A while ago we were having another discussion on evolution and someone gave a web address that was the best explanation of why it was true. This website provided evidence that showed that evolution is the only explanation for what we see in animals now.

Who was it and what was the website?

BrentD?

Here's one that will help set you straight.

http://www.intelligentdesign.org/

Another good one.



http://www.discovery.org/

Not what I was looking for.

Got irony?

Just read Why Evolution Is True, by Biology professor Jerry Coyne.

Curious why one gives a [bleep] whether proof exists or not? Clearly it goes either way. Is it OK for some to believe and some not? I mean what the [bleep]? Seems it is a personal thing that is defined, quite personally, as required. Nothing wrong with that IMO... Some believe, some not and either will receive the "wrath" they believe. [bleep], at least simple really for those not so worried...

The argument for evolution is almost as strong as that for electricity and nuclear weapons. The article that I an seeking did an excelent job of showing this.

If you look for "proof", you will find it, whether or not it's truth.

That's the first thing I thought, when I read this....

As of today there is no "only explanation"

Snake

Is this the one you are looking for?

http://talkorigins.org/origins/faqs.html

intellegent desing is the biggest crock of chit there is....for every one thing that fits there is a dozen that show the "designer" had to have been high off his arse when he came up with it....a rabbits digestive system comes to mind.....

not to mention the whole thing actually minimizes god when you get down to it....it teaches god is in the gaps there for the more science we understand the less god there is....but thats what you get from a theory that is mostly pushed by lawyers, not academics, not clergy.....its lawyers that picked up the ball an ran with this one to make money suing school districts....

IIRC Intelligent design came out of the Discovery institute in Seattle. After they lost in court over creation, they rewrote "Of people and panda's" replacing the words creation with intelligent design.

also findit hilarious that a couple of books they hold up as academics supporting have flat out lies in them to prove their point....and not even lies about biological process....they just flat lie about how things are taught.....

watched a funny video where one of the big proponents of intelligent design was taken to task about the Ernst Haeckel diagram still being taught and when they pulled a dozen school biology texts off the shelf in the guys office and IF Haeckel was mentioned at all(in 2/3's he wasnt mentioned at all) it was in passing that he was one of the early scientists....it sure isnt being taught as modern theory.....WTF flat out lie to people bout something so easily checked out....

When your audience if RobJordorn, or other who wonder why a person would care about evidence, it's easy to lie to them, because they will never fact check your lies. Now with the internet, not only are we able to fact check their lies, we have access achieves where other have already done the fact checking, or posted youtube video's deconstruction their lies with facts and logic.

i just find it hilarious one of the big names supporting teh whole deal never bothered to even look at the books in his own office.....

hell 2 of the biggest three pushers of intelligent design cannot even explain to you what intelligent design is because they dont care cause they dont need to know to sue school districts...they just need something else out there so that they can sue school districts......

Not even close my friend. For a good eye opener read Uncommon Dissent: Intellectuals Who Find Darwinism Unconvincing.

Jordan

15 members of the discovery institute??

Steve says they are wrong, 1200 times over:

Project Steve

Evolutionary and historical researcher John M. Lynch describes Uncommon Dissent:

"a collection of (largely) non-scientists bemoaning evolution and it�s perceived moral effects while rehashing arguments lifted from older anti-evolutionary sources. The tone is the usual paranoid delusion that American creationism seems to specialize in; Darwinism is an 'ideology' which exhibits 'overweening ambition', it�s a theory that is held 'dogmatically and even ruthlessly' by the 'Darwinian thought police' who are 'as insidious as any secret police at ensuring conformity and rooting out dissent'." --John M. Lynch[22]

Of the fifteen intellectuals in the book he says:


"It's indicative of something that the initial best case for the failure of Darwinism is given by a philosopher (Koons) with no apparent background in biology and the last word is given to an eight year old piece by a popularizer of mathematics, novelist, and 'accomplished poet'. In between we get a poor sandwich - all filling and no substance." --John M. Lynch[22]

Here is another good one.

http://www.signatureinthecell.com/


BTW, notice that Lynch's review does not discuss any of the arguments made in the book on the merits? If they are wrong, why not refute them instead of utilizing hit and run personal attacks? See a pattern? When evolutionists are challenged with evidence or arguments they can't defeat they try to camouflage that fact with snide personal attacks, hoping to reassure believers that there's nothing to doubt. That is not debate, that's obfuscation.

The argument must have merits inorder to debate them:

Here a lecture covering the ID losses in court by one of the lead witnesses demolishing the so called "pure science" behind ID.

[video:youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=oQvmqRv_jN4[/video]

I'll post a refutation of Miller later. He's actually a bit of a lightweight. BTW, the fact the courts have held ID not to be science tells us nothing about whether their arguments are correct, nor does it prove the truth of evolution. The establishment is heavily invested in a creation story that excludes God from the cosmos. This a priori commitment to naturalism includes the legal profession. Naturalism and empiricism however are not the same thing.

More later. Got to get back to work.

Jordan

What is the difference between natural selection and Evolution?

Scale?


Snake

I don't have the time to argue about this (I'm too busy being a psychopath in the "respect for animals" thread), but I would like to chime in briefly. I'll just copy and paste my thoughts from the last evolution discussion we had.

Pretty much. The fossil record demonstrates that species evolve, sort of. What really happens is genetic information is lost, IE, no more Cave Bears, or Wooly Mammoths, via extinction. This dovetails nicely with the laws of thermodynamics. Evolution flies in the face of physics.

The common terms are micro vs macro-evolution. IE, micro-evolution would be Darwin's finches he observed on the Galapogos Islands. They both started and ended as finches. Another evolutionary "proof" oft cited is the Peppered Moth. They changed colors due to smokestacks. IOW, a moth became....a moth. Quite the evolutionary leap.

What the fossil record doesn't demonstrate is how reptiles became birds. Stephan Jay Gould postulate his "Hopeful Monster" hypothesis to explain this away.

In a fairy tale, a princess kisses a frog, and you get a prince. With evolution, it just takes a few million years.

Well stated Blue.

Geez, Conrad just asked a question about an information source, not an argument.

This place sometimes..........

Natural selection is the force that drives evolution.

For sure.

Yes, we do have transitional forms. We have so many paleontologist argue about their classification.

[video:youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=q9a-lFn4hqY[/video]

Sure there are:

The late Dr Colin Patterson, senior paleontologist of the British Museum of Natural History, wrote a book, Evolution. In reply to a questioner who asked why he had not included any pictures of transitional forms, he wrote:

I fully agree with your comments about the lack of direct illustration of evolutionary transitions in my book. If I knew of any, fossil or living, I would certainly have included them � . I will lay it on the line�there is not one such fossil for which one could make a watertight argument.2

The renowned evolutionist (and Marxist) Stephen Jay Gould wrote:

The absence of fossil evidence for intermediary stages between major transitions in organic design, indeed our inability, even in our imagination, to construct functional intermediates in many cases, has been a persistent and nagging problem for gradualistic accounts of evolution.3

And:

I regard the failure to find a clear �vector of progress� in life�s history as the most puzzling fact of the fossil record.4

As Sunderland points out:

It of course would be no puzzle at all if he [Gould] had not decided before he examined the evidence that common-ancestry evolution was a fact, �like apples falling from a tree,� and that we can only permit ourselves to discuss possible mechanisms to explain that assumed fact.5

http://www.thematrix.co.uk/texttopic.asp?ID=22

So let's believe a book.

Why do you say Gould was a Marxist?

I think after reading Blue's thoughts I'm going to go to church on Sunday.



Travis

Nice out of context quote mine on Dr. Patterson:

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/patterson.html

In 1993 I attended a public lecture on the Queensland University of Technology (Australia) campus by Carl Wieland, the director of the Creation Science Foundation here in Brisbane. That was my first encounter with Carl Wieland and the CSF, and it wasn't to be my last. In his lecture Wieland made a string of absurd claims, to which I objected vocally much to his chagrin. On each point Wieland refused to answer my objections and stated that questions would be allowed at the conclusion of the lecture (where I was allowed to ask one whole question!). Anyway that's another story...

During the lecture a quotation of Dr. Colin Patterson was used to justify the standard creationist argument that 'there are no transitional forms.' Numerous other creationists I have encountered have used the quote, and an extended version (which fills in the text between the ellipsis) appears in the CSF "Revised Quote Book", published in 1990. So the quote is in wide usage, at least in Australia:



"I fully agree with your comments on the lack of direct illustration of evolutionary transitions in my book. If I knew of any, fossil or living, I would certainly have included them. . .I will lay it on the line, There is not one such fossil for which one might make a watertight argument."
-- Dr. Colin Patterson, senior paleontologist at the British Museum of Natural History.

I decided to get to the bottom of the matter. The quote is from a personal letter dated 10th April 1979 from Dr. Patterson to creationist Luther D. Sunderland and is referring to Dr. Patterson's book "Evolution" (1978, Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd.). My first step was to read the book. (I believe it is now out of print, but most university libraries should have a copy.) Anyone who has actually read the book can hardly say that Patterson believed in the absence of transitional forms. For example (p131-133):



"In several animal and plant groups, enough fossils are known to bridge the wide gaps between existing types. In mammals, for example, the gap between horses, asses and zebras (genus Equus) and their closest living relatives, the rhinoceroses and tapirs, is filled by an extensive series of fossils extending back sixty-million years to a small animal, Hyracotherium, which can only be distinguished from the rhinoceros-tapir group by one or two horse-like details of the skull. There are many other examples of fossil 'missing links', such as Archaeopteryx, the Jurassic bird which links birds with dinosaurs (Fig. 45), and Ichthyostega, the late Devonian amphibian which links land vertebrates and the extinct choanate (having internal nostrils) fishes. . ."

Patterson goes on to acknowledge that there are gaps in the fossil record, but points out that this is possibly due to the limitations of what fossils can tell us. He finishes the paragraph with:



". . .Fossils may tell us many things, but one thing they can never disclose is whether they were ancestors of anything else."

It is actually this statement which is the key to interpreting the Sunderland quote correctly; it is not possible to say for certain whether a fossil is in the direct ancestral line of a species group. Archaeopteryx, for example, is not necessarily directly ancestral to birds. It may have been a species on a side-branch. However, that in no way disqualifies it as a transitional form, or as evidence for evolution. Evolution predicts that such fossils will exist, and if there was no link between reptiles and birds then Archaeopteryx would not exist, whether it is directly ancestral or not. What Patterson was saying to Sunderland was that, of the transitional forms that are known, he could not make a watertight argument for any being directly ancestral to living species groups.

Of course, my opinion on the interpretation was never going to impress a creationist -- I don't think anything is enough to convince a creationist -- so I decided to see if I could get the full text of the letter and see if it would clarify the context. Since the quote appears in the "Revised Quote Book", and the editor claims in the introduction that the text of each quote is held in full, I faxed the CSF and asked if they would supply me with the text of the letter. I received the following fax back from Carl Wieland (Dated 18 June 1993) who apparently remembered our exchange at QUT:




FAX to: Lionel T
From: Carl Wieland
Re: Your requests.

Our past exchanges would have served to show you (if your intention was bona fide) not only the bona fides, but the validity of many of the things you were challenging. Instead of coming back for a genuine discussion in the interests of discovering truth, you have sidestepped these issues and are moving into a totally unrelated area.

I can only assume that your intention is not, and is unlikely to become, bona fide and will therefore not permit our staff to give you the references etc you seek as you are clearly simply looking for the negative and cannot be relied upon to give an objective assessment (not meant as any personal disrespect, but from our encounter at Uni you are clearly so emotionally involved and hostile to our platform that it would serve no useful purpose for us to do your work for you. the quotes in the RQB are extensively referenced, and you have access to public libraries, etc. You are even free to write to the authors yourself, since most would be still alive.


The very reason the RQB is the Revised Quote Book is that the original "Quote Book", published in 1984, had been withdrawn due to an embarrassing number of errors. (Some quotes even seem to have been fabricated.) The introduction of the RQB coyly refers to that fiasco as follows:



"With CSF, as usual, sorely under-funded and overworked at the time, the original Quote Book had been hastily put together from quotes sent in by a number of people. Some of these turned out to have been simply written down on a card after listening to a creationist speaker at a lecture. . ."

It is ironic that so-called Creation 'scientists' (including those of the CSF) often complain that they are not treated with the respect they feel they deserve. Yet any scientist who published a work of such appalling scholarship would probably lose his or her job and certainly would never be taken seriously by the scientific community again. If the sort of 'science' peddled by those responsible for the "Quote Book" is not being taken seriously, it is because creationists are treated exactly the same way that any scientist who acts incompetently would be.

Looking through the RQB does not inspire any confidence that it is any better than the original "Quote Book". Many of the quotations are clearly out of context. Also, out of the 130 quotes, at least 13 (10%) are secondary references. Secondary quotes are a convenient way to misrepresent. Sure, the 'quote' might accurately reproduce the secondary text, but does the secondary text accurately reflect the original text? Then there are the 'uncheckable' quotations: sources like personal letters, lectures, TV interviews, etc. which cannot be referenced in a library. Interestingly, Dr. Colin Patterson is quoted five times. Every single one is from a source uncheckable in a library.

