From today's New York Times: a bit long but interesting.

Almost 20 years ago, in the pages of an obscure publication called Bioastronomy News, two giants in the world of science argued over whether SETI � the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence � had a chance of succeeding. Carl Sagan, as eloquent as ever, gave his standard answer. With billions of stars in our galaxy, there must be other civilizations capable of transmitting electromagnetic waves. By scouring the sky with radio telescopes, we just might intercept a signal.

But Sagan�s opponent, the great evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr, thought the chances were close to zero. Against Sagan�s stellar billions, he posed his own astronomical numbers: Of the billions of species that have lived and died since life began, only one � Homo sapiens � had developed a science, a technology, and the curiosity to explore the stars. And that took about 3.5 billion years of evolution. High intelligence, Mayr concluded, must be extremely rare, here or anywhere. Earth�s most abundant life form is unicellular slime.

Since the debate with Sagan, more than 1,700 planets have been discovered beyond the solar system � 700 just this year. Astronomers recently estimated that one of every five sunlike stars in the Milky Way might be orbited by a world capable of supporting some kind of life.

That is about 40 billion potential habitats. But Mayr, who died in 2005 at the age of 100, probably wouldn�t have been impressed. By his reckoning, the odds would still be very low for anything much beyond slime worlds. No evidence has yet emerged to prove him wrong.

Maybe we�re just not looking hard enough. Since SETI began in the early 1960s, it has struggled for the money it takes to monitor even a fraction of the sky. In an online essay for The Conversation last week, Seth Shostak, the senior astronomer at the SETI Institute, lamented how little has been allocated for the quest � just a fraction of NASA�s budget.

�If you don�t ante up,� he wrote, �you will never win the jackpot. And that is a question of will.�

Three years ago, SETI�s Allen Telescope Array in Northern California ran out of money and was closed for a while. Earlier this month, it was threatened by wildfire � another reminder of the precariousness of the search.

It has been more than 3.5 billion years since the first simple cells arose, and it took another billion years or so for some of them to evolve and join symbiotically into primitive multicellular organisms. These biochemical hives, through random mutations and the blind explorations of evolution, eventually led to creatures with the ability to remember, to anticipate and � at least in the case of humans � to wonder what it is all about.

Every step was a matter of happenstance, like the arbitrary combination of numbers � 3, 12, 31, 34, 51 and 24 � that qualified a Powerball winner for a $90 million prize this month. Some unknowing soul happened to enter a convenience store in Rifle, Colo., and � maybe with change from buying gasoline or a microwaved burrito � purchase a ticket just as the machine was about to spit out those particular numbers.

According to the Powerball website, the chance of winning the grand prize is about one in 175 million. The emergence of humanlike intelligence, as Mayr saw it, was about as likely as if a Powerball winner kept buying tickets and � round after round � hit a bigger jackpot each time. One unlikelihood is piled on another, yielding a vanishingly rare event.

In one of my favorite books, �Wonderful Life,� Stephen Jay Gould celebrated what he saw as the unlikelihood of our existence. Going further than Mayr, he ventured that if a slithering creature called Pikaia gracilens had not survived the Cambrian extinction, about half a billion years ago, the entire phylum called Chordata, which includes us vertebrates, might never have existed.

Gould took his title from the Frank Capra movie in which George Bailey gets to see what the world might have been like without him � idyllic Bedford Falls is replaced by a bleak, Dickensian Pottersville.

For Gould, the fact that any of our ancestral species might easily have been nipped in the bud should fill us �with a new kind of amazement� and �a frisson for the improbability of the event� � a fellow agnostic�s version of an epiphany.

�We came this close (put your thumb about a millimeter away from your index finger), thousands and thousands of times, to erasure by the veering of history down another sensible channel,� he wrote. �Replay the tape a million times,� he proposed, �and I doubt that anything like Homo sapiens would ever evolve again. It is, indeed, a wonderful life.�

Other biologists have disputed Gould�s conclusion. In the course of evolution, eyes and multicellularity arose independently a number of times. So why not vertebrae, spinal cords and brains? The more bags of tricks an organism has at its disposal, the greater its survival power may be. A biological arms race ensues, with complexity ratcheted ever higher.

But those occasions are rare. Most organisms, as Daniel Dennett put it in �Darwin�s Dangerous Idea,� seem to have �hit upon a relatively simple solution to life�s problems at the outset and, having nailed it a billion years ago, have had nothing much to do in the way of design work ever since.� Our appreciation of complexity, he wrote, �may well be just an aesthetic preference.�

In �Five Billion Years of Solitude,� by Lee Billings, published last year, the author visited Frank Drake, one of the SETI pioneers.

