Bill Nye versus Ken Hamm debate (Feb4,2014)

[Stubby]

For those interested, live streaming debate on evolution
19h00 to 21h30 EST live from Creation Museum auditorium.
I tried connecting to the stream site with FF and it crashed but IE seems to work ok

debatelive.org

Is creation a viable model of origins in today’s modern, scientific era? Leading creation apologist and bestselling Christian author Ken Ham is joined at the Creation Museum by Emmy Award-winning science educator and CEO of the Planetary Society Bill Nye

[choff]

The Doonesbury view.

http://www.bornagainpagan.com/cartoons/ ... onism.html

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According to the youtube page there are almost 46000 people watching the countdown timer

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Starting audience ~172 000
Peak audience ~490 000

Did anyone watch? Thoughts?

[Skipjack]

Me and my wife watched it. It was pretty tame. I thought Nye was too nice to Hamm, who seemed a bit more aggressive. I guess Nye was trying too hard to remain politically correct.
Hamm's argumentation can be pretty much summed up with "there is a book that has all the answers" and "we have [a few] scientists that actually support our theories". Nye used "we don't know" a bit too often. It was pretty clear that Hamm chose to interpret the bible to his liking. E.g. he chose to take it literally for genesis, some aspects of marriage, etc, but as allegories where it clearly was not fitting with todays moral standards (multiple wives?). That was in response to one of the very few times when Nye delivered a punch. Unfortunately he failed to follow up with a right hook to finish him off. As I said, it was very tame, not to call it "lame".

[GIThruster]

I didn't see it but I think this sort of thing needs to be tame. An aggressive defense just turns people off.

When it comes down to it, the only way to defend a Young Earth model, is to argue that "God created with the appearance of age". Once you're willing to accept that appearance does not match reality, your ability to do science goes right out the window. So if the debate concerned whether or not science promotes a Young Earth, seems to me obvious who loses that debate.

Take this and contrast it to the debates back in the 80's and 90's where Stephen Jay Gould and Carl Sagan got their asses handed to them by creationists. To this day, science is better off for it. Were it not for the creationists, Gould would not have invented the "Punctuated Equilibrium" model, which was certainly required for evolution to make sense. Before that time, the older model of evolution was the only one in use, and it was certainly unable to cope with the evidence. It was held by scientists for decades in complete disregard of the obvious fact it could not explain the millions of transitional forms completely missing from the fossil record. The same kind of revolution occurred in geology because of the creationists. For decades, geology had been teaching straight uniformitarianism. What the creationists pointed out was, that this is NOT what the evidence says. Rather, the record is of a very old Earth, that has endured uniformitarian processes, but that has been highly modified by repeated catastrophism. It was the creationists who argued for catastrophism for decades before geologists finally realized they were right.

So don't be too anxious to bash the creationists. I have no sympathies with Young Earth folk, but just want to note we do owe the earlier breed of creationists a great debt for arguing against the status quo position of their time which was certainly WRONG, when no other scientists would do this. Likewise to this date, the old earth Intelligent Design folks are still the only voice pointing out that we cannot explain many other parts of evolution, and what we teach in high schools is certainly not correct. It's just the indoctrination necessary to put young minds at ease and assure them we have a clue, when in many ways, we do not. For instance, we still have no idea how any pre-biotic system could have separated out levro and dextro rotary amino acids and composed life of the latter as opposed to the former. We simply do not know. Atheists hate this, but that is the current state of science. We have no explanation for spontaneous generation of life, despite what high school teachers or Bill Nye may say.

And about that last, I have a special note. Nye is famous for arguing that allowing a creationist view in modern culture hurts the state of science and injures us--makes us unable to compete against more science based cultures around the world. Bill is completely wrong here.

Only science that permits debate and open discussion of its tenets is really science. What Bill is advocating is something very much less. If a scientific theory cannot obtain in the face of antagonism, it is not true. What Nye is saying is that things like evolution need to be protected from criticism, and our experience is of the complete opposite of this. Evolution needs to be exposed to criticism, just as all scientific theory does. Nye has argued in the past, that the US will fall behind the rest of the world unless it quenches this creationist standpoint, but the facts are that the US leads in this upstart, oddball view and it leads the world in innovation and advancement as well. So pretending we won't be able to compete based upon whether some small segment of society has been thoroughly indoctrinated is just crazy talk.