Hence the onus was clearly on the CSF to prove its own 'bona fide' intentions and allow its references to be checked. After all, what is the point of claiming to have the full text on file if no one is allowed to see it?

I wrote back to Carl Wieland and explained that the quote I was interested in was from a personal letter, and as such could hardly be referenced in a library. He was unsympathetic and so as a last resort I took Wieland's own advice and set about contacting Dr. Patterson personally. Wieland only has himself to blame for the response.

I phoned the British Museum of Natural History and to my delight discovered that Dr. Patterson was still working there. I faxed him the text of the quote and asked him whether my interpretation, the creationist interpretation, or some other interpretation of his words was correct. Here is his reply dated 16 August 1993:




Dear Mr Theunissen,
Sorry to have taken so long to answer your letter of July 9th. I was away for a while, and then infernally busy. I seem fated continually to make a fool of myself with creationists. The specific quote you mention, from a letter to Sunderland dated 10th April 1979, is accurate as far as it goes. The passage quoted continues "... a watertight argument. The reason is that statements about ancestry and descent are not applicable in the fossil record. Is Archaeopteryx the ancestor of all birds? Perhaps yes, perhaps no: there is no way of answering the question. It is easy enough to make up stories of how one form gave rise to another, and to find reasons why the stages should be favoured by natural selection. But such stories are not part of science, for there is no way to put them to the test."

I think the continuation of the passage shows clearly that your interpretation (at the end of your letter) is correct, and the creationists' is false.

That brush with Sunderland (I had never heard of him before) was my first experience of creationists. The famous "keynote address" at the American Museum of Natural History in 1981 was nothing of the sort. It was a talk to the "Systematics Discussion Group" in the Museum, an (extremely) informal group. I had been asked to talk to them on "Evolutionism and creationism"; fired up by a paper by Ernst Mayr published in Science just the week before. I gave a fairly rumbustious talk, arguing that the theory of evolution had done more harm than good to biological systematics (classification). Unknown to me, there was a creationist in the audience with a hidden tape recorder. So much the worse for me. But my talk was addressed to professional systematists, and concerned systematics, nothing else.

I hope that by now I have learned to be more circumspect in dealing with creationists, cryptic or overt. But I still maintain that scepticism is the scientist's duty, however much the stance may expose us to ridicule.

Yours Sincerely,

[signed]

Colin Patterson

Click here to view a scan of the original letter [113k]
Note that not only does Patterson confirm that the creationist representation of the quote is false and that my interpretation is correct, but he goes on to point out that another quote which appears in the RQB has been misrepresented. (I only sent him the text of the one, but did mention the other four quotes in the RQB.) The quote which claims to be from a keynote address was actually from an informal talk, and is a comment on systematics only, rather than a general comment on evolution as it is represented in the RQB.

I sent Patterson's reply to the CSF requesting that they retract the quotes in question. Carl Wieland sent me a very long letter giving all sorts of contradictory reasons why the quotes were supposedly valid. For example:



"Incidentally, if space permitted, I would have been quite happy for the continuation of his quote to also go in to the Quote Book. Because I do NOT agree that the continuation shows clearly that your interpretation is correct. Nor is it fair for Patterson to comment on the creationist interpretation without a clearer definition of what is meant by 'transitional forms'..."

Wieland seems to completely miss the point. How can it be unfair to ask Dr. Patterson to comment on the meaning of his own words? What could be more fair? He is, after all, the only person who truly knows what he meant. Whether Wieland agrees with him or not is neither here nor there. As for the comment about a definition of transitional forms, the exact opposite is true; creationists should supply a clearer definition of 'transitional forms' when they quote scientists. When quoting scientists like Patterson or Gould as saying 'there are no transitional forms' they neglect to mention that they are only referring to transitional forms at the species level. They know full well that Gould has stated that transitional forms between orders and families are in fact abundant, and even a cursory read of Dr. Patterson's book will yield numerous examples of transitional forms.

Wieland's comments on the 'keynote address' were almost comical:



"Since we have the entire tape, I assure you that it is a typical example of somebody squirming [I hesitate to use this word re such an honest and genuine scientist as Dr Patterson seems to be] when a quotation has been used by creationists which they didn't want to be used. I assure you, the context does not alter the meaning, and in any case Dr Patterson does not say that it is taken out of context in the sense of a misquote, but merely states that it was an address 'to systematists'. Reading the entire address, it would scarcely matter if it were a girl guides meeting, the comments are valid."

I have to point out that Dr. Patterson certainly does imply that he was taken out of context. He states that his talk concerned systematics only, and nothing else. Yes, the comments are valid. But they are valid comments about systematics, not about evolution in general as implied in the RQB. I will also point out that at least in terms of my understanding of Australian Law, taping someone without their knowledge and then publishing excerpts is illegal. It's certainly unethical.

I think that this whole saga demonstrates just how deceitful creationists can be. Whether they are willingly deceitful or just don't know any better, I don't know. But deceitful they are. To top it off I wasn't surprised when soon after I had released the letter on fidonet, a creationist was posting the claim that I had written to Dr. Patterson and that he had confirmed that the quotes of him in the RQB were genuine, by selectively citing the following sentence:



"The specific quote you mention, from a letter to Sunderland dated 10th April 1979, is accurate as far as it goes."

It seems that no matter how thoroughly one destroys a creationist argument, you can be sure that they'll find some twisted way to justify using the same argument tomorrow. It is frustrating to have to repeat the same explanations over and over, but you really do need the patience of a saint to argue with a creationist. I guess the price of truth is eternal patience. Anyway, if there are still creationists who think the quotes of Patterson are valid, I'd like to know what part of the following sentence you don't understand:



"I think the continuation of the passage shows clearly that your interpretation (at the end of your letter) is correct, and the creationists' is false..."

You did the same thing with Gould:

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/quotes/

Another way of misquotation is the result of the readers of the quoter and the readers of the quoted having different vocabularies, making different assumptions, and interpreting things in different ways. In science, words are often used in different ways than what they would mean to a general audience. And of course a word might mean different things in a different field or can mean different things depending on the context. If an evolution denier's readers don't realize this then they are vulnerable to being fooled by a misquotation. ◦ Many evolution deniers quote Stephen Jay Gould and other punctuated equilibria proponents as saying that transitional forms are very rare. Most non-specialists get ideas of "missing links" between higher taxa of animals when they hear about transitional forms. Gould has been very clear that these are common and yet he has been quoted many times that transitional forms are rare. What is going on here? In the context of punctuated equilibria, a transitional form is between immediately related species (say two species of squirrels, species of similar Devonian trilobites, etc.), and is not referring to a transition between human and non-human, whales and primitive land mammals, etc. Indeed the transitions Gould and other punctuated equilibria proponents are arguing about would be generally be dismissed as "microevolution" by many evolution deniers. Thus antievolutionists arguing against the existence of transitions between larger taxa are very likely guilty of misquotation if they quote Gould's writings on punctuated equilibria. For more details on this see Gould's10 classic essay "Evolution as Fact and Theory" where he explains his position on the fossil record as well as demonstrates young-earth creationist misrepresentations of his views.

http://socialistworker.org/2002-1/410/410_08_StephenJayGould.shtml

Ain't it amazing, Jerry Falwell was a creationist, and Gould was a marxist evolutionist. Go figure....

Bullsch!t Ant. From your C&P:


"In several animal and plant groups, enough fossils are known to bridge the wide gaps between existing types. In mammals, for example, the gap between horses, asses and zebras (genus Equus) and their closest living relatives, the rhinoceroses and tapirs, is filled by an extensive series of fossils extending back sixty-million years to a small animal, Hyracotherium, which can only be distinguished from the rhinoceros-tapir group by one or two horse-like details of the skull. There are many other examples of fossil 'missing links', such as Archaeopteryx, the Jurassic bird which links birds with dinosaurs (Fig. 45), and Ichthyostega, the late Devonian amphibian which links land vertebrates and the extinct choanate (having internal nostrils) fishes. . ."

Patterson goes on to acknowledge that there are gaps in the fossil record, but points out that this is possibly due to the limitations of what fossils can tell us. He finishes the paragraph with:

They started with horses, they ended with, SURPRISE, more horses. Peppered moths. Again.

Bullsch!t. He was a marxist, that is really all that needs to be said. Not much different than a Imam with a Koran. He's GOTTA tie it all together.

I'm an inspirational kinda guy.

That's a nice redherring. You bring in Gould, claiming a quote of his disproves evolution, then claim he doesn't matter because of his politics. Nice distraction, but again, all you are engaging in is quote mining and ad hominids at this point.

22s worked for Gould!

BUT HE DIDN'T LIVE NORTH OF THE AK RANGE!

GFY


Travis

Good thing that's the ONLY place it gets cold.

True, but Bolio Lake at the Cold Regions Test Center at Greely holds the record for the all-time low in N. America. Montanan's just THINK it gets cold there.

Response to Miller's suppposed refutation of the bacterial flagellum as irreducibly complex.

http://www.evolutionnews.org/2011/03/michael_behe_hasnt_been_refute044801.html


Response on blood clotting to follow

Then why did he loose the court case?

Michael Behe's response to the supposed refutation of blood clotting as an example of an irreduciably complex system.

http://www.trueorigin.org/behe03.asp

You're joking right? Seriously, is it your belief that judges are infallible? The issue is not whether a court ruled ID not to be scientific; the issue is whether such ruling was correct or not. So, for an allegedly intelligent man, you are asking a very ignorant, question-begging, well, question. I will provide you a link explaining the error of the court's ruling later tonight.

Jordan

Listen to the video I posted, the read behe's response. He didn't address any of the critiques of his claims of irreducible complexity in the flagellum, he just ignored them like they never happened, and claimed he made a response.

Let's see what the Judge had to say about Behe:

"In fact, on cross-examination, Professor Behe was questioned concerning his 1996 claim that science would never find an evolutionary explanation for the immune system. He was presented with fifty-eight peer-reviewed publications, nine books, and several immunology textbook chapters about the evolution of the immune system; however, he simply insisted that this was still not sufficient evidence of evolution and that it was not "good enough" (23.19(behe))

And that was from a Bush appointed judge.

Colder than Prospect Cr.?

Antelope Sniper:

See the PDF doc link in the second paragraph of this article.

http://www.evolutionnews.org/2013/02/playing_fast_an069561.html

I didn't read this whole thread and this is directed at no one in particular. But if you want proof of evolution, look in the mirror!

Can't believe there is a doubt about it in anyones mind�...

The above is a textbook example of a standard Miller misrepresentation. The response below is what Behe actually said. Read it and then ask yourself whether you ought to be relying on someone who so blithely misrepresents what someone else actually said.

VII. Ken Miller and the Evolution of the Immune System: �Not Good Enough�?

A final area where Ken Miller misrepresents Behe�s arguments is regarding the origin of the immune system. In Only a Theory, Miller claims that when the plaintiffs' attorneys at the Dover trial did a literature-dump bluff on Behe during cross-examination�placing before him over 50 papers and nearly a dozen books purportedly explaining the evolution of the immune system�that Behe said that they were "not 'good enough.�" Miller even goes so far as to characterize Behe's response as follows: "Even when presented with every opportunity to make their case, the defenders of design resorted to little more than saying 'It's not good enough for me' in the face of overwhelming evidence for evolution."42 What did Behe really say?

If by overwhelming evidence for "evolution," Miller meant neo-Darwinian evolution, where random mutation and natural selection are the driving force generating biological complexity in an adaptive, step-by-step fashion, then Behe is on quite firm ground in doubting Miller's assertion of "overwhelming" evidence for the evolution of the immune system. Behe knew this, and thus stated during his cross examination about the immune system: "In many of [the papers] they're not actually discussing mutation. They're discussing similarities and sequences between parts of the immune system in
vertebrates and some elements of transposons."43

The plaintiffs� attorney wouldn�t give up. In another exchange Behe was asked "Now, these articles rebut your assertion that scientific literature has no answers on the origin of the vertebrate immune system?" and he replied:
�A. No, they certainly do not. My answer, or my argument is that the literature has no detailed rigorous explanations for how complex biochemical systems could arise by a random mutation and natural selection and these articles do not address that.
Q. So these are not good enough?
A. They're wonderful articles. They're very interesting. They simply just don't address the question that I pose."44
The relentless plaintiffs� attorney then pestered Behe again with nearly the same question �Is that your position today that these articles aren't good enough, you need to see a step-by-step description?� and Behe clearly replied, �These articles are excellent articles I assume. However, they do not address the question that I am posing. So it's not that they aren't good enough. It's simply that they are addressed to a different subject.�45
The plaintiffs� attorney continued pressing Behe, and later Behe again emphasized this point: �Most of them have evolution or related words in the title, so I can confirm that, but what I strongly doubt is that any of these address the question in a rigorous detailed fashion of how the immune system or irreducibly complex components of it could have arisen by random mutation and natural selection.�46

Does Behe say, as Miller characterizes it, "It's not good enough for me," or in Judge Jones' words, the papers are "not 'good enough��? Not at all, because Behe actually says: "These articles are excellent articles I assume. However, they do not address the question that I am posing. So it's not that they aren't good enough. It's
simply that they are addressed to a different subject."