�Right now, there could well be messages from the stars flying right through this room,� Dr. Drake told him. �Through you and me. And if we had the right receiver set up properly, we could detect them. I still get chills thinking about it.�

He knew the odds of tuning in � at just the right frequency at the right place and time � were slim. But that just meant we needed to expand the search.

�We�ve been playing the lottery only using a few tickets,� he said.

Best argument for creationism I've ever heard from a scientific stand point

Exactly.

Here's something interesting about evolutionists. If SETI received an ordered apparently programmed message it would be accepted as evidence of intelligent life. But when those same people see the DNA molecule, which the discovers said was miraculous, they ascribe it to chance.

Consistent? Or willfully blind? Just more rejected evidence of the Creator.

People will believe anything but the obvious.

Yes! They will grasp at straws and dream up utterly ridiculous superstitions in order to escape the obvious conclusion staring them square in the face. That is: the existence of humans can not be satisfactorily explained by evolutionary processes that start from primordial goo. The likelihood of that happening is obviously vanishingly small.

I agree...

For much the same reasons as articulated here, one of the most respected philosophers of his time, Antony Flew, became a theist. He said he had to go where the evidence led him.

The odds of any one person existing is essentially zero.

http://visual.ly/what-are-odds

But we exist none-the-less.

Still I give the possibly of other intelligent life existing at this moment in time to be right around zero. Odds of it being advanced enough to have radio communication to be less than zero. Odds of any civilization with radio communication close enough that we can detect it in the time we've been able to detect it (generously 50 years), even more less than zero.

That's what the aliens want you to think....

I'd be happy with some proof of terrestrial intelligence.

The odds of human beings evolving on Earth are precisely 100%. Because we did. It does not matter what the odds would be if it all were to start over.

Did we, or is that what the aliens want us to believe?

Well, if Einstein was right, and so far he has a pretty good record, then, "God doesn't play dice with the universe"

If there is a god he's either smart enough to hedge his bet or he's in control of the outcome and we don't matter one iota. If we don't matter, then our religious superstition doesn't matter.

If we do matter, then if there is a god he hedged his bet and planted life capable of similar intelligence to ours. If he did that, then presumably he's smart enough to have scattered that seed as widely as possible across the universe lest our baser impulses decide to eliminate the competition to be god's favorite. We know the universe is some 13 billion or so years old. If he gave all the seed stock an equal start, then we are being awfully presumptuous making comments about not being able to find our seeded family when we have been looking for but about fifty years.

Since we have a pretty sound grasp of physics and there is nothing in god's universe yet demonstrating it can exceed the speed of light, god must obviously have intended us to do most of our evolving in a space ship on the way to visit our relatives. Since we have yet to invent/design/find anything capable of lasting unchanged for one billion years much less 13 billion, god must not want us to visit the relatives.

"Einstein, don't tell God what to do" -Bohr

Einstein comment was about the statistical nature of quantum mechanics and because it implied there was a limit to how much a one could know about a particle. Didn't fit his paradyne.

But he's since been proven wrong as evidenced by things like NAND Flash working.

Whether or not there is intelligent life around besides Earth, given that there are billions of stars in a galaxy and there are billions of galaxies in the currently known universe I'd wager that there is, was or will be. How's that for taking a firm stand?

But as to life itself, whether in the form of single celled slime, multicelled organisms or something that doesn't even rely on cellular structure as we know it, I'd bet the farm that it exists somewhere else and quite probably in a lot of somewhere elses.

Even on Earth life is just too tenacious. Wherever it can exist, even in the harshest environments, it does exist. We've found it in the frozen Arctic and living in close proximity to volcanic vents under the ocean floor. I'd be hard pressed to disbelieve that "life", even in forms we may not even recognize, might not take hold somewhere else.

I agree 100%.

I disagree with everything except your last sentence.

Heisenberg aside, until someone proves quantum is the explanation, Bohr should have considered that god may have had Einstein's ear.

Sure, Rocky. You can get any conclusion you want if you put it in your premises. That logical fallacy is known as begging the question.

My point is that there is zero evidence that we did NOT evolve naturally and in the exact same way as every other life form on this planet.

I'd also like to point out that a sample of one (life on Earth) simply says that life is possible. It says nothing about probability on other planets. The fact that intelligent life has only happened once in the 3.6B years that life has existed on this planet, does say that (at least here on Earth) intelligent life is a very rare thing.

I have no evidence that you're anything other than a life-long pedophile.