[Skipjack]

I didn't see it but I think this sort of thing needs to be tame. An aggressive defense just turns people off.
When it comes down to it, the only way to defend a Young Earth model, is to argue that "God created with the appearance of age".

Still does not work. One point of the discussion as Noah's ark. Nye correctly argued that the 4000 years that allegedly passed since then would not have been enough time to create the diverse number of species from the few animals that fit on the ark. The young earth creationists insist on the story of Noahs ark being literal and true, however.
I also found it funny how they kept interpreting the bibles take on marriage as literal and poetic wherever they saw fit. Gave me the giggles.

[GIThruster]

I also found it funny how they kept interpreting the bibles take on marriage as literal and poetic wherever they saw fit. Gave me the giggles.

Now you're not talking about science at all. Why was theology made part of the debate? If Nye pressed the talk onto this topic he should have known better.

Most of the bible was written during a time when patriarchal/polygamous practices were the norm. The bible is the first religious literature to start to put restrictions on such behavior, especially with the restrictions the OT kings like David and Solomon had against plurality of wives. By the time of Christ, church leaders (elders) are restricted to one wife. The church picked this up and ran with it, and this is what caused Charlemagne to eventually release all his wives and concubines save the first wife. Well before the dark ages ended, polygamy was ended in the West, entirely because of this biblical teaching, so I have to wonder what strange kind of interpretation you're offering, and why Nye brought the subject up at all, save unless he was resorting to well-poisoning.

Maybe the reason the creationists do so well in debate is they stay on topic and don't resort to these fallacious methods.

[Skipjack]

I also found it funny how they kept interpreting the bibles take on marriage as literal and poetic wherever they saw fit. Gave me the giggles.

Now you're not talking about science at all. Why was theology made part of the debate? If Nye pressed the talk onto this topic he should have known better.

Most of the bible was written during a time when patriarchal/polygamous practices were the norm. The bible is the first religious literature to start to put restrictions on such behavior, especially with the restrictions the OT kings like David and Solomon had against plurality of wives. By the time of Christ, church leaders (elders) are restricted to one wife. The church picked this up and ran with it, and this is what caused Charlemagne to eventually release all his wives and concubines save the first wife. Well before the dark ages ended, polygamy was ended in the West, entirely because of this biblical teaching, so I have to wonder what strange kind of interpretation you're offering, and why Nye brought the subject up at all, save unless he was resorting to well-poisoning.

Maybe the reason the creationists do so well in debate is they stay on topic and don't resort to these fallacious methods.

No, the question was why they were interpreting some parts of the bible as literal and others not. And it was Hamm who brought up religion all the time with his "well there is the book that knows it all". Since he brought it up, it was OK to challenge him on it.

[GIThruster]

That's why I didn't bother to watch. I mean really, what is the point? Origins is a science issue, not a theological issue.

[Skipjack]

That's why I didn't bother to watch. I mean really, what is the point? Origins is a science issue, not a theological issue.

Well tell that to Hamm!

[Stubby]

@GiThruster

You brought up the left/right amino acid argument before.

http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CB/CB040.html

Claim CB040:

The twenty amino acids used by life are all the left-handed variety. This is very unlikely to have occurred by chance.
Source:
Watchtower Bible and Tract Society. 1985. Life--How Did It Get Here? Brooklyn, NY, pg. 43

Response:

The amino acids that are used in life, like most other aspects of living things, are very likely not the product of chance. Instead, they likely resulted from a selection process. A simple peptide replicator can amplify the proportion of a single handedness in an initially random mixture of left- and right-handed fragments (Saghatelian et al. 2001; TSRI 2001). Self-assemblies on two-dimensional surfaces can also amplify a single handedness (Zepik et al. 2002). Serine forms stable clusters of a single handedness which can select other amino acids of like handedness by subtituting them for serine; these clusters also incorporate other biologically important molecules such as glyceraldehyde, glucose, and phosphoric acid (Takats et al. 2003). An excess of handedness in one kind of amino acid catalyzes the handedness of other organic products, such as threose, which may have figured prominently in proto-life (Pizzarello and Weber 2004).