In other words, Behe said precisely the opposite of what Miller claims Behe said. Of course Miller copied the error from Judge Jones, who copied the error from the ACLU's "Findings of Facts and Conclusions of Law" brief,47 but unfortunately this false account of Behe�s testimony continues to be perpetuated by Miller in his books and lectures about Dover.
More important than all of this is the fact that Behe�s response to these papers was right on target: the papers dumped on Behe during cross-examination made for a nice display of courtroom theatrics, but they did not establish a step-by-step Darwinian explanation of the origin of the immune system. Instead, the papers made comparisons of DNA sequences�a type of evidence that doesn�t refute irreducible complexity, making the same mistake discussed earlier in Section III, �Confusing Evidence for Common Ancestry with Evidence for Darwinian Evolution.�

"�[I]rreducibly complex systems such as mousetraps and flagella serve both as negative arguments against gradualistic explanations like Darwin�s and as positive arguments for design."

This is exactly the statement that Miller so artfully takes apart, by demonstrating the flagellum is not irreducibly complex.

Intelligent design is not a super natural explanation??
They actually laughed at Behe when he said that in the court room, and it's just as laughable in print.

DNA does not demonstrate evolution.....common ancestor does not demonstrate evolution....

Everything his says is just laughable.

Heck, they didn't even try to cross examine the DNA evidence introduced at trial:

[video:youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=dK3O6KYPmEw[/video]


Behe lame late rebuttals reminds me of an old quote from the University of Chicago:

Everyone like to debate Milton Friedman, when Milton Friedman is not in the room.

Berkely Law Professor Phillip Johnson commenting on the Kitzmiller (Dover) ruling.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rpp5TEB3NEg

There is anecdotal evidence that evolution is a myth. Take a hard look at Africa.

Miller has never, ever demonstrated the flagellum is not irreduciably complex. Read the resources I posted above.

Phil Johnson, the same guy the say HIV does not cause AIDS???????????????????????????????????????????

Phil Johnson, the Father of the ID movement, Co-founder of the Discovery Group, who according to the Harvard Review engages in pseudo-science, and not real science....

Yea, that's perhaps the worst person you could choose for an appeal to authority.

To be fair, Johnson at (4:37 in RJ's link) did say that Jones was judicially correct in his ruling in Kitzmiller under SC guidelines. Johnson's total beef with Jones was that he thought that Jones was grandstanding beyond proper decorum.

Of course he did. The resources you posted in no way refuted his arguments.

Your apparent argument is that because everyone believes HIV does cause AIDS, and Johnson does not, ergo Johnson is wrong on evolution (or rather,he is a crackpot). Do I have it correct? Do you have the slightest idea what a ridiculously weak argument that is? At some point, virtually everyone believed the world was flat too. Kerry Mullis, a Nobel Laureate and discoverer of PCR (polymerase chain reaction) also does not believe the evidence establishes that HIV causes AIDS. There are other scientists---world leaders in their field---who also do not believe in the HIV-AIDS hypothesis. So your premise utterly begs the salient question. You (and Miller) employ a pattern of argument that is characteristic of discussants who actually have no argument: attack the intelligence, motivation or credentials of your opponent, misrepresent their arguments if you can get away with it----but don't ever actually refute them. I take the lack of refutation as evidence o of the inability to refute.

Notice also, I did not appeal to Johnson's authority. I cited him. His commentary on Kitzmiller (which I linked) speaks for itself.
As usual, you refuse to address the merits of Johnson's commentary. One of the important points about Kitzmiller is the role that the lawyer's had in the outcome. The Plaintiffs were heavily funded and served by the finest lawyers. The defendants were in the opposite position. The point is the outcome of a trial really tells us nothing about who was actually right: it only tells us who won.

Actually, to be fair Johnson said Jones found material in the record to justify a finding of religious purpose and that he was applying a Supreme Court doctrine that made religious motivation decisive. He did not say Kitzmiller was correct. The important part of the Kitzmiller decision is Jones's definition of science, which is incorrect.

Jordan

Sounds like a law professor's endorsement of Jones to me.

What definition of Science would have been correct?

Yes, the defense consisted of quacks and liars:

"Witnesses either testified inconsistently, or lied outright under oath on several occasions," Jones wrote. "The inescapable truth is that both [Alan] Bonsell and [William] Buckingham lied at their January 3, 2005 depositions. ... Bonsell repeatedly failed to testify in a truthful manner. ... Defendants have unceasingly attempted in vain to distance themselves from their own actions and statements, which culminated in repetitious, untruthful testimony." An editorial in the York Daily Record described their behaviour as both ironic and sinful, saying that the "unintelligent designers of this fiasco should not walk away unscathed".[41]

And my favorite quote from the Judge:

"The Citizens of Dover are were poorly served by the members of the Board who voted for the ID Policy. It is ironic that several of these individuals, who so staunchly and proudly touted their religious convictions in public, would time and again lie to cover their tracks and disguise the real purpose behind the ID Policy.

Well, for starters, a definition that presupposes the metahpysical freedom of the mind. The idea of "truth" presupposes that "truth" is intelligible. But scientific truth, or any kind of truth for that matter is logically impossible if one's starting premise is that "matter in motion" is all there is. Naturalism implicitly denies that the mind is free to apprehend truth---or rather, that truth is even possible---all the while purporting to discover the "truth" of evolution.

Here is a link that discussed the definition of science from another perspective.

http://www.stephencmeyer.org/news/2010/07/is_intelligent_design_science.html


Jordan

Wiki says Prospect hit -80F. The Army said the CRTC hit -81 in FEB/80.

Bonsell and Buckingham were school board members and young earth creationists. Young earth creationism is not scientifically tenable. That does not mean ID is not.

Ronald Reagan, the father of modern conservatism, originator of the Reagan Doctrine, who, according to the ACLU/SDS/PETA/Polesmokers of Amerika, sucked great big MOOSE COCK.....

Recently one of the evolution supporters on this very website used Haeckel's info as support for evolution. It has been almost 150 years since he was discredited, so why is he even mentioned in passing?

Creationism explained:

God + Adam + Eve - times - Cane - minus - Abel + Seth - divided by - Lilith - times - Eve's sister-in-law - divided by - dinosaurs - times - 42 - times - E=mc2 - divided by - Infinity + H2O - times - monosodiumglutimate - minus - The Monolith + hot air + the sound of a honking horn + The Secret Ingredient - minus - your opposable thumb = ALL THAT IS AND EVER SHALL BE! AMEN!

I hope that clears things up for you.

- taken from Urban Dictionary...I thought it was funny.

why is he mentioned in passing? same reason all kinds of people are mentioned in passing....they are a part of history....every history book is full of similar.....his stuff wasnt taught when i was in school but he was mentioned in the beginning of the biology texts as a scientist in the past....

BTW on the whole transitional forms.....IF you actually chose to learn bout biology you would find out there are loads of them including living ones.....unfortunately most that seem to argue against it on here couldnt pass a basic biology class....least i put the effort in figuring out what the hell intelligent design was trying to sell.....it quickly fell apart cause as i said its main point has been to make lawyers money not to actually explain anything....

I've passed a few biology classes, and I think you are FOS.

"Living" transitional forms, huh?

yep....guessing you just dont understand what a transitional form is....there are plenty of plants and animals that dont fit neatly into an existing species....they are either on the way to something new or a dead end.....time will tell....

Living transition forms reproduce after their kind. Did any of you evolutionists happen to notice that? But we could go back to the 1970's and accept the evolutionist Goldsmidt's (I think that's his name.) idea that a turtle laid an egg and a parakeet hatched. He called it the "hopeful monster mechanism" because he could not find a single un-challenged by an evolutionist transition form. He was laughed at by the evolutionary community. Now it is called the "punctuated equilibrium concept" and many scientists are no longer laughing.

man yo really have no clue about what you are talking about...cause the above makes no [bleep] sense what so ever....you gotta be trying to parrot someone else and have no clue what they are talking about...

He's referring to S.J. Gould, as you well know, and "according to their kind" is why there is no such thing as a mule farm, but don't let reality get in the way of your pet theory.

Rattler,

This has got me curious. What is a transitional form and please give me a couple of examples thereof.

thanks,

tf

I'd like to know how it's certain that they're transitioning and what they transitioned from.

I'm doubtful I'll be convinced, based on what I've heard before about the subject, but I'm still genuinely curious about the answer.

Nice to hear you pipe up. So many others won't. Ya know, a bud on the 'fire and all...

These supposedly irreducibly complex structures only seem so when one starts with the premise that the end point was contemplated from the beginning of the structure's development. This is not how evolution postulates it occurs at all. Each tiny step served a function that merely increased survivability a little over other members of the species. Once that new adaptation became fully refined for that function by the process of natural selection, a further modification (hit upon by genetic variability/mutation) improved survivability a little more, etc., etc.. The end function of the end product (which can be very complex indeed) can even (and often does) have little or nothing to do with the original purpose of the earlier stages of development.

For example, our lungs (or rather that structure that became our lungs) originally served the function of equalizing buoyancy in our fish ancestors, i.e., it was an air sack that served no blood-oxygenation function at all. Our fish ancestors' gills (originally serving the function of blood-oxygenation) are now, in us, associated with producing speech, and no longer serve any blood-oxygenation function.

Because he was the popularizer of the idea that ontology recapitulates phylogeny, and this is irrefutably true and accepted in the biological sciences. Doesn't matter if his early illustrations have been found fault with. Science isn't stuck in the 19th Century.

You chose a poor example for your point of view, since the fact that a donkey and a horse can produce offspring, but not fertile offspring, is a strong argument in favor of speciation by evolution, i.e., it proves they are 1) not the same species, but 2) had a common ancestor not very distant in the past.

Sounds like a law professor's endorsement of Jones to me.

What definition of Science would have been correct? [/quote]

Well, for starters, a definition that presupposes the metahpysical freedom of the mind. The idea of "truth" presupposes that "truth" is intelligible. But scientific truth, or any kind of truth for that matter is logically impossible if one's starting premise is that "matter in motion" is all there is. Naturalism implicitly denies that the mind is free to apprehend truth---or rather, that truth is even possible---all the while purporting to discover the "truth" of evolution.

Here is a link that discussed the definition of science from another perspective.

http://www.stephencmeyer.org/news/2010/07/is_intelligent_design_science.html


Jordan [/quote]

Quite a mouthful to simply say that ID (Creationism), Astrology, Scientology, Turtleworld



be taught along side Biology, Physics, Mathematics, Medicine, as Science in public teaching institutions.

Maybe Kitzmiller is wrong for you and perhaps your community but it was not for Dover, PA. After Kitzmiller, The people of the Dover School District showed their disdain of redefining Science, to be more inclusive of hocus pocus, by voting out all of the ID proponents on the school board in the very next election.

I'm taking a geology class in university right now. It's basically an evolution propaganda class, and here I thought I'd learn some stuff about rocks. Huge disappointment, and if I had paid anything for it, I'd be demanding a refund.

After reading all the crap I need to read and spit forth the information I need to get an A, I've come to the following conclusions..


1. The "scientists" who write all the papers and reports purposely write them so 99% of the people have zero idea what the heck they are talking about.. that way they can be full of [bleep], and 99% of the people don't know it.

2. You'd either have to be really bored or really "searching" to latch onto a belief like evolution. 90% of the stuff the write basically says "we have no clue, but this is a guess that we'll change in a few years".

3. If you want to believe in some weird religion of evolution so you can fit into some sort of "intellectual" crowd, go ahead. I'm sure it fits some need you have.

Just to let you know, that's about what your statement sounds like to scientifically literate people reading it.

Stay strong in your faith. Don't be complacent and waste the time in class on [bleep]. Raise your hand and demand the professor teach you the real truth of Geology. Do it or you will be just another limp putz.

One of the main occupations of geologists today is working for the fossil fuel industry looking for oil and coal deposits. They are very effective, and could never be so were evolution false. That's because all the assumptions on which rest their techniques for finding fossil fuels are based on evolution being true. Were it not true, in fact, their techniques would be worthless.

"Faunal Succession: Similar to the law of superposition is the law of faunal succession, which states that groups of fossil animals and plants occur throughout the geologic record in a distinct and identifiable order. Following this law, sedimentary rocks can be "dated" by their characteristic fossil content. Particularly useful are index fossils, geographically widespread fossils that evolved rapidly through time."