I see frustration over being discovered as a fraud is making you extra cranky.

Funny schit that I called it so very long ago.

Yay 'flave!



Travis

Why is DNA shaped the way it is? It has to be because the atoms fit together in certain ways and with certain bond angles. Random? Hardly.

Why is life as we know it based on carbon and not silicon? It works. The ability for carbon to form double and triple bonds that can be made and broken without excessive energy transfers allows large and complex molecules to be made and modified at reasonable temperatures. Random? Hardly.

Why is water the solvent used by life as we know it? It works. It is a polar molecule that can do all sorts of interesting things necessary for life that a nonpolar molecule of the same size could not. Random? Hardly.

Why do I have AB Negative blood? My parents had blood types that allowed me to have the type I have. Random? Not completely since there is a limited number of combinations their blood types would allow me to have. I could not have positive blood.

I am not sure why lots of people talk so much about things being so random. Certain things only work in certain ways. We build on what works and what is available. New options may become available in a fairly random manner, but their rejection or incorporation is not random in most cases.

Hmmm...considering that life exists under extreme pressure & extreme heat in the harshest of environments even here on earth, speaks volumes on the issue of "probability" of life on other planets. Intelligent? I seriously doubt we're the "most intelligent" in the universe....odds are that we'd be considered retarded or very primitive at best...take 2-4 billion stars in the Milky way & multiple that times a very possible Infinite (nobody knows) number of galaxies & then tell me about "probabilities".
Here's a good link to better understand where I'm coming from... live long & prosper... http://www.space.com/26078-how-many-stars-are-there.html

Well (religious theology aside) we still don't know the mechanism by which life was formed here on Earth. So no matter how tenacious life is on this planet once it exists, I don't think that it is meaningful when considering the possibility of life forming on other planets.

Now don't get me wrong. I'd love to have the one of the Mars Exploration Rovers send back proof of life. That would be thrilling.

I'm not sure why anybody ever expected the SETI to succeed. I don't care what kind of a civilization you have, radio transmitters with interstellar range are expensive, and more expensive with every square second of solid angle they're designed to transmit into.

What motivation would an alien civilization have to spend such a large fraction of its productivity on hollering blindly into the void?

I think SETI should be spending its time building transmitters, not receivers.

Maybe SETI is betting all the aliens think like you.



Travis

Excellent read. Thanks for posting it.

How do you conclude that??

But it evidently did happen, at least once in the universe, i.e., here.

Exactly.

God is in control of the outcome, but he outsourced the process to nature, and didn't micromanage it. He didn't say, "Living creatures, I command that you appear before me." He said, "Let the waters bring forth the creatures that have life."

Unlike your dumbazz, at least he CAN think. The kids seen you slobberin' lately?

Yes. In fact, speaking in terms of geological time, just about as soon as life was possible on earth, it came into existence. Thereafter, however, it remained quite primitive (unicellular) for billions of years before stumbling on the innovation of symbiotic colonial existence, which eventually evolved into multicellular life forms.

PS The existence of mitochondria in animal cells (like chloroplasts in plant cells) is an artifact of our distant colonial ancestors, i.e., mitochondria and chloroplasts are essentially specialized forms of a single cellular life forms little distinguishable from bacteria. Their ancestors were specialized unicellular life forms living within colonies of specialized unicellular lifeforms, which colonies eventually evolved into every multicellular life form on the planet.

He's almost as smart as you!




Travis

+1

Exactly.

Is this supposed to be witty? Maybe funny? Intelligent? Or are you just trying to be as disgustingly stupid and disliked as Raisuli and Maser? If you are, congratulations...you're "winning"!!!

Here's to hoping Rick, Sysop or Dogzapper put a leash on you & your constant barrage of insults...

Not in the least. Merely the truth. Barak probably has 25 IQ points over Trav's dumbazz, and the latter braggs about his alcoholism, all the while single-parenting young teenagers. If the shoe fits.

Poor TAK. Got exposed as a fraud and has been stomping his wittle feet ever since.

Can't wait to see the pics of all the things you take your kids to do this weekend!

Laughin' my ass off...




Travis

What's your lame assed excuse for attacking Rocky?

Quote...Originally Posted By: RockyRaab
"My point is that there is zero evidence that we did NOT evolve naturally and in the exact same way as every other life form on this planet."

And your reply:
"I have no evidence that you're anything other than a life-long pedophile."

That is not an "attack". That is demonstrating absurdity by being absurd. He made an absurd statement and I merely countered it. Are you really such a dullard as to not get that? Do you really think I'm accusing him of something so heinous?

