More banana man logic

In a previous post I described Ray Comfort's plan to distribute 50,000 copies of Darwin's "On the origin of species" with a "special" inserted preface written by Comfort. Well now I have obtained a copy of that preface and can confirm that it is entirely up to the normal intellectual standards of the "banana man". It is very hard to pick any particular part that stands out; it's all pretty asinine, but to illustrate what I mean here is a few paragraphs on DNA (remember Comfort has no scientific qualifications whatsoever, nor any theological ones)

More importantly, this claim of evolutionists makes a huge assumption. What is the scientific basis for assuming that similar DNA means a common ancestor? When you see a biplane and a jet—which share common features of wings, body, tires, engine, controls, etc.—do you assume that one must have evolved from the other naturally, without a maker?

That's illogical. It's more reasonable to conclude that similar design indicates a common, intelligent designer. An architect typically uses the same building materials for numerous buildings, and a car manufacturer commonly uses the same parts in various models. So if we have a common Designer, we would expect to find that a similar "blueprint" was used in many different creatures.

So what Ray is arguing here is that because animals have very similar DNA it doesn't necessarily mean they have common ancestors it could mean that they were created individually but using the same "blueprint".

First we have the usual conflation of man-made things and natural things, i.e. the non-sequitur that because man-made things are designed then natural things have to be we know a posterior that people make jet planes there is overwhelming evidence for it, Comfort ignores the fact that we also have overwhelming evidence that natural processes create natural things.

Anyway let's put aside the glaring logic errors and focus on the evidence. Let's assume that God did indeed create DNA in the same way that a human designer creates a design for an aircraft, the human would certainly design the parts of the aircraft that needed to be there for the correct functioning of it, i.e. wings, wheels, a cabin, seats, engines etc. and certainly some of the same ideas would be carried forwards from previous modes of mass-transport, i.e. the "Blueprint" idea, a good example would be trains. Trains have seats, wheels, engines and cabins etc. but think about it, if you laid out the individual parts of the TGV in one hanger and the Airbus A380 in another how many would be identical and made of the same material? it's likely that they would only number a few dozen, mostly insignificant screws and plastic fixings, i.e. <1%. In the case of DNA the differences between human DNA and chimp DNA are roughly 4%; that is 96% of the components in our DNA are IDENTICAL in every way, same material, same order and same structure.

The only reasonable explanation for this is evolution, if you are an intelligent designer you can design every animal from scratch, like the train and the airbus you don't need to reuse the same design, hence we see utterly unique configurations of utterly unique components in human design. Evolution on the other hand cannot start from scratch it has to adapt existing design in tiny ways to achieve new results, therefore all the legacy exists in every new species, which is exactly what we see in nature.

So how do we know that the entire legacy DNA of all ancestors exists in every modern species, easy, watch what happens when the system goes wrong!

This is a picture shows a snake that has grown a lizard's leg, not just any old stumpy leg but a well defined and perfect lizard leg, complete with toes and claws, now where did that come from if the ancestral lizard DNA wasn't already present in the snake and suppressed with genetic switches during embryonic growth (an act of God?).

Need more evidence? How about the retrovirus DNA that is inside every one of our cells. Back in the mists of time one of our ancestors was infected with a retrovirus, what these little critters do is inject their DNA into a host cell and use the mechanism of the host cell to replicate, occasionally that virus just sits there injected into the normal DNA sequence, benign and functionless, like a typing mistake in a document. Guess what, the exact same retrovirus sequence is present in chimp DNA, in exactly the same place as ours. What Ray has to explain is why his "designer" not only copied the DNA of apes to make the DNA of men but he also copied the errors too?

I could go on.

So, if you are offered one of these books you know what to do; take as many copies as you can, rip out the first 50 pages and punch a hole in them, thread the hole with a string and hang the whole bundle up in the nearest toilet.