- Utah Geological Survey

You're wrong, my example is top shelf. Gould's Punctuated Equilibria, or "hopeful monster" theory predicates that a pair mates and produces a "freak" unlike themselves (think mule) and THAT offspring must locate, and breed with, another "freak" with chromosomes close enough to its own to be able to produce viable offspring to perpetuate this "quantum leap". Bear in mind all this had to happen, TWICE, at least, in the same geographical area, at nearly the same time.

This is where mathematicians went off the reservation with Gould. They simply said the probability of this having ever occurred are so remote as to be utterly impossible, and just happening once would have changed nothing. It had to happen thousands and thousands of times.

Back to mules. Don't you think if there was anything to Gould's hypothesis, somewhere, ONE PAIR of mules would have gotten it on and produced a baby mule? And this is with a LOT of human intervention.

Bear in mind, Gould was a top-shelf paleontologist, and HE didn't see all those "living transitional forms" that Rattler keeps babbling about, which is why he cooked this stuff up in the first place.

I'm taking that class online. I do write all of my answers as "it is believed"..

No, that's how you justify following one of the biggest scams going.

Have you actually taken the time to read all the evolution crap out there? Wild ass guesses, at best. It's like Jeff O wrote it.

Sorry, but there's little need for me to read further, since one assumes that what you have to say further rests on the premise contained in the above quote, which reveals a very fundamental misunderstanding on your part about what speciation by evolution proposes.

You're clearly a bright person. My personal theory is that you are experiencing some sort of social pressure to maintain the fiction of Intelligent Design. Perhaps your parish church is heavily dedicated to it, and you fear rejection were you ever to disagree. I cannot imagine, short of something like that, an intelligent person like yourself falling for something like ID.

Speaking for myself, my Christian faith doesn't depend in the least on the falsity of the discoveries made in the last hundred plus years by the biologic sciences.

It ain't fiction to me Hawk. On this, you and I will likely always differ. So be it. And I've not, nor have I ever been "pressured" to adopt my stance. It is just where my feeble brain takes me I suppose.

A little help here for the perpetually confused: what are "scientifically literal people"? Thanks

This is the scam:

They come up with a wild ass theory.

They make it complex, so that an advance degree is needed to teach it.

They make a fortune teaching such classes to kids in University. 100K + jobs.

They make the kids accept what they are teaching, or fail them and not let them into the field.

And, the scam keeps going, as the "believers" is this wild theory are the only ones who make it high enough to each at the university level.

Repeat this cycle a few dozen times, and people accept it as "truth".


Heaven forbid they actually teach about rocks in a Geology class.

It should be self-explanatory, but if not, here's a cut and paste on the subject:

"A scientifically literate person is defined as one who has the capacity to understand experiment and reasoning as well as basic scientific facts and their meaning; ask, find, or determine answers to questions derived from curiosity about everyday experiences; describe, explain, and predict natural phenomena; read with understanding articles about science in the popular press and to engage in social conversation about the validity of the conclusions; identify scientific issues underlying national and local decisions and express positions that are scientifically and technologically informed; evaluate the quality of scientific information on the basis of its source and the methods used to generate it; pose and evaluate arguments based on evidence and to apply conclusions from such arguments appropriately."

Wow! Quite literally, none of what's routinely accomplished in the biological sciences today would be possible were speciation by evolution false. It's a foundational concept for all of it.

Illustrated��..

Since you don't know me and didn't watch me write that from memory you show you are a major speculator.

You are not a parrot? You have worked so extensively with animals you have produced living transitional forms? Show us your work! Science is observation, repeating, verifying, documenting, etc.

Literal?

Thank you, even one so unintelligent as I can figure out scientifically literate. Scienticially literal left me a bit puzzled.

Travis can be a smartazz and actually be humorous on occasion. Just sayin.

Wow.

Your post in Headlines.

University geology professors propagate a scam to make 100K.

University geology professor don't teach about rocks.

University geology professor fails students that don't learn what is taught.

Undergraduate non-believers restricted from teaching Geology at the university level.




Hilarious stuff Calvin. Keep it up.

There have been some cases lately of Jennies reproducing mules so who knows. I think the sperm donor was a horse though. I don't know if Jack can reproduce with a Jenny.

Someone just pointed out to me that I have a typo. Literal should be literate. Make sense now?

Literate. Typo corrected by auto correct to literal.

That happens to me all the time with this iPad. Sometimes the replacement word is no where near to what the one I typed was.

Yeah, but it's rare. If they were the same species, producing fertile offspring would be the norm not the exception.

Heck, I have that with PC. I think the spell check program was written by the same guys that wrote ObamaCare.

It is pretty rare and has just been happening recently.

Your understanding of punctuated equilibrium is not accurate. Under punctuated equilibrium occurs rapidly on a geological time scale. A rapid change on a geological time scale does not require "freaks breaking with freaks", but just an increase in the evolutionary pressures such as a decrease in the genetic diversity of a population, or environmental changes migration into new area's that favor certain traits over others. In other words, no freaks required.

Calvin-

What is the title of the course you are taking?





As an aside, these threads have never, and likely will never, change anyone's mind on the topic of evolution/creation.

I hope that someone was able to answer the OP via PM.

Nothing but obfuscation. I'll break it down for you. For there to be a next generation, animals have to copulate TODAY, and give birth to viable offspring at the end of a normal gestation period.

We are back to "mule farms" again. There are none, anywhere, on planet earth. Never will be because genetic code precludes it. Again, macro evolution flies in the face of what is knowable and observable, and Darwin's theory is neither.

Yep, and that's what they say too when you tell them man made climate change isn't real.

I would be inclined to believe the above statement, at any rate , but...speaking generally, not at any individual: everytime I see one of these discussions I wonder why it is that whenever people mention 'evolution' it is always immediately branded to mean evolution as in CREATION. No one has found proof yet of how creation came to be, period, hence the ongoing arguments. But there sure is a LOT of proof of evolution as far as living things continually changing, regardless of how/what they started out as.

For someone to say evolution is or isn't how humans came to be is still an open-ended statement. To say that evolution is not going on within and all around us, sounds un-informed.

Yup.

[video:youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=0X9WwxzZ8E4[/video]

Sum bidch......... this works for all kinds of threads on here. Jusus, abortion, 223 vs 22-250, 270 vs 280 vs 30'06, chile with or without beans, ice or no ice in your whiskey/whisky/bourbon. Are Zebra print thongs gay and Leopard print masculine? Thanks.

Again, TAK, you reveal that you don't understand the fundamentals of evolution. Changes are gradual, not sudden like a horse giving birth to a donkey.

The horse and the donkey are branches off from a common ancestor that lived in the past. One subgroup of said ancestor species became isolated from the main group, and became exposed to slightly different environmental pressures, guiding natural selection in a different direction. Eventually, the two branches became sufficiently dissimilar genetically that they could no longer produce fertile offspring when they came across one another, despite still being able to produce infertile offspring, thus making for two distinct species.

The fact they could product infertile offspring indicates, however, that they branched away from each other relatively recently (on a geological time scale). For example, a cow and a horse can't produce any sort of offspring. This is because their common ancestor lived much further in the past than that of the horse and the donkey. A sheep and a goat, however, on very rare occasions (unlike horses and donkeys who can reliably produce infertile offspring), can produce living (though, of course, infertile) offspring.

This tells us that the split from the common ancestor of the sheep and the goat likely occurred further back in time than that of the horse and the donkey, but not as far back as that of the cow and the horse. The horse and the sea turtle had a common ancestor, too, but MUCH further distant in the past, as can be seen by the degree of their genetic dissimilarity.

Yes it does. Human history (which, on a geological scale, is a very short period of time) has observed this in the variety of subspecies we've created through human-directed selection, e.g., the dog from the wolf (and all the varied breeds of dog), and all the other various breeds of domesticated animals. Wild subspecies have even come about under the observation of human beings, such as species of lizard becoming geographically isolated within human history, causing the generation of an identifiable subspecies.

On a geological timescale, this occurred in the blink of an eye. Given hundreds of thousands of years of isolation, it's not hard at all to imagine sufficient genetic differentiation between two subgroups of the same species as to result in an inability to reliably generate fertile offspring, the first step in speciation.

I'm suspicious of ALL arguments presented with the zeal of a missionary, as if a man's welfare in some important area depends on his acceptance of the "message".

Belief, or unbelief, in Darwinian evolution, or any other school of thought which cannot be proven by replication has ZERO impact on an ordinary man's life.

Its importance can ONLY be established and magnified by the insistence of its adherents that it IS important.

The most favored technique in accomplishing this, probably because it requires ZERO genius on the part of the promoter, is to brand unbelievers as being too stupid to understand the message.

Even Al Gore was smart enough to understand that he had to convince people that "man made global-warming" adversely affected their lives before they would consider the truth of it.

So.... ALL you promoters on evolution posting on this thread may very well be more intelligent than doubters such as myself.

But ..... you are demonstrating that you are DUMBER THAN AL GORE.

Maybe, maybe not.

Most probably realize that it would be a freak one-off if a belief conversion happens because of what is posted on threads such as this one. I tend to think that forum proponents of evolution post mainly for entertainment whereas non-believers of evolution post to glorify God. Each gets what they are after.


Win-win.

Give unto God what is Gods and give unto scientists what is science. The origin of life is science.

The Scientific Community cannot even agree on when an individual human life begins.

How arrogant to grant to it the "right" to determine the origin of LIFE in general.

You're conflating molecules to man with wolfs to dogs the way you are using the word "evolution". It is a logical fallacy.

Science is observable, testable, repeatable, and verifiable.

Please demonstrate the origin of life please.

NO, the origin of life is not science, it is materialist philosophy comprised of "just so" stories and masquerading as science. And the "science" on origin of life evolution is so devoid of evidentiary support, or even a plausible theory, that Antony Flew---one of the great and prominent atheists and defender of evolution of the 20th century---renounced his atheism because of it, i.e., because of the complete lack of a plausible Darwinian scenario to account for the origins of life. Even great minds like Francis Crick can't make evolutionary theory plausibly explain the origin of life, so Crick posits visitors from outer space (and how life originated for them, Crick does not say).

That is how bad it is for origin of life Darwinian evolutionary theory. Darwinian evolution is a complete non-starter unless and until it can explain the origin of life, and it can't even do that.

Jordan

Perhaps as regards an individual, but the same can be said about belief or unbelief in a spherical earth.

As to humanity as a whole, however, it makes a huge difference, since most of what the biological sciences regularly accomplish would not be possible if evolution were widely rejected by said scientists. An example of this is found in the old Soviet Union when Stalin sent all biologists who believed in evolution to the gulags and only permitted scientists to work if they rejected evolution, the competition leading to improvement and self regulating systems aspects of which were seen as contradicting Marxist theory. One direct consequence of this was repeated crop failures, as agriculture was centrally directed by scientists. Finally, they had to let the real scientists out of the gulags just to address this issue.

When the Soviet Union Chose the Wrong Side on Genetics and Evolution

DITTOS. All is possible; nothing is impossible.

It is easier for a pseudo scientist such as ALGORE to sell bull crap than it is for a real scientist to sell the truth.

Boy, ain't that the truth.

But not the all important aspect of evolution. Every one agrees that microevolution occurs. It is microevolution which is at issue in plant breeding. The grand evolutionary questions (origins and speciation) are trivial and unimportant to actual practical biological sciences. Anti-biotic resistance and plant breeding involve the appearance in increased frequency of desireable or undersirable traits based on previously existing genetic information in a breeding population. They do not involve the creation of new information or altogether new species. It is how we get new information necessary for life and speciation where the fight is at; not whether the frequency of dark or light colored peppered moths changes with changes in air pollution, as an example.

The idea then that doubts about the grand Darwinian claims somehow constitute hostility to science is simply nonsense. Evolutionists like to conflate micro and macro evolution because it serves their agenda of confusing the public to marginalize dissent. How can anyone not believe in anti-biotic resistance (i.e. "evolution)? Only a religious nut. But the nuttiest religionist believes in microevolution. What nutty religionists and non-nutty non-religionists often don't believe is that micro-evolution is no proof whatsoever that chance and blind material natural processes can produce new genetic information and hence new life forms.

So, you are saying following actual evidence is better than blindly adhereing to a theory, in Lysenko's case Lamarck's? That sounds very familiar.....

That's like saying you believe in micro-economics but that macro-economics is just theory with no proof. You can't have one without the other.

If you have micro-evolution than you must have macro-evolution.

No, because micro-economics is not to macro-economics as micro-evolution is to macro-evolution. The analogy does not hold. Macro evolution involves the claim that blind, materialistic natural processes can create new genetic information and new species from essentially the same process involved in micro-evolution. But micro-evolution does not involve the creation of new genetic information or speciation. It only involves the change in frequency of gene expression in a population. The gene and its genetic information remains unchanged. It is the frequency of the expression that is affected by natural selection; not the creation of new information. There is literally no evidence that natural selection can create new genetic information or cause speciation, let alone the origin of genetic information in the first place (which is necessary before natural selection can even begin to work).

Just because the words "micro" and "macro" are also used in economics does not mean the relationship between those terms in economic theory is anything like their relationship in biology.