Rush Limbaugh does this about every five minutes for three hours daily. Maybe that is why libtards can't stand him.

So Rocky making the statement... quote "My point is that there is zero evidence that we did NOT evolve naturally and in the exact same way as every other life form on this planet."
Is absurd? How so?

There is proof that douche nozzles exist here, however.

His disparaging one liners are getting old quick...his comment to Rocky however was totally out of line & over the top...

Will you guys PLEASE stop quoting TAK?

You are helping to defeat one of the best things on the 'Fire for me: the bozo filter.

You might also try using the "ignore this buttwipe" option yourselves... it will lower your blood pressure!

John

Back on topic, I just seen this & found it interesting...plankton found on International Space Station... http://theweek.com/article/index/26...-exterior-of-international-space-station

The message should be?

Without receivers, how would we know the message was received?

This is absolutely absurd logic. A negative can not be proven.

Am I missing something obvious?

First Barak questions why a civilization would build expensive transmitters to holler blindly in the the interstellar void.

And then in the next sentence advocates that we do just that.

HA!!!
I seen that movie & it didn't turn out very well...

On a side note, anybody care to speculate why mankind has been around for a long long time & has only harnessed what I'd call primitive technologies in the last hundred years or so?

Why the sudden leap in technology in just the past 50 years?
We haven't even had rubber tires for very long & now we're doing research with nano technology? Is alien technology too far of a stretch? Maybe SETI has already been contacted? Maybe we have recovered alien air/space craft? Do you think it would ever become public knowledge?

You pick and choose like most of the Bible thumpers here. Let me help you with the quote:
Genesis 1:20-23

Then God said, �Let the waters teem with swarms of living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth in the open expanse of the heavens.� God created the great sea monsters and every living creature that moves, with which the waters swarmed after their kind, and every winged bird after its kind; and God saw that it was good. God blessed them, saying, �Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the waters in the seas, and let birds multiply on the earth.� There was evening and there was morning, a fifth day.

The above does not leave room for one kind to become some other kind.

The fossil record contains trillions of fossil single celled creatures. It has billions of million celled creatures. Where are the ten celled creatures alive or in the fossil record? Where are the hundred celled creatures alive or in the fossil record? Where are the thousand celled creatures alive or in the fossil record?

I know! They are in the hopeful imaginations of the imaginers.

Neither can the presence of an omnipotent god be proven...

Same could be said for religious types...BTW, did you ever get the answers you were looking for in regards to sending those food packs to prisoners?

Damn you're dumb.

Only to the willfully blind. Even Crick and Watson, the discoverers of DNA, said the molecule is miraculous. But instead of glorifying God as creator they coined the term "panspermia" and gave credit to that which is imaginary: Spacemen rather than the Infinite Intelligent Energy; the God of the Bible.

I'm with you, i've thought for a long time now that Gus is related to ET

And here I've always heard..."the only dumb question is the one that's not asked" damn...hoodwinked again.

Willfully blind huh? IMHO, the only people who are willfully blind are those that preach "blind faith" to an ancient text & condemn everybody else to a sea of fire...

And that's saying something...because if there's anyone who knows a lot about dumb, it's TAK.

You're a wee-bit confused about who's condemning who. Look in the mirror.

Perhaps I'm not understanding your argument, Rocky, but it seems to be:
Premise 1: Humans could only have come into existence by evolutionary processes
Premise 2: Humans exist
Therefore: Humans came into existence through evolutionary processes.

This argument clearly begs the question, no?

Let me come at it from a slightly different angle: Your argument seems to allow for only one possible explanation for the existence of human life. Why do you exclude all others?

Yes it does. Every specimen of a species produces after its kind. Speciation is a gradual process, such that a change sufficient to classify one as belonging to a distinct species requires a separation of many thousands of generations, perhaps millions. So while each specimen always produces a member of its own species, one can look back over the expanses of time and classify as two distinct species a distant ancestor and his distant descendant. No violence, therefore, is done to the verse you cite.

The whole argument is spurious as there is some doubt as to whether there is intelligent life on Earth.

The adult caenorhabditis elegans (seen above) possesses only about a thousand somatic cells. You, Ringman, once possessed even fewer, i.e., when you were a zygote.

It sure would be nice if someone came up with a definition of what a species is that applies in all situations.

A good definition of life would also be nice.

How different do two populations have to be to be considered populations of different species?

Quite a few animals have a specific small number of cells. Rotifers, nematodes, and tardigrades often display eutely.

Of course it would become public.

It's too good a secret to keep.