Amino acids found in meteorites from space, which must have formed abiotically, also show significantly more of the left-handed variety, perhaps from circularly polarized UV light in the early solar system (Engel and Macko 1997; Cronin and Pizzarello 1999). The weak nuclear force, responsible for beta decay, produces only electrons with left-handed spin, and chemicals exposed to these electrons are far more likely to form left-handed crystals (Service 1999). Such mechanisms might also have been responsible for the prevalence of left-handed amino acids on earth.

The first self-replicator may have had eight or fewer types of amino acids (Cavalier-Smith 2001). It is not all that unlikely that the same handedness might occur so few times by chance, especially if one of the amino acids was glycine, which has no handedness.

Some bacteria use right-handed amino acids, too (McCarthy et al. 1998).

Links:
Jacoby, Mitch. 2003. Serine flavors the primordial soup. Chemical and Engineering News 81(32): 5. http://pubs.acs.org/cen/topstory/8132/8132notw1.html
References:

Cavalier-Smith T. 2001. Obcells as proto-organisms: membrane heredity, lithophosphorylation, and the origins of the genetic code, the first cells, and photosynthesis. Journal of Molecular Evolution 53: 555-595.
Cronin, J. R. and S. Pizzarello. 1999. Amino acid enantiomer excesses in meteorites: Origin and significance. Advances in Space Research 23(2): 293-299.
Engel, M. H. and S. A. Macko. 1997. Isotopic evidence for extraterrestrial non-racemic amino acids in the Murchison meteorite. Nature 389: 265-268. See also: Chyba, C. R., 1997. A left-handed Solar System? Nature 389: 234-235.
McCarthy, Matthew D., John I. Hedges and Ronald Benner. 1998. Major bacterial contribution to marine dissolved organic nitrogen. Science 281: 231-234.
Pizzarello, S. and A. L. Weber. 2004. Prebiotic amino acids as asymmetric catalysts. Science 303: 1151.
Saghatelian, A., Y. Yokobayashi, K. Soltani and M. R. Ghadiri. 2001. A chiroselective peptide replicator. Nature 409: 797-801.
Service, R. F. 1999. Does life's handedness come from within? Science 286: 1282-1283.
Takats, Zoltan, Sergio C. Nanita and R. Graham Cooks. 2003. Serine octamer reactions: indicators of prebiotic relevance. Angewandte Chemie International Edition 42: 3521-3523.
TSRI. 2001 (15 Feb.). New study by scientists at the Scripps Research Institute suggests an answer for one of the oldest questions in biology. http://www.scripps.edu/news/press/021401.html
Zepik, H. et al. 2002. Chiral amplification of oligopeptides in two-dimensional crystalline self-assemblies on water. Science 295: 1266-1269.

Further Reading:
Clark, Stuart. 1999. Polarized starlight and the handedness of life. American Scientist 87(4) (Jul/Aug): 336-343.

Guterman, Lila. 1998. Why life on Earth leans to the left. New Scientist, 160(2164): 16.

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I also found it funny how they kept interpreting the bibles take on marriage as literal and poetic wherever they saw fit. Gave me the giggles.

Now you're not talking about science at all. Why was theology made part of the debate? If Nye pressed the talk onto this topic he should have known better.

Most of the bible was written during a time when patriarchal/polygamous practices were the norm. The bible is the first religious literature to start to put restrictions on such behavior, especially with the restrictions the OT kings like David and Solomon had against plurality of wives. By the time of Christ, church leaders (elders) are restricted to one wife. The church picked this up and ran with it, and this is what caused Charlemagne to eventually release all his wives and concubines save the first wife. Well before the dark ages ended, polygamy was ended in the West, entirely because of this biblical teaching, so I have to wonder what strange kind of interpretation you're offering, and why Nye brought the subject up at all, save unless he was resorting to well-poisoning.

Maybe the reason the creationists do so well in debate is they stay on topic and don't resort to these fallacious methods.

Nye is the one who stayed on topic. Hamm brought up many biblical issues that had nothing to do with the debate question. He was preaching.

You really need to watch the debate before attempting to criticize or analyze either party because you are misreading or misinterpreting some of the comments here. Watch it, for if nothing else, it was funny but in a predictable sort of way.

You could try to count the number of logical fallacies!

[JLawson]

I'm of the opinion that God sneezed - (Big Bang) and has been laughing ever since.

[Skipjack]

Actually there are about 500 amino acids. 22 of them are proteinogenic (used for the creation of proteins). 21 of them are found in eukaryotes. One was discovered in 2006. They believe there might be more.