Speciation by evolution is already confirmed many times over by the science of genetics, none of which would make any sense whatsoever were speciation by evolution not a fact. Holdouts on this question are now, and have been for a very long time, solidly in the realm of flat earthers.

No. Speciation has been confirmed by the science of genetics, but not as a result of blind, materialistic evolution. Natural selection has never been shown to have the power to create new genetic information of any kind. And of course, if they are flat-earthers, then we have to ask why some of the most intelligent scientists, mathmeticians and intellectuals in the world find the Darwinian explanation lacking.

Mainstream sciences in fields relevant to the question accept the reality of speciation by evolution, which involves natural selection as the primary factor. Everywhere they look they see confirmation of it staring them in the face. Failure to accept it is an indication someone is holding their eyes tightly shut on this question.

For the evolution deniers: Are horses and donkeys the same species? If not, doesn't the fact that they can produce offspring suggest to you that they are close cousins, i.e., closely genetically related? After all, cows and donkeys cannot produce any offspring whatsoever. If genetically closely related, explain what that means in terms of their past. If God blinked each species into existence from scratch in their present form, doesn't that imply he made a mistake permitting offspring from two different species?

My answer is that God didn't blink all the species into existence, but rather commanded nature to do so (as stated in Genesis), and the method by which nature accomplished the command was evolution.

PS Evolution has nothing to offer with regard to the question of life origin, only speciation, so don't bother taking it there. Different field with different theories.

"Main stream science" has, in the course of human history, accepted as "fact" many theories and "proofs" which were subsequently determined to be incorrect. Unfortunately the integrity of science has been very much compromised by how research is funded and there is very much a political agenda at work in publishing and funding. I think it was a 5 or 6 years ago a scientist was essentially banished for publishing a "peer reviewed" article critical of evolution. (See the link below). So, what "main stream" science is allowed to "believe" is very much influenced by politics. One need look no further than global warming to see the practical effect of political influence on science.

In any event, I like the logic of Albert Einstein on this issue: when some aspect of Einstein's theory of relativity was challenged by the Third Reich by assembling a large collection of German scientist to simply assert Einstein was wrong, Einstein remarked "it takes only one to prove me wrong". So, appeals to numbers or what the majority says should not necessarily impress us.

Jordan



http://www.the-scientist.com/?artic...onian--discriminated--against-scientist/

For intelligent design deniers, how did basic elements in your big bang come together to make this and what did it "evolve" from?

[video:youtube]qy8dk5iS1f0&list=PLF757B231B9D69DE7[/video]

If one thinks that micro-evolution can occur but macro-evolution cannot, what biological or logical barriers prevent the former from becoming the latter...?

Then why is it that your sort always claim large numbers of various sorts of scientists and mathematicians on your side? My response was a specific retort to this tactic on your part. I've already been through the scientific evidence many times over. It's like speaking to deaf people.

Exactly. In fact, evolution is so much the norm in nature that it requires precisely the right circumstances to prevent it from happening.

So, how did the eye evolve? Pick any species you like. I'll wait.

Yes, it did:

1. This is the quintessential example of the argument from incredulity. The source making the claim usually quotes Darwin saying that the evolution of the eye seems "absurd in the highest degree". However, Darwin follows that statement with a three-and-a-half-page proposal of intermediate stages through which eyes might have evolved via gradual steps (Darwin 1872).

� photosensitive cell
� aggregates of pigment cells without a nerve
� an optic nerve surrounded by pigment cells and covered by translucent skin
� pigment cells forming a small depression
� pigment cells forming a deeper depression
� the skin over the depression taking a lens shape
� muscles allowing the lens to adjust

All of these steps are known to be viable because all exist in animals living today. The increments between these steps are slight and may be broken down into even smaller increments. Natural selection should, under many circumstances, favor the increments. Since eyes do not fossilize well, we do not know that the development of the eye followed exactly that path, but we certainly cannot claim that no path exists.

Evidence for one step in the evolution of the vertebrate eye comes from comparative anatomy and genetics. The vertebrate βγ-crystallin genes, which code for several proteins crucial for the lens, are very similar to the Ciona βγ-crystallin gene. Ciona is an urochordate, a distant relative of vertebrates. Ciona's single βγ-crystallin gene is expressed in its otolith, a pigmented sister cell of the light-sensing ocellus. The origin of the lens appears to be based on co-optation of previously existing elements in a lensless system.

Nilsson and Pelger (1994) calculated that if each step were a 1 percent change, the evolution of the eye would take 1,829 steps, which could happen in 364,000 generations.

How about the Krebs Cycle?

Interesting discussion gents.

There is no plausible evolutionary explanation for the eye whatsoever. It is irreducably complex for one thing. Merely articulating a "progression" of sorts does not explain how the genetic information was created nor does it explain how any of the above-referenced stages conferred a reproductive advantage on a specimen. I mean, the above-referenced "Just So" story does not even begin to capture the complexity of the human eye. Its all wishful thinking with no experimental verification whatsoever. Its true because it has to be true as a matter of philosophical necessity.

Jordan

Yep, exactly right:

No, because micro-economics is not to macro-economics as micro-evolution is to macro-evolution. The analogy does not hold. Macro evolution involves the claim that blind, materialistic natural processes can create new genetic information and new species from essentially the same process involved in micro-evolution. But micro-evolution does not involve the creation of new genetic information or speciation. It only involves the change in frequency of gene expression in a population. The gene and its genetic information remains unchanged. It is the frequency of the expression that is affected by natural selection; not the creation of new information. There is literally no evidence that natural selection can create new genetic information or cause speciation, let alone the origin of genetic information in the first place (which is necessary before natural selection can even begin to work).

Just because the words "micro" and "macro" are also used in economics does not mean the relationship between those terms in economic theory is anything like their relationship in biology.

In my opinion, to be able to grasp macro-evolution one needs to have a passing understanding of astrophysics.

Nope,"speciation" has not been proven by science. The example of the horse and donkey is like looking at the history of the dog. Started with wolves and ended with dogs. Big dogs, small dogs, but still ALL dogs. Not a change in speciation. All is simply genetic variation WITHIN a species.

I have heard college professors use "equine evolution" as an example of evolution in the fossil record. This is nonsense. You have small horses and large horses and what not. BUT they are all horses of the same species. Different time periods to be sure, but all judged to be horses by their own statements.

Those who refuse to see the difference between genetic variation within a species versus the evolution from one species to another do not seem to be serious students of the subject.

TF

^^^ Pretty much sums up my beliefs ^^^

I believe in evolution within a species.

The species must first exist. Fish didn't turn into humans...

If man evolved from apes, then why are there still apes?

There are indeed forms of humanoid specimens that are extinct that resembled apes. Most particularly from the African continent. Some specimens still resemble apes. Humans are evolving now even more rapidly due to cross breeding with humans from areas of the world that travel has touched.

If you threw all breeds of canines onto an island, it wouldn't be long in the big scheme of things that you would have a breed of canine emerge from all of that with standard characteristics. But, it's still a canine, and it evolved within it's own species.

There's an entire chapter on this in Why Evolution Is True, by Jerry A. Coyne. Go to the library and read that chapter.

Oh brother! So, if donkeys and horses are the same species, why can't they produce (except in very rare cases) fertile offspring together?

How so? ...I am saying that one CANNOT unite "molecules to man" (meaning evolution IS creation) with "wolves to dogs" (evolution IS undeniable, no matter where you put your finger as the starting point) and that is why one should not always be construed as the other as default.

Evolution is change - proven. Evolution is origin - ???...

There is quite a lot of logic in it...

Scientific Classification
Kingdom: Animalia
Phylum: Chordata
Class: Mammalia
Order: Perissodactyla
Family: Equidae
Genus: Equus

Species:
E. asinus - Donkey
E. africanus - African Wild AS$
E. caballus - Domestic Horse
E. ferus - Wild Horse
E. grevyi - Grevy's Zebra
E. hemionus - Onager
E. kiang - Kiang
E. quagga - Plains Zebra
E. zebra - Mountain Zebra

Are you saying that you would not have a problem that a 'Creator' created an evolutionary process to occur within species (an artificial, man-made, classification system) but inexplicably has not allowed that very exact same evolutionary process to generate eventual descendents, over the course of time, distance, different selective pressures, that differ enough from each other biologically to be classified as different species? Any thoughts as to why that might be so?

When you ask; "if man evolved from apes, why are there still apes?", it reveals that you do not understand the concept of evolution enough to rationally deny it on any level. Evolution claims that men and apes evolved from a common ancestor. Evolution does not claim that man was suddenly begotted by apes.

It really would be interesting and a great breakthrough for Biology of one of you folks could provide a definition of what a species is that holds in all cases and that allows a person to determine exactly when two organisms are in different species.

While you are at it, come up with an infallible definition of what life is.

Mr. Eastern Shiner,

I think I can see a gooey tar pit in either pursuit.

Is a software virus alive in the parallel digital universe? If so, software engineers that create them might be virtual Gods.

Jerry Coyne is one of those famous "Cretins who say that all Cretins are liars". In other words, he does not believe that there is any such thing as free will, in which case there is no such thing as truth either. Of course this competely refutes his truth claims about evolution. (If his books are the product of "matter in motion" and bind material processes, then there is no point in writing, or reading them, because they contain nothing but the product of materially determined elecro-chemical processes in Coyne's brain. Coyne has to somehow exempt himself from the strictures of his own theory when it comes time to discuss "truth". Francis Crick has made the same self-refuting claim, which Phillip Johnson did a beautiful job of skewering in his book Darwin on Trial. Also, for an excellent read by some leading intellectuals, you might also try: Uncommon Dissent: Intellectuals Who Find Darwinism Unconvincing. Its an excellent read from some top-flight minds.


http://www.evolutionnews.org/2013/09/self-refutation076541.html


For a couple of excellent books which do a nice job showing why neo-Darwinian evolution cannot possibly be true, take a look at:

Signature in the Cell and Darwin's Doubt by Stephen Meyer.

I see your understanding of philosophy is right up there with your understanding of biology.

Decidedly unhelpful hubris. Just sayin.

The_Real_Hawkeye,



It's O.K. for you to be an evolutionist. But to try to attach it to Genesis is foolish. Ten times in the first chapter of Genesis God tells the animals and plants to reproduce "after their kind". Donkeys and horses and zebras and other extinct horse kinds all came from an original horse kind. They didn't come from some pre-existing kind.

Give up on trying to make God's Word say something it does not say. You look foolish to the ardent evolutionists and you display ignorance of God's Word to those of us who do know what it says.

antlers,



Try some real science and read George Washington Carvers studies. In a nutshell he wrote he could make a plum smaller and he could make a plum larger, but there were limits. They always came out a plum.

antelope_sniper,



This is a nice start. From where did this photosensitive cell get its start?

Just because someone professes to know God's Word, and even quotes Scripture, doesn't mean they are imparting truth correctly.
Even Satan knows Scripture.

Realy hat to distract you fellers from you wizzing match, but did the question and the point of the post (which most managed to miss in there own small-mindedness) ever get answered?

Someone please give the link and lets get back to bashing the .gov.

This level of misinformation is typical in evolution deniers.

Evolution doesn't contradict this since at no stage in the evolutionary process could you look at the offspring of any particular animal and classify it as a species of another kind from its parents. You would need to compare two sample specimens separated by many thousands of generations to perceive the species distinction.

A man's lifetime isn't remotely comparable to the time spans involved in evolutionary speciation.

If this was the case, would one expect the fossil record to be filled with these transitional types?


btw, given "today's" scientific lingo, you were correct about the word "species" as opposed to "genus." But, there are a few that point out difficulties in making a distinction between species and genus. A quick Wiki search turned up these statements:

The modern theory of evolution depends on a fundamental redefinition of "species". Prior to Darwin, naturalists viewed species as ideal or general types, which could be exemplified by an ideal specimen bearing all the traits general to the species. Darwin's theories shifted attention from uniformity to variation and from the general to the particular.

Most textbooks follow Ernst Mayr's definition of a species as "groups of actually or potentially interbreeding natural populations, which are reproductively isolated from other such groups".[9] It has been argued that this definition of species is not only a useful formulation, but is also a natural consequence of the effect of sexual reproduction on the dynamics of natural selection

Nope, everyone MUST believe exactly like I do or the world will end!

The fossil record is nothing but transitional types.

Hard not to notice that Ringman's questions and arguments against evolution are even more superficial and even less carefully thought out compared to earlier times.

Hope all is well with him.

Apparently you don't understand the concept "after its kind".

Exactly what does that phrase mean to you? Include an example if you can.

Is that why the different dinosaurs are able to be classified like living animals?

There are none so blind as those who will not see.

The concept of irony is completely lost on you isn't it?

Do you mean "why" instead of "what"? And what are you trying to say?

Do you think dinosaurs and people lived on the earth at the same time...?
Do you think that dinosaurs were sent into Noah's Ark along with the other land animals...?

Some of you seem to argue that the Theory of Evolution does not have to account for the origin of life in order to be accepted as the origin of all the different life forms present and past.