When two different subspecies lines of a species (typically separated by geographic isolation) can no longer reliably interbreed to produce fertile offspring (i.e., when they've reached reproductive isolation), I'd think that would be a pretty good place to declare speciation to have occurred.

Think of, for example, all the various species of mongoose. There was almost certainly, at one time, only one species of mongoose, a common ancestor to all of them. At various points, over vast stretches of time, certain lines of them became geographically isolated from the others, gradually drifting genetically from each other over many thousands of generations, to the point where they could no longer even theoretically produce fertile offspring together. That's called reproductive isolation, and it's a good point to declare speciation to have occurred.

Ernst Mayr had a reputation as being a lousy mathematician, so it's no surprise he came up with a BS conclusion.

There are way too many exceptions to that to rely on that as a definition.

I think that's a mistake on the part of zoologists. Dingos, wolves, and domestic dogs, for example, are classified as three distinct species, when they should be classified as three subspecies of the same species, since hybridization is common between them, thus reproductive isolation is absent.

Presumably, if we are to accept the premises of the SETI people, the recipients of the message would show up on our doorstep and say hi.

Look: either a civilization has interstellar travel or it doesn't.

If it doesn't, we don't (or at least probably shouldn't) care about it one way or the other, because we don't have interstellar travel either, and at least for the foreseeable future that civilization and ours are completely irrelevant to each other.

If it does, then A) it might very well be relevant to us, and B) it probably has some form of interstellar communication as well--possibly radios or masers with highly-directional output powered by a significant fraction of their star's energy output. (Less power--say the few thousand kilowatts emitted by earthly radio and television stations--would be barely detectable across a solar system, let alone across interstellar distances.) This is presumably the sort of communication that SETI is hoping to intercept, since it's searching the radio spectrum.

But a civilization like that would have little or no reason to care about non-starfaring civilizations like ours unless it happened to run across them accidentally; its interstellar communications would likely be very tightly focused on their targets, very much like lasers, in an effort to avoid wasting energy by broadcasting power to places in the sky where there aren't any intended recipients. Which is to say, SETI has a vanishingly small chance of hearing them. So why bother?

If SETI wants to find extraterrestrial intelligence, it's got a couple of reasonable choices.

First, go find it. Develop an interstellar drive and start exploring other star systems in the vicinity. It's not a lock that we'd be able to unambiguously identify an extraterrestrial intelligence if we found one--look at the decades of controversy over the intelligence of dolphins right here on this planet--but it's the best option available if SETI can develop the technology.

Second, if SETI can't leave the solar system, then its only other reasonable option is to attract the starfaring extraterrestrial intelligence here by building big transmitters--probably on the Moon or on asteroids--with huge fission, fusion, or even total-conversion power plants, and hollering, "Here we are! Here we are! Here we are!" at the stars--kind of like a trapped rabbit calling in the coyotes.

Those are the options it should be concentrating on, not listening for some other trapped rabbit. Any relevant ETs it's not going to hear, and any ETs it hears are not going to be relevant--they'll be non-starfaring trapped rabbits themselves with their own SETIs hollering at the stars.

What about species that have asexual reproduction?

Some species reproduce mainly by asexual reproduction. When times get bad, however, they go looking for a little genetic recombination so there will be some variability in their offspring. Usually the creatures have sexual reproduction with another individual, but some animals have some cells that go through meiosis. The creature then fuses two of the daughter cells produced to form a genetically different individual. The animal basically has sex with itself.

Not all animals do things the way we humans do. Some of them get rather weird.

Zoologists would love for someone to come up with a definition that would work all the time. It would make life much easier for them. About the only one that works is that a species is whatever an eminent taxonomist says it is, and the taxonomists are always changing their minds.

Who did I condemn?

Take a look at some of the stuff Ray Kurzweil (the fellow who started the company that makes Kurzweil synthesizers) has written about what he calls The Singularity. It sounds like you'd be interested.

Bob Lazar & Ben Rich would disagree with you...

Yourself.

I'm good with that...

God didn't use the man made word of species. He said "kind". You are calling God a liar and saying there is no such thing and everything is related.

Where are all the others needed to support your theory? You forgot the zygote had the program for trillions, or you conveniently forgot that.

"But I tell you that every careless word that people speak, they shall give an accounting for it in the day of judgment. "For by your words you will be justified, and by your words you will be condemned."

What sort of words do they mean?

Here ya go; slime molds, where a bunch of free living, dividing cells come together to form what is effectively a multicellular organism...

http://lcmrschooldistrict.com/roth/PowerPoint_Lectures/chapter21/videos_animations/slime_mold.html

More like when a fertile hybrid between two species (there are lots and lots of different kinds of fertile hybrids) cannot survive as well as either parent and thus does not survive to reproduce or else reproduces at a lower rate such that hybrid offpring eventually disappear from the population.

