli - here and here.] I like Kettlewell as it has generated controversy and criticism but in the end, it still stands. True to form, Chris took the bait.
One notion I have found with creationists such as Chris, they do not follow the science or narrative behind the science to the end-point. In other words, creationists tend to only go so far as to confirm their preconceived ideas(s). Chris demonstrates this well as highlighted above. Also the aftermath concerning the Peppered moth demonstrates this; research has continued beyond the initial findings and criticisms. They focus in on one flaw (or flaws - remember Kettlewell's paper was published the 50's) in the experiment's design and deem the whole shebang a fraud.
First were did this criticism arise? As far as I can tell, either from John Morris of Institute of Creation Research in 1999,
And now comes the revelation that Kettlewell's compelling argument has not been verified by other investigators (Nature, vol. 396, November 5, 1998, pp. 35,36). Furthermore, we now know that neither dark nor light moths ever spend their days on exposed tree trunks or rocks as depicted in the famous textbook pictures. His original associates have even admitted that the photographs were faked, that the moths were glued onto the tree. Thus the star witness for evolution has perjured itself, and knowledgable evolutionists are recommending it not be used.or from ID advocate Jonathan Wells in his 2000 book Icons of Evolution. He argues that a number of examples used to illustrate biology textbooks were exaggerated, distorted, or were patently false. Wells said that this shows that evolution conflicts with the evidence.
The following chapters compare the icons of evolution with published scientific evidence, and reveal that much of what we teach about evolution is wrong. This fact raises troubling questions about the status of Darwinian evolution. If the icons of evolution are supposed to be our best evidence for Darwin's theory, and all of them are false or misleading, what does that tell us about the theory? Is it science, or myth?
It wasn't until 2002 that this bogus argument against Kettlewell gained some steam when science writer Judith Hooper discussed it in her book, Of Moths and Men. While trashing Kettlewell's methodology, she implied that Kettlewell and his colleagues committed fraud or made errors.Jerry Coyne has a review of Wells' book is here.
It is telling that, although Wells repeatedly attacks evolution, he gives no hint of his own ideas about the origin and development of life. There is good reason for this. As one learns from his website sermon, Evolution by Design, Wells believes that "the human species was planned before life began, and that the history of life is the record of how this plan was implemented". To Wells, the fossil record does not represent a continuum of ancestry, but a succession of creations by the Intelligent Designer, with each species carefully devised to nurture the next product of creation up to the final goal, humans.
,,,
Finally, Wells's main theme about the collusion of evolutionary biologists is simply wrong. Authors of some biology texts may occasionally be sloppy, or slow to incorporate new research, but they are not duplicitous. And, far from representing a conspiracy, it is invariably evolutionists (including myself) who have noted problems with some classic icons of evolution. Wells has it backwards. It is creationists like him who are conspiring to purge evolution from American education. They hide their own differences about issues such as the fossil record and the age of the Earth, they pretend to be disinterested seekers after truth, they fail to do their own scientific research, and, like Wells, they avoid at all costs revealing their own theories about the history of life. Icons is exactly as even-handed and intellectually honest as one would expect from someone whose "prayers convinced me that I should devote my life to destroying Darwinism".
According to one review by Bryan Clarke, Hooper's book was, "a treasury of insinuations worthy of an unscrupulous newspaper". David Rudge has also examined the same records which Hooper's argument is based and comes to similar conclusion as Clarke.
Did Kettlewell commit fraud? While we can never know for certain, the foregoing demonstrates that Hooper (2002) does not provide one shred of evidence to support this serious allegation. In retrospect, the multiple historiographic problems of Hooper’s approach to this episode seem obvious. She decided in advance that she wanted to tell an entomological “whodunnit” story regardless of whether fraud had actually been committed (Coyne, 2002). Her research consisted of a careful search through archives and published documents to exhaustively list questionable assumptions, methodological errors and interpretive problems associated with Kettlewell’s investigations, in order to make them appear suspect (pp. xviii–xix, 216–18, 259–71),,, In lieu of any direct evidence, she draws attention to how the possibility that Kettlewell committed fraud, and that his colleagues at Oxford may have engaged in a conspiracy to hide the truth, might account for these discrepancies. She repeatedly cites quotations from letters and published documents that, out of context, might be interpreted as supporting the conspiracy theory. In the multiple instances where the evidence directly contradicts the conspiracy theory, she either ignores the evidence, or suggests the author was insincere and had ulterior motives for lying. Beyond all this, as noted above, the interpretive framework she provides rests on several fundamental misunderstandings about the nature of science.So as you can see the "fake photos therefore fraud" notion is not so simple. This is what I mean by Chris and his ilk not following science, or the narrative behind it, to its end-point. As Rudge notes, "[t]he fact that the authors of these critical publications have their own agenda, or even recognition that to get published, a premium is placed upon how new results represent an advance on previous work (which tends to emphasize a few points of difference, while minimizing broad areas of agreement) seems never to have occurred to her. " Nor did that fact occur to Chris.
One point to note, while Rudge speaks of "new results" advancing on previous work. There is no new work by Hooper, just criticism. As far as I can tell neither Hooper, Wells, nor Morris designed a study to counter Kettlewell's experiment. Kettlewell is from the 50s. Subsequent criticisms followed and more studies where done. Those studies, and others like them, are totally ignored or in AiG's case, poo-poo'd away because it doesn't match their definition of what evolution is. Can't compete with science, we'll just ignore it.
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