That seems similar to walking into a theater at the middle of a play, throwing away the script and writing a new one for the second half of the play.

It's great when you get to make up your own "rules".

Not as great as when you can evoke, by mere faith, an omnipresent,omnipotent, omniscient, God that has absolutely zero constraints.

Zero rules trumps making up 'own "rules"'.

What did Elmer have to say on the subject?

Envisioning a "Creation without a Creator" does not seem to me to be a function of intelligence on the part of the "visionary".

The fact that you can accomplish it speaks to something other than our respective IQ's.

Adopting your position would condemn me to a lifetime of searching for answers that will NEVER be sufficient.

Having the "How" question removed, rather than answered, frees me to engage in the business of living as opposed to an endless practice of mental masturbation.

Having been in both "places". I much prefer my present position. I sincerely hope you are as content in your position.

A variety of proteins interact within a fully-functioning eye. Pax proteins are coordinators and attach directly to the DNA, turning on the necessary genes at the appropriate place and time. Oddly enough, Pax is the same in vertebrates and insects so must have evolved before they separated. Even organisms without eyes, such as sponges, have Pax genes; this finding suggests that Pax proteins originally controlled other processes and were later recruited into the eye. Those individuals born missing eyes had defects in the same gene- Pax6- this is required for normal eye development in all bilaterally symmetrical animals.

It appears that unicellular organisms had very primitive �eyespots�. These were made of photoreceptive proteins that sense light and dark, allowing these organisms to have photoperiodism- being able to time day and night. However, this is not sufficient enough for vision, as they cannot detect where the light is coming from, or distinguish shapes (Land and Fernald, 1992).

The three basic functions an eye needs are: light detection; shading, in the form of dark pigment, for sensing the direction light is coming from and connection to motor structures, for movement in response to light. Sometimes, all three of these functions are carried out by a single cell. The single-celled euglena has a light-sensitive spot, pigment granules for shading, and motor cilia. However, this is not considered as a true eye, but a stigma, a small splotch of red pigment which shades a collection of light sensitive crystals, and is located at its anterior end. With the flagellum, the eyespot allows the single-celled organism to move in response to light, often towards it to assist in photosynthesis (Land and Fernald, 1992). The most-basic structure that is widely accepted as an eye has just two cells: a photoreceptor that detects light, and a pigment cell that provides shading. The photoreceptor connects to ciliated cells, which engage to move the animal in response to light (Nilsson, D.-E., 2009).The marine ragworm embryo has a two-celled eye.

Complex optical systems started out as multicellular eyespots gradually developing a depressed cup, granting the organism the ability to detect the direction of light, and then in iner and finer directions as the pit deepened. Pit eyes were seen in the Cambrian and were seen in ancient snails, and modern representatives such as planaria. This animal can slightly differentiate the intensity and direction of light because of their cup-shaped, heavily pigmented retina cells, which shield the light-sensitive cells from exposure in all directions except for the single opening for the light. But, the proto-eye is still a lot more efficient at detecting the presence of lack of light, than its direction (Autrum, 1979).

As animals evolved more-complex bodies and behaviours, the eye too became more complex. Eyes evolved connections to muscle cells rather than cells that moved by waving cilia. Neurons evolved that could process signals and coordinate behaviour (Arendt, Hausen, Purschke, 2009). Based on cells, there appears to be two main designs for eyes- one is seen in the protostomes (molluscs, annelid worms and arthropods) and the other seen in deuterostomes (chordates and echinoderms) (Land and Fernald, 1992). The �pinhole camera� eye is seen in protostomes such as nautiloids. It developed as the pit deepened into a cup, then a chamber. By reducing the size of the opening, the organism achieved true imaging, allowing for fine directional sensing and even some shape-sensing. These animals� eyes have poor resolution and dim imaging, as they lack a cornea or lens, but are still a massive improvement from eyespots. To prevent infection, a transparent film of cells is grown over the pinhole (Dawkins, 1986). The segregated chamber contents specialised for optimisations such as colour filtering, higher refractive index, blocking of ultraviolet radiation, or the ability to operate in and out of water. It is likely that a key reason eyes specialise in detecting a narrow range of wavelengths on the electromagnetic spectrum- the visible spectrum- is because the earliest species to develop photosensitivity were aquatic, and only two specific wavelength ranges of electromagnetic radiation (blue and green visible light) can travel through water (Fernald, 2001).

So your position has nothing to do with logic, and is just a matter of what is comfortable?

[bleep]' great that you trained yourself to do it; mental ejaculation without mental masturbation. Kudos.

The business of living for me, for the most part, is curiosity of 'How'. You must be retired.

I already have my hands full on the �Killing Jesus� thread, but�

�The fossil record implies trial and error, an inability to anticipate the future, features inconsistent with an efficient Great Designer.�
Carl Sagan

Carl has always written clean and concise words of wisdom about the Cosmos.

I do not know if he was smoking anything or not when he wrote those words.

"Who is more humble? The scientist who looks at the universe with an open mind and accepts whatever it has to teach us, or somebody who says everything in this book must be considered the literal truth and never mind the fallibility of all the human beings involved?"
Interview with Charlie Rose (1996)

"So your position has nothing to do with logic, and is just a matter of what is comfortable?"

Quite the opposite, my friend.

Your idea of a creation, which is inescapably apparent, without a Creator, is about as illogical a position as I can imagine.

The comfort I experience is a byproduct of accepting the Truth, which is that the creation we see is the product of a Creator.

Were it to be finally determined that the Creator was NOT the God of the Christian bible, but an amalgamation of the Hindu, Buddhist, and Pagan ideas, I would still be closer to the Truth than those of you who insist on a creation with no creative force as the originator.

I believe in Creation through Evolution. I believe the world and life on this earth are God's Creation, and I believe that evolution was a very clever way that God used to achieve His creative objectives.

So a busybody, micromanaging Creator is more logical? What about the possibility of a hands-off force that ultimately resulted in this creation? Seems logically equivocal to me.

I didn't really think anybody would try to define some of the terms they are throwing around casually without really understanding what they mean. Gooey tar pit is about right. It is quite easy for some people to reject things they do not understand.

What do you reckon the "hands off force" is involved in now?

Dunno. Perhaps expanding the Universe.

Not likely it is intentionally killing babies with massive typhoons. But then again.......??????

My brother-in-law is a geologist and producer-of-oil for a major international oil corporation. Also, a born-again Baptist who believes, or did at one time, that the earth is no more 6,000 years old.

I asked him once how he could ever find oil when he was supposed to be looking in rock formations that were far older than 6,000 years. He said something to the effect of, "For reasons we cannot possibly understand, God wants the Earth to appear to be billions of years old."

He would understand exactly about the radioactive bugga-wugga.

Sounds very much like Christian Deism to me. Nothing wrong with that.

Fishing the last I heard.

Here's a rebuttal.

Jordan

http://www.evolutionnews.org/2011/05/rebutting_karl_giberson_and_fr046491.html

Except that I very much DO believe in the divinity of Jesus, as well as His moral teachings.

Fill in one gap, it creates 2 more. Still all your "rebuttal" is, is an argument from incredulity.

You are what is know as a borderline Deist or Christian take your pick. You aren't alone in that regard a number of the Founding Fathers fell into same pigeon hole. There are many borderline Christian Deist today.

It's not a complicated idea, but some folks like things to be complicated, and it's a pretty dumb argument to them.

Rebuttal? Not quite.

More of a whimpering whine that Giberson and Collins did not spell out every molecule involved in a molecular recipe for an eye.

Carefully reading and comprehending links before you post them might help you avoid the appearance of a 'spray and pray' debating style.

In other words "We speculate...."

I have trouble believing your story. The geologists I have met use Noah's Flood to explain the oil and coal. Many years ago I met a geologists who was on staff for two oil companies because he was so good a telling them where to drill for oil. He based all his recommendations on his acceptance of Noah's Flood.

If oil and coal don't happen quickly they won't happen at all. I learned that from a Ph.D chemist who used to be an evolutionists professor. When he did research after college he became a young earth creationist.

Personal attacks don't impress. The "evolutionary scenarios" for the eye are pure speculation---"Just So" stories that are highly improbable (if not impossible) with not a shred of empirical proof. None of the scenarious imagined has a shred of laboratory evidence to support it. It is just so much wishful thinking.

Mathmetician David Berlinski comments on Richard Dawkins fanciful evolution eye scenario.

________________________


Keeping an Eye on Evolution: Richard Dawkins, a relentless Darwinian spear carrier, trips over Mount Improbable.
Review of Climbing Mount Improbable by Richard Dawkins (W. H. Norton & Company, Inc. 1996)
By: David Berlinski
The Globe & Mail
November 2, 1996



For more information about David Berlinski - his new books, video clips from interviews, and upcoming events - please visit his website at www.davidberlinski.org.




The theory of evolution is the great white elephant of contemporary thought. It is large, almost entirely useless, and the object of superstitious awe. Richard Dawkins is widely known as the theory's uncompromising champion. Having made his case in The Blind Watchmaker and River out of Eden, Dawkins proposes to make it yet again in Climbing Mount Improbable. He is not a man given to tiring himself by repetition.

Darwin's theory has a double aspect. The first is the doctrine of descent with modification; the second, the doctrine of random variation and natural selection. Descent with modification provides the pattern; random variation and natural selection, the mechanism. Dawkins' concern is with the mechanism; the pattern he takes for granted.

Biological structures such as the mammalian eye are complex in the sense that they contain many parts arranged in specific ways. It is unlikely that such structures could have been discovered by chance. No one, the astrophysicist N. C. Wickramasinghe once observed with some asperity, expects a tornado touching on a junkyard to produce a Boeing 747. This may suggest--it has suggested to some physicists--a disturbing gap between what life has accomplished and what the theory of evolution can explain. The suggestion provokes Dawkins to indignation. "It is grindingly, creakingly, crashingly obvious," he writes, mixing three metaphors joyously, that the discovery by chance of a complex object is improbable; but the Darwinian mechanism, he adds, "acts by breaking the improbability up into small manageable parts, smearing out the luck needed, going round the back of Mount Improbable and crawling up the gentle slopes...."

This is a fine image, one introduced originally by the American bio-mathematician Sewell Wright. Random variation offers the mountaineer an allowance of small changes. Chance is at work. Natural selection freezes the successful changes in place. And this process owes nothing to chance. In time, the successful changes form a connected path, a staircase to complexity.

The example that Dawkins pursues in greatest detail is the eye. Darwin himself wondered at its complexity, remarking in a letter to an American colleague that "the eye...gives me a cold shudder." That shudder notwithstanding, Darwin resolved his doubts in his own favor; the eye, he concluded, was created by a single-step series of improvements, what he called 'fine gradations.' Where Darwin went, Dawkins follows.

It is one thing, however, to appeal to a path up Mount Improbable, quite another to demonstrate its existence. Dawkins has persuaded himself that because such a path might exist, further argument is unnecessary. Impediments are simply directed to disappear: "There is no difficulty"; "there is a definite tendency in the right direction"; "It is easy to see that..."; "it is not at all difficult to imagine...."

In fact, the difficulties are very considerable. A single retinal cell of the human eye consists of a nucleus, a mitochondrial rod, and a rectangular array containing discrete layers of photon-trapping pigment. The evolutionary development of the eye evidently required an increase in such layers. An inferential staircase being required, the thing virtually constructs itself, Dawkins believes, one layer at a time. "The point," he writes, "is that ninety-one membranes are more effective...than ninety, ninety are more effective that eighty-nine, and so on back to one membrane, which is more effective than zero."

This is a plausible scheme only because Dawkins has considered a single feature of the eye in isolation. The parts of a complex artifact or object typically gain their usefulness as an ensemble. A Dixie Cup consists of a tube joined to a disk. Without the disk, the cup does not hold less water than it might; it cannot hold water at all. And ditto for the tube, the two items, disk and tube, forming an irreducibly complex system.

What holds for the Dixie Cup holds for the eye as well. Light strikes the eye in the form of photons, but the optic nerve conveys electrical impulses to the brain. Acting as a sophisticated transducer, the eye must mediate between two different physical signals. The retinal cells that figure in Dawkins' account are connected to horizontal cells; these shuttle information laterally between photoreceptors in order to smooth the visual signal. Amacrine cells act to filter the signal. Bipolar cells convey visual information further to ganglion cells, which in turn conduct information to the optic nerve. The system gives every indication of being tightly integrated, its parts mutually dependent.

The very problem that Darwin's theory was designed to evade now reappears. Like vibrations passing through a spider's web, changes to any part of the eye, if they are to improve vision, must bring about changes throughout the optical system. Without a correlative increase in the size and complexity of the optic nerve, an increase in the number of photoreceptive membranes can have no effect. A change in the optic nerve must in turn induce corresponding neurological changes in the brain. If these changes come about simultaneously, it makes no sense to talk of a gradual ascent of Mount Improbable. If they do not come about simultaneously, it is not clear why they should come about at all.