Happens all the time with bird populations.

That's the definition of religion

Interesting. Thanks.

Good grief...!

Ringman, you are NOT drawing anyone here closer to the Good News...you're just pushing them further away from it.

If people don't see things the same way you do, you accuse them
of "calling God a liar."

That's ridiculous...!

Species is, indeed, an abstract manmade concept we use for our own convenience. I am curious about the "kind" concept.

At what level of differences are two creatures not of the same kind?

Old school taxonomists categorize organisms into different groups such as Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, species, and a whole bunch of super and sub categories. More recent taxonomists have stirred things up a bit and have some different categories. Where does "kind" relate to these categories?

Are all fish of the same kind? Are bony fish of a different kind than boneless fish? Are dogs and cats the same kind? Are lions and tigers the same kind?

What do you think the meaning of "kind" is, and how different do different organisms have to be to be of different "kinds?"

I wonder if this guy could be saved???? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Allen_Davis

Just accept Jesus Christ as your savior & all your sins are forgiven??? I'm not believing that kind of schitt for a second and if heaven is gonna be full of spirits like him, I'll pass...

What about Hitler, Stalin & Pol Pot??? Every one of them had exposure to Christianity...IIRC, Hitler had even considered becoming a priest when he was a child. Accept Christ & all is forgiven??? Give me a friggin break.

Christianity was never meant to be a 'religion'...but a relationship, one on one, with a loving God who created us...and sent His son to reveal just how much He loves us.

I could hang with that...except if god is so omnipotent & loving, why doesn't he step in & smite A bunch of motherbleepers that desperately need smiting? I was a "devout christian" for about the first 20 years of my life...all my close friends still are. They also understand the reasons for my agnostic belief in any god/gods or lack thereof. I actually envy those of you who can maintain your belief in a hereafter...

I think they will either enslave our relatively dumb population or just give us their technology.

The best thing about SETI, like the space program is that it drives technology forward.

Kind, in that context, is synonymous with species. The Old Testament wasn't written in English. Specimens (individuals) of each species (kind) always produce offspring of the same species (kind). No violence is done to the scriptures by scientific knowledge.

Now you're playing games with words. You required an example of a thousand-cell species. I provided one. A second example was also offered, i.e., you when you were a zygote. You didn't limit your requirement to adults. Zygotes are specimens of animals with very few somatic cells. You then, after the fact, introduced the new requirement of adulthood. Still, that leaves the example I provided of the thousand-cell adult species. You keep moving the goalpost.

Here's some interesting reading...
http://www.globalchange.umich.edu/gctext/Inquiries/Inquiries_by_Unit/Unit_3.htm

http://www.space.com/10498-life-building-blocks-surprising-meteorite.html

http://science.nasa.gov/astrophysics/focus-areas/black-holes/

"Wolves, dogs, and dingoes are subspecies of Canis lupus."

Dingo A Distinct Species

PS I tend to agree that the dingo, the wolf, and the domesticated dog, are subspecies of canis lupus, rather than distinct species. The fact that they can hybridize seems compelling evidence of that.

Lot's of scientists I read don't agree with you. Is a goat and a sheep the same species? I think they are the same kind because someone successfully read them.

You are not doing any better using my words than you do using God's Word. I asked for examples of ten celled creatures, hundred celled creatures. There should be trillions of examples of them with intermediates found in scores of strata.



Give mew a break. You gave an example of an adult. The context of this conversation is adult examples.

Yes, I gave you an example of an adult as well. Now you say a thousand somatic cells is too large, while before you included that as an example that you'd find persuasive. You keep moving the goalpost.

That said, it's unlikely that you'd find a multicellular organism with much fewer than a thousand cells, since it's likely that nature quickly settled on larger numbers of cells at the colony phase of the evolution of multicellular life, as complexity is more adaptive than simplicity, and complexity requires more cells.

Where do you get the idea I say a thousand celled creature is too large? That is one of the examples I asked for.



Nature? Nature is a word used to describe a concept. It does not have intelligence to decide anything.

Without passing through the ten celled and hundred celled and anything in between the ten and the thousand celled creature you used, there is no thousand celled creature. The fossil record should be filled with examples of the intermediates.

Taxonomy is a funny thing since it is always changing and there are always different systems being used at the same time. A friend of mine is still teaching and came down to visit my wife and me. She was working on some tests that had a taxonomic system that I had never seen.