The same problem reappears at the level of biochemistry. Dawkins has framed his discussion in terms of gross anatomy. Each anatomical change that he describes requires a number of coordinate biochemical steps. "[T]he anatomical steps and structures that Darwin thought were so simple," the biochemist Mike Behe remarks in a provocative new book (Darwin's Black Box), "actually involve staggeringly complicated biochemical processes." A number of separate biochemical events are required simply to begin the process of curving a layer of proteins to form a lens. What initiates the sequence? How is it coordinated? And how controlled? On these absolutely fundamental matters, Dawkins has nothing whatsoever to say.

In addition to the eye, Dawkins discusses spiders and their webs, the origin of flight, and the nature of seashells. The natural history is charming.

Dawkins is a capable if somewhat dry prose stylist, although such expressions as 'designoid' and 'wince-makingly' are themselves wince-making. The science throughout is primitive. Difficulties are resolved by sleight-of-hand. "In real life," Dawkins remarks in a representative passage, "there may be formidable complications of detail." Yes? What of them, those formidable complications? "These emerge simply and without fuss."

Is the elephant's large nose truly the result of an evolutionary progression? Then some demonstration is required showing that intermediate-sized noses are valuable as well. None is forthcoming. "If a medium sized trunk were always less efficient," Dawkins writes, "than either a small nose or a big trunk, the big trunk would never have evolved." Indeed. The emergence of powered flight is treated as an engaging fable, one in which either arboreal animals glided downward from the tree tops or a primitive dinosaur hopped upward toward the sky. "The beauty of this theory," Dawkins affirms, commending the hopping scenario, "is that the same nervous circuits that were used to control the center of gravity in the jumping ancestor would, rather effortlessly, have lent themselves to controlling the flight surfaces later in the evolutionary story." It is the phrase "rather effortlessly" that gives to this preposterous assertion its antic charm.

A final note. In a book whose examples are chosen from natural history, it is important to get the details right. Hawks may soar or sail, but they cannot hover like helicopters. Not all organisms share precisely the same genetic code. And Gary Kasparov was defeated by IBM's Big Blue, and not a program entitled Genius 2.

Don't you ever tire of short stroking into the argumentum ad ignorantiam illogical fallacy sand trap? It is as if you have a neurochemotaxic attraction response to them.

Noteable that Berlinsky could only find factual faults on three rather trivial statements that have no bearing on the major premises of the Dawkins book.

An abstract on the biochemistry of the eye....


How a nerve comes to be sensitive to light hardly concerns us more than how life itself originated. He had an excellent reason for declining the question: it was completely beyond nineteenth century science. How the eye works; that is, what happens when a photon of light first hits the retina simply could not be answered at that time. As a matter of fact, no question about the underlying mechanisms of life could be answered. How did animal muscles cause movement? How did photosynthesis work? How was energy extracted from food? How did the body fight infection? No one knew.

Darwins Black BoxTo Darwin vision was a black box, but today, after the hard, cumulative work of many biochemists, we are approaching answers to the question of sight. Here is a brief overview of the biochemistry of vision. When light first strikes the retina, a photon interacts with a molecule called 11-cis-retinal, which rearranges within picoseconds to trans-retinal. The change in the shape of retinal forces a change in the shape of the protein, rhodopsin, to which the retinal is tightly bound. The protein's metamorphosis alters its behavior, making it stick to another protein called transducin. Before bumping into activated rhodopsin, transducin had tightly bound a small molecule called GDP. But when transducin interacts with activated rhodopsin, the GDP falls off and a molecule called GTP binds to transducin. (GTP is closely related to, but critically different from, GDP.)

GTP-transducin-activated rhodopsin now binds to a protein called phosphodiesterase, located in the inner membrane of the cell. When attached to activated rhodopsin and its entourage, the phosphodiesterase acquires the ability to chemically cut a molecule called cGMP (a chemical relative of both GDP and GTP). Initially there are a lot of cGMP molecules in the cell, but the phosphodiesterase lowers its concentration, like a pulled plug lowers the water level in a bathtub.

Another membrane protein that binds cGMP is called an ion channel. It acts as a gateway that regulates the number of sodium ions in the cell. Normally the ion channel allows sodium ions to flow into the cell, while a separate protein actively pumps them out again. The dual action of the ion channel and pump keeps the level of sodium ions in the cell within a narrow range. When the amount of cGMP is reduced because of cleavage by the phosphodiesterase, the ion channel closes, causing the cellular concentration of positively charged sodium ions to be reduced. This causes an imbalance of charge across the cell membrane which, finally, causes a current to be transmitted down the optic nerve to the brain. The result, when interpreted by the brain, is vision.

My explanation is just a sketchy overview of the biochemistry of vision. Ultimately, though, this is what it means to "explain" vision. This is the level of explanation for which biological science must aim. In order to truly understand a function, one must understand in detail every relevant step in the process. The relevant steps in biological processes occur ultimately at the molecular level, so a satisfactory explanation of a biological phenomenon such as vision, or digestion, or immunity must include its molecular explanation.

DarwinNow that the black box of vision has been opened it is no longer enough for an "evolutionary explanation" of that power to consider only the anatomical structures of whole eyes, as Darwin did in the nineteenth century, and as popularizers of evolution continue to do today. Each of the anatomical steps and structures that Darwin thought were so simple actually involves staggeringly complicated biochemical processes that cannot be papered over with rhetoric. Darwin's simple steps are now revealed to be huge leaps between carefully tailored machines. Thus biochemistry offers a Lilliputian challenge to Darwin. Now the black box of the cell has been opened and a Lilliputian world of staggering complexity stands revealed. It must be explained.

__________________________
The Darwinian model can't account for this. Show me a peer reviewed scientific article that articulates a plausible Darwinian scenario.

From where, Answers in Genesis?

Do you think the biochemistry of vision is somehow molecularly completely different than the biochemistry of the bacterial flagellum?

Not necessarily. But intelligent design is staring us right in the face.

Here are some quotes from Michael Denton on the complexity of the cell:

Michael Denton quotes (showing 1-6 of 6)



�The complexity of the simplest known type of cell is so great that it is impossible to accept that such an object could have been thrown together suddenly by some kind of freakish, vastly improbable, event. Such an occurrence would be indistinguishable from a miracle.�
― Michael Denton, Evolution: A Theory In Crisis


tags: abiogenesis, biology, chance, chemical-evolution, coincidence, id, intelligent-design, irreducible-complexity, living-cells, naturalism, origin-of-life, science, serendipity

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�Molecular biology has shown that even the simplest of all living systems on the earth today, bacterial cells, are exceedingly complex objects. Although the tiniest bacterial cells are incredibly small, weighing less than 10-12 gms, each is in effect a veritable micro-miniaturized factory containing thousands of exquisitely designed pieces of intricate molecular machinery, made up altogether of one hundred thousand million atoms, far more complicated than any machine built by man and absolutely without parallel in the nonliving world.�
― Michael Denton, Evolution: A Theory In Crisis


tags: bacteria, biology, factory, id, intelligent-design, irreducible-complexity, living-cells, molecular-machines, science

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�Considering the way the prebiotic soup is referred to in so many discussions of the origin of life as an already established reality, it comes as something of a shock to realize that there is absolutely no positive evidence for its existence.�
― Michael Denton, Evolution: A Theory In Crisis


tags: abiogenesis, biology, chemical-evolution, darwinism, evolution, naturalism, origin-of-life, sciece

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�To grasp the reality of life as it has been revealed by molecular biology, we must magnify a cell a thousand million times until it is twenty kilometers in diameter and resembles a giant airship large enough to cover a great city like London or New York. What we would then see would be an object of unparalleled complexity and adaptive design. On the surface of the cell we would see millions of openings, like the port holes of a vast space ship, opening and closing to allow a continual stream of materials to flow in and out. If we were to enter one of these openings we would find ourselves in a world of supreme technology and bewildering complexity.�
― Michael Denton, Evolution: A Theory In Crisis


tags: biology, factory, id, intelligent-design, irreducible-complexity, living-cells, molecular-machines, science

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�The theory of phlogiston was an inversion of the true nature of combustion. Removing phlogiston was in reality adding oxygen, while adding phlogiston was actually removing oxygen. The theory was a total misrepresentation of reality. Phlogiston did not even exist, and yet its existence was firmly believed and the theory adhered to rigidly for nearly one hundred years throughout the eighteenth century. ... As experimentation continued the properties of phlogiston became more bizarre and contradictory. But instead of questioning the existence of this mysterious substance it was made to serve more comprehensive purposes. ... For the skeptic or indeed to anyone prepared to step out of the circle of Darwinian belief, it is not hard to find inversions of common sense in modern evolutionary thought which are strikingly reminiscent of the mental gymnastics of the phlogiston chemists or the medieval astronomers.

To the skeptic, the proposition that the genetic programmes of higher organisms, consisting of something close to a thousand million bits of information, equivalent to the sequence of letters in a small library of one thousand volumes, containing in encoded form countless thousands of intricate algorithms controlling, specifying and ordering the growth and development of billions and billions of cells into the form of a complex organism, were composed by a purely random process is simply an affront to reason. But to the Darwinist the idea is accepted without a ripple of doubt - the paradigm takes precedence!�
― Michael Denton, Evolution: A Theory In Crisis


tags: chance, coincidence, consensus, darwinism, evolution, macro-evolution, macroevolution, majority-view, naturalism, origin-of-information, origin-of-life, science, scientific-consensus, serendipity

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�In the discoveries of science the harmony of the spheres is also now the harmony of life. And as the eerie illumination of science penetrates evermore deeply into the order of nature, the cosmos appears increasingly to be a vast system finely tuned to generate life and organisms of biology very similar, perhaps identical, to ourselves. All the evidence available in the biological sciences supports the core proposition of traditional natural theology - that the cosmos is a specially designed whole with life and mankind as a fundamental goal and purpose, a whole in which all facets of reality, from the size of galaxies to the thermal capacity of water, have their meaning and explanation in this central fact.

Four centuries after the scientific revolution apparently destroyed irretrievably man's special place in the universe, banished Aristotle, and rendered teleological speculation obsolete, the relentless stream of discovery has turned dramatically in favor of teleology and design, and the doctrine of the microcosm is reborn. As I hope the evidence presented in this book has shown, science, which has been for centuries the great ally of atheism and skepticism, has become at last, in the final days of the second millennium, what Newton and many of its early advocates had so fervently wished - the "defender of the anthropocentric faith.�
― Michael Denton, Nature's Destiny: How the Laws of Biology Reveal Purpose in the Universe

Podcast from Denton. Interesting....



http://intelligentdesign.podomatic.com/entry/2013-07-29T16_27_39-07_00

Do you ever tire of misunderstanding logical fallacies---and making personal insults? It appears not.

Open this peer-reviewed abstract, read it and then get back to us with your simple mechanistic explanations for biological complexity.


http://bio-complexity.org/ojs/index.php/main/article/view/BIO-C.2013.3

The staggering complexity of the cell...


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zl0NXSbeeqg

No one is arguing that complexity does not exist. Just that ID is the least compelling explanation for it.

I thought this was going to be a thread on creatures of whatever species who appear evolution proof. Sigh.

The actual state of things is the exact opposite: the mechanistic, Darwinian "explanation" is no explanation at all; just a series of ad hoc "Just So Stories" which seeks, by a priori philosophic commitment to exclude any rival explanation. It is no longer a search for truth, but dogmatic adherence to philosophy masquerading as science.

If the creations possess ideas with greater explanatory power, why don't they publish them in peer reviewed journals?

Interestingly, the concept of ID itself appears to be undergoing Darwinian selection. ID's fitness as an rival explanation to Darwin seems to lack robustness and long term viability in the world of Science which it wants to live. For example the ID on-line organ, Bio-Complexity that you cited, appears to be to be on life-support if not dead. Curious, does it have any fertile progeny?

Ironic, neh?

Oh yeah, almost forgot to add as another example of ID's lack of fitness, Kitzmiller and the electorate of Dover, PA that booted ID out of it's school system.

Bingo!! Scientific truth is determined by its popularity---not on the soundness of its premises, conclusions or evidence. Thank you for proving my point.

Interestingly, the concept of ID itself appears to be undergoing Darwinian selection. ID's fitness as an rival explanation to Darwin seems to lack robustness and long term viability in the world of Science which it wants to live. For example the ID on-line organ, Bio-Complexity that you cited, appears to be to be on life-support if not dead. Curious, does it have any fertile progeny?

Ironic, neh? [/quote]

Bingo!! Scientific truth is determined by its popularity---not on the soundness of its premises, conclusions or evidence. Thank you for proving my point. [/quote]

Popularity, perhaps. If ID had any real testable validity, it would be more popular.

Point unmade.

Right, like the Heliocentric view of the solar system prior to Copernicus! Nice try 12.

Helio did not withstand the test of time. ID seems to be going by the wayside too. Think of them as failed 'transitional forms'

Of course, you are being deliberately obtuse. Heliocentrism replaced Geocentrism--and it took many hundred years for that to occur. That is the comparison I was making, as you well know. Which theory is "winning" at any given moment tells us nothing about whether it is correct.