I was lecturing in my Zoology class several years ago when I noticed that the taxonomic system of the new edition of the book was very different from the earlier edition. How embarrassing. So much for class prep. I did a whole lot of reading that night.

One of the major species I studied for a thesis had a name change while I was writing. That was annoying in the days of typewriters.

The Rainbow Trout has had a significant change since I took Ichthyology back in 1973. The taxonomists not only changed the name of the species but also put into a different genus. Several of the other fish I knew back then have different names now.

I spent a good deal of time looking at different textbooks for several classes. One thing that was annoying was that there were often as many as different taxonomic organizations as there were different textbooks. The number of Kingdoms ranged from three or four to about ten.

The Cladistics folks are trying to change all taxonomic categories to conform to their ideas.

Taxonomy is one of the softest parts of a soft science. Those who are still active in the field are constantly trying to make it a better description of what exists in the real world.

Dawkins discusses this extensively in The Greatest Show On Earth.

Now there is a documentation that a guy who got his GED when he was fifty-one years old can make a mistake. Now show us the creatures with fewer cells than this one. After all your theory depends on their existence.

Look at rotifers, gastrotrichs, and a few others. Some sponges and corals may also fit your requirements.

Also Rhombozoa.

Were I to ever come upon a scene where you were engulfed in flames, I'd immediately seek out a skewer and a bag of marshmallows.

Remember, according to the Bible, God committed genocide more than once, with the Flood in Genesis being an example of almost total Genocide on a global scale..

Given that, I suspect Hitler, Stalin & Pol Pot would feel right at home in Heaven and be in good company..

NO, Goats and Sheep are not the same species, and cannot normally interbreed.

That is a good one.

No it does not. The biological sciences can be characterized as a nonstop series of street signs pointing to evolution. Someone who hasn't studied the biological sciences can be forgiven for not realizing that, though.

When a potter smashes certain of his pots, he's merely exercising discretion. When a customer in his shop does it, he's committing a crime. Very crucial distinction.

Why are there so many Ph.D and master's degree scientists who disagree with this opinion?

I suppose it is when your God has killed more Jews than Hitler..

IMHO religion is one of the most destructive forces ever created by man.

Take the blinders off and you'll see orders of magnitude of scientists who disagree with yours.

Ironically, the reverse could also be said, at least historically anyway..

How so, I'm not comprehending what you mean.

I was going to say something like that but you got there first, but I'll still go ahead and give my take on it.

Religion is a two edged sword. Those who justify their all too human hatreds by saying their God wills it or finding excuses for it in their religious teachings have caused as much pain and misery in the world as any dictator or madman. "God wills it" allows them to bypass the most basic feelings of human compassion without guilt. Currently a lot of Muslims are the chief practitioners of this form of madness but Christianity has had its moments as well.

The basic tenets of most religions are based on compassion and treating others as you would be treated. In that regard, a religious belief practiced truly, one person at a time and done from the heart, not to be "seen of men", can mitigate more suffering than all the do-gooders and do-gooder organizations ever created that tout their goodness for all the world to see.

I personally have no use at all for organized religions with their power structures and hierarchies and insistence that I have to go through their certified and anointed personnel to reach my god. I have great respect and admiration for those who, quietly and without fanfare, truly practice the way of life originally taught by the folks those religions are founded upon.

There are some. I have known some. One thing most of the Biologists with advanced degrees in this particular field have done, however, is to try to understand what it is and to be able to talk about it in an educated manner.

It is a real good idea to know quite a bit about your subject before you start trying to argue about it with other people. Your lack of knowledge becomes very obvious very quickly if you do not.

Also keep in mind that an advanced degree does not guarantee that someone knows a lot about a lot of things. Many know a great deal about a very narrow range of things but very little about things outside their area of expertise. Having an advanced degree in Physics, Geology, or Physical Education means very little when it comes to Biology. Earning a Ph.D does not make someone God-like with unlimited and infallible knowledge in all subjects. There is also not one train of thought that is accepted by all people with high degrees.

Did you ever figure out where "kind" fits into modern taxonomy?

I would say politics is the most destructive thing ever created. Because most of the things done in the name of religion are actually politics with religion as the "excuse" for the political power/control they're seeking. And please notice I said "most" not all; this is NOT an absolute statement.

That was well said.

Bravo...!

So is compassion...need examples?

I agree...

Look how many were murdered under atheistic communism, is what he meant, I suspect.

Yep.

Have you read the prior posts? The post you replied to was a part of the thread where I asked about forgiveness & whether or not Hitler, Pol Pot & Stalin might have accepted JC as their savior before death & be accepted into heaven. All of them were well aware of the concept.

To avoid confusion in the future, you might adopt the habit of quoting the post to which you're responding.

I just did a stroll though this thread and am a little surprised no one had plugged in the Drake equation into The Intelligent Life Lottery.

The Drake equation is: N=R* times Fp times ne times f1 times fi times fc times L
where:
N = the number of civilizations in our galaxy with which radio-communication might be possible (i.e. which are on our current past light cone);
and
R* = the average rate of star formation in our galaxy
fp = the fraction of those stars that have planets
ne = the average number of planets that can potentially support life per star that has planets
fl = the fraction of planets that could support life that actually develop life at some point
fi = the fraction of planets with life that actually go on to develop intelligent life (civilizations)
fc = the fraction of civilizations that develop a technology that releases detectable signs of their existence into space
L = the length of time for which such civilizations release detectable signals into space

It is useful to estimate all the parameters and their values needed to arrive at some range of numbers.

Of course the final number cannot be less than one and the original equation used by Drake in 1961 came up with a probability between 1000 and 100,000,000 civilizations in the Milky Way galaxy.

Wikipedia has a good summary of some of the many proposed modifications to the equation.
Colonization of other worlds by an advanced civilization and how many times has a single world produced and lost an advanced civilization can raise the final estimations. Maybe 200,000,000 or more.

The simple fact that despite the immense numbers of stars; we ain't heard nothing from any of them can reduce the final estimations. Maybe only one or two besides us in our galaxy.
The fact that we have proof of the existence of one greatly increases the odds of a second.
And than there are all those other galaxies...

But we don't know what values to place into fl and fi.

Do you have an answer regarding forgiveness?

Sure. Forgiveness is available to any who accept Christ and are sorry for their sins. However, as one becomes more deeply involved in evil, one's conscience becomes increasing seared, thus decreasingly likely to accept Christ, regret sin, and request forgiveness.

All predestination means is that God knows in advance who will, and who will not, accept him and ask forgiveness.

Not at all. The State is the most destructive force ever created by man, bar none. Can you come up with any other force--or combination of forces, for that matter--that can kill more than 260 million people in only 100 years?

Now, a religion can form a partnership with the State, as happened with Christianity hundreds of years ago and Islam today, and can thus be involved in great destruction, but the driving force behind massive widespread man-made destruction is always the State. Take the State out of religion, and you get a mostly-harmless religion, no matter how it foams at the mouth.

That's why the First Amendment prohibits a State establishment of religion, and why Thomas Jefferson assured the Danbury Baptists about the "wall of separation between Church and State."

Historically, look how many great civilisations were based around or driven by a religion..

For instance here in the UK, if you go back to say 1200 AD, most of the population here were peasants (some would say we still are!) who lived in little more than hovels, but at the same time massive and hugely elaborate stone Cathedrals such as York Minster were being built, sometimes taking over many years to complete.

At that time very few people could read or write but the majority of those who could were monks or other such members of the church. The were also the seat for studying rudimentary medicine.

Later as education started to become established, many of the early schools and colleges were set up and run by the Church..

Much of the exploration of the world at that time was driven by religion as folk went to convert heathen tribes and spread the word ect..

And of course war was waged in the name of religion.

All these things helped our civilisation grow, develop new technology, carry our commerce and expand the arts ect..

If you look at other parts of the world, other great technological achievements such the pyramids in Egypt or those in South America were lined to the local religion..

So while I believe religion can be very destructive, it also directly and in directly drove societies forward.

Sometimes Religion is the State/Government such as in some Islamic countries today, or how the Catholic church ruled a few hundred years ago..

Oh, but not the Church of England??

A few centuries ago the vast majority accepted the "fact" the earth was flat. A consensus does not establish scientific knowledge; just a lot of scientists beliefs.

You seem to be under the false impression that scientists come to a consensus about things and assume, therefore, that it must be true. You really do need to learn more about how science works instead of just making false assumptions.

No assumption is necessary. My post is based of lots of observation. Someone's signature says something like new information is ridiculed. Then it is rejected. Then it is considered common knowledge.

You need to observe a little more closely. Your observations have lead you to very wrong conclusions about science and how it works.

A few centuries ago the "vast majority" would have been in deep schitt with the church to suggest otherwise... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_galilei

Heretic & sacrilegious are a couple words that come to mind...Galileo was lucky he wasn't tortured & or killed for heresy...

That's because, "Historically" if you opposed the religious beliefs of said civilization, you were promptly dealt with.