Correctness is, in large part, a function of its predictive value. ID has none.

Says who?

Go ahead, make some predictions based on ID.

I asked first. Says who?

I retract my sentence that ID has no predictive value and replace it with: what unique predictive value does ID have?

Here is your opportunity to demonstrate the 'correctness' of ID and the fallacy of Darwin.

I'll take a shot at some predictions based on ID. Irreducible complexity arguments for ID will continue to be more narrowly focused as biological understanding increases. The more that is known, the less complex these biological systems seem to become. Irreducible complexity is just another version of argument from ignorance claiming cellular structure is too complex to have evolved.

Lots of things that were once thought too complex to understand are now very well understood and there is no reason why biological systems would be any different. Advances in genetic engineering will be unrecognizable in 20 years to today's level of understanding just like today's is from 20 years ago.

The ID arguments as we know them today will "evolve" accordingly though and there will be new arguments for a creator based on the then current level of understanding. This cycle has been going on since the geocentric vs. heliocentric days and beyond. It's the god of the gaps argument. The gaps keep getting smaller but there will always be unknowns so something new will become irreducibly complex and therefore an argument for a creator. Belief in a creator god is a personal issue of faith.

You miss represent science. A scientific theory is never "right", it just hasn't been proven wrong. If we collect a larger data set that proves a theory wrong, it is no longer a theory.

I posted these thoughts on the "Killing Jesus" thread. Most of the "scientists" are on this thread, so I offer them for comment:


"Who is more humble? The scientist who looks at the universe with an open mind and accepts whatever it has to teach us, or somebody who says everything in this book must be considered the literal truth and never mind the fallibility of all the human beings involved?
Carl Sagan"

This quote from Sagan is a perfect example of WHY I reject the "argument from science" in favor of atheism or agnosticism.

A truly open minded man would never approach the question of a God's existence by attempting to determine the validity of one book.

God either IS, or He Isn't.

Since a negative can never be proven on a "scientific basis", an open minded scientist would start his quest by looking for evidence in favor of the "God is" argument.

With all the testimony available to him of persons still living, why on earth would he spend time on a book compiled centuries ago by fallible men with an obvious political agenda?

If such an open minded scientist as Sagan alludes to actually exists, and if he dignifies Christianity by considering its arguments as a starting point in his attempts to prove the "God is" argument, he has an investigative route available to him which is far superior to focusing on the truths, or untruths, of its book.

The book's central claim is that Jesus of Nazareth IS God, is alive today in a miraculous manner, and eagerly wants to establish communication with us on an INDIVIDUAL basis.

Were a truly "open minded scientist" take the very logical step of attempting to establish communication with this Jesus of Nazareth, a simple step which- if successful- could settle the question of "God either Is, or He Isn't, with no need of further scientific research, he would find that he is NOT open minded at all.

An HONEST seeker would discover that he is actually of two minds. A part of his mind will not allow the question to go away, and another part has always been fervently occupied on the "God Isn't" side of the debate.

He would discover that he is unable to truly open his mind to the question. He cannot surrender his most prized possession....... his intellect.

He might remember from his reading that the Gospel writers predicted this very thing, and offered a remedy.

Again 12, Who says predictive value is the sine qua non of a valid scientific theory?

And Sniper, I wasn't intending to represent scientific theory. I was commenting on 12's apparent claim that "truth" is decided by vote.

Of course, scientific knowledge is provisional. Read "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" by Thomas Kuhn.

So out of curiosity has anybody seen the evolution of the galaxies?

With the new space-based telescopes and land-base telescopes the evolution of the galaxies (space?) is becoming clearer. Astrophysics may solve the evolution debate once and for all and than again maybe not with "creationists".

BTW: I've never comfortable using the term "creationists" as that implies that only fundamental Christians can be "creationists" not Pagans, Deists, Agnostics, Atheists, etc.

Regardless of what he may or may not been smoking at the time Carl Sagan has profound words of wisdom for those who are not deaf.

He has said that he did not want to BELIEVE, he wants to KNOW.

He is my prophet for my time here on this beautiful blue ball.

Heed the words of the prophet�


�How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, �This is better than we thought!
The Universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant?� Instead they say, �No, no, no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way.�

A religion, old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the Universe as revealed by modern science might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths.�
― Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space


�Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality.�
― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

Equating 'in large part' with 'sine qua non' is a bit of an overreach, no?

There was no claim that truth is by vote as you have noted by qualifying your statement with "apparent". There was an observation that the concepts of ID is undergoing a winnowing process not unlike natural selection.

Have you prepared a post with your ID based predictions so that we can examine how they may fair in the crucible of the Campfire?

TF49, anyone who 1) doesn't have ulterior motives for rejecting evolution (for example, they wrongly believe it threatens their faith if true), 2) has sufficient intelligence/education to understand the overwhelming myriad of evidence for it, and 3) actually researches said evidence, will always come away from doing so with full acceptance of the reality of it. I am thoroughly convinced of this. Therefore, when I come across someone who is a denier, I place them in the category of 1) having an ulterior motivation for rejecting it, therefore choosing to don intellectual blinders, 2) lacking sufficient intelligence/education to understand the evidence, and/or 3) having never done the research.

Or perhaps it's you who do not.

Excellent book on how scientific revolutions occur.

Ever get your link, Conrad?

I provided him with a book title that serves the same function.

Haven't seen BrentD around lately.

Hawkeye:

Interesting comments. I have a view that is in some ways similar to yours. Here are some of my observations of �evolution proponents.�

First: It is vitally important to them that the process of evolution be seen as only a fully natural process by which all living things have developed and progressed; in the past and in the present and for the future. Most will reject the idea out of hand that organisms were designed. This idea is simply dismissed, almost with visceral reaction. In the same way some may fear that evolution threatens their god, evolutionists react in a remarkably similar when confronted with the �god thing.� Now many evolution proponents will say they �believe in god� but often provide only vague politically acceptable thoughts about God. One wonders if they believe in God, how can they limit God to �causing evolution?� Oh well.

Second: I have found that many believe in evolution simply because they were taught in schools that that was the truth. As you intimated, many don�t have an inquiring mind and simply accept what they have been told. Most obamathons fall into this category. Indoctrinated.

Third: I have seen many evolution proponents are quite proud of their views and denigrate those who see things differently as either simpletons of some sort of offminded zealot. They can mock and criticize the evolution skeptics and have the comfort of knowing that �the majority of scientists� believe as they do. They seem to like what I call �unsubstantiated dogmatic assertions.� Such as �the fossil record is full of transitional forms.� They say things loud enough and get others to rally to them like a bunch of high school kids rooting for a football team. While proclaiming �science,� they leave reason behind. Here is a quote that I have appreciated: �It is dangerous to follow the multitude because the majority is almost always on the wrong side in this world.�

Fourth: How many evolutionists would this apply to: Many believe in evolution because they have rejected god and therefore MUST believe in evolution or face the prospect and being held accountable to a Creator God. A God that in fact did create them.

Are you suggesting the many Ph.D scientists who convert to creationism from evolutionism fall into your categories above? Are you suggesting the Ph.D scientist who earned their degrees in non-religious colleges fall into your categories above?

Today in a lecture I heard such a notable evolutionist as Dr. Stephen J. Gould who said mutations will never move molecules to man. He said he didn't know what the mechanism was, but he knew it was not mutations. Dr. Lee Spetner says there is not one known mutation that will move life forms from molecules to man.

It seems like the theory sits in judgment on the evidence instead of the evidence sitting in judgment of the theory. Take a watch of the movie Expelled! No Intelligence Allowed.

Yes, that is much more likely than talking snakes.

I guess you missed my clip above by a Nobel Prize winning physicist, because it was addressed in the first minute.
In addition, it's in every modern science text book you can pick up.

I am an acceptor of the reality of evolution, as I am the reality of a heliocentric solar system, a round earth, gravitation, atomic theory, etc., because in good conscience I can be nothing else after a many-years research into the question.

I've been a Christian since the age of fourteen, and started as a young earth Creationist. As I came across the evidence for evolution, I found (after many years of immersing myself in Young Earth Creationist "answers" to evolutionists) young earth Creationism untenable, and was very pleased to fully adopt Intelligent Design after reading my first of many books (Starting with Darwin On Trial, by Johnson) proposing it as a way to shut the mouth of those oh-so-smug "evolutionists."

Gradually, however, I discovered that the answers to ID by those smug "evolutionists" were vastly more objective and scientific than the claims of the ID proponents, and thus immersed myself in the study of evolution in a search for its fundamental defects, finding, however, it to be many times more praising of God than any children's story (as Genesis is wrongly presented to us by Young Earth Creationists) or pseudo-scientific denial of it's reality.

As I reread the Genesis account of Creation, in the late 1990s, with this understanding as part of my basic conception of the world (as I also read the Bible understanding the earth is round, the earth orbits the sun, gravitation is a force causing massive objects to attract, everything's made of atoms, etc.,etc..), and the basic facts about biology (to include the evolutionary process), the reality began to stare me directly in the face that I could find nothing in it that in any way contradicted it. Not only that, it seemed to be telling the very same story, only in terms directed towards prescientific peoples ... sort of the way an adult explains how babies are made to a very young child, e.g., "When a man and woman love one another very much, a tiny baby appears in her belly, and that baby grows till it's too big to stay inside, then comes out." There's no lie in that. It's all true. It just leaves out details and brushes over many others that a young child couldn't possibly understand, such as the details of the actual biological processes that occur all along the way. The Biblical Creation account and modern evolutionary biology share the same sort of connection.

The_Real_Hawkeye,



You don't understand the concept of entropy. God created everything "very good" including people. If you and I, with our modern intellectual level, were somehow transported in time to before Noah's Flood we would be put in an institution for retarded people. Mutations go the wrong direction. They don't increase information. They destroy it.

Hawk eye,

Well said.

TF

Thanks.

Actually, it's you who don't. Entropy is relevant to the universe as a whole, but doesn't predict decay in all subsets of the universe, such as the earth's biosphere, for example, which is constantly being barraged with solar energy, adding energy for the processes of life, to include evolution. Entropy predicts that eventually said energy input will cease, but till then there's lots of it available for systems of increasing complexity.

I was referring to our brains which make up our minds. You posted that the original men were not as smart as we are. I maintain the exact opposite.

No I didn't. Not at all. Are you suggesting that the ancients were scientifically sophisticated in modern terms, though? Just consider what were common beliefs about biology a mere two or three centuries ago, even among those thought to be enlightened in this regard.

What does that have to do with a civilization we don't know a thing about, except they lived on average 900 years?



You think you are enlightened and yet reject God's Word in favor of fallible men's word.

That's a false premise unsupported by any facts. Don't you believe it to be a sin to bear false witness or to spread calumny?

So, no?

Please. You reject Genesis and Jesus' words in favor of men's opinions and you want me to agree that I'm the one not telling the Truth. Get a grip! You are doing what Eve did. She sat in judgment of God's Word instead of believing Him.

By the way you didn't answer my question about the Ph.D evolutionist switching to creation or the Ph.D scientists coming out of non-religious colleges. You say they are not educated enough or intelligent enough. What is your highest science earned degree? In which field?

RM. There is more then one way to look at the dichotomy of what to believe.

You see it as a choice between the Bible (God), and Science (Man).

But the Bible was written by the hand of men. So others may see it as a comparison between the Bible (men) and Science (other men). In other words, it's not a decision between God and Man, but a weighing of two camps of fallible men. The scientific representations of the Bible have been falsified many times, yet Young Earth Creationist continue to claim it is infallible, and the evidence must be adjusted to meet the conclusion. In science, it's the conclusion that must be adjusted to match the evidence.

He still fits into the ulterior motive category.

Then I assume you will be consistent and deny that sperm meeting egg, forming a zygote, etc., has anything to do with human reproduction since the Bible only mentions men knowing women and conceiving. RIGHT? You're not, according to you, allowed to read into that a modern scientific understanding. So all conceptions were and are caused by men and women merely coming to know each other. If you believe otherwise, i.e., that there's more detail to it than that which was glossed over by the Bible, then you're choosing man's opinions against God's Word, which mentions nothing about sperms/eggs/zygotes, etc..

Please. Grow up, The_Real_Hawkeye. You know you reject God's Word and accept men's. If you take a straight forward reading of God's Word you learn there was a world wide flood. Do you accept that? How can you and accept the geological column. A recent world wide flood destroy it and leave its own evidence.

Watch the movie Expelled! and tell me again these guys have an ulterior motive. You are amazing.

What is amazing is that there are still people who believe the earth is 6000 years old, people used to live for 900 years, and that every animal on earth lived within walking distance of Noah's house. You believe all that is the literal truth based on the writings of ancients yet selectively reject any and all real evidence if you even think it might contradict your particular interpretation of these writings.

Please answer Hawk's question on sperms/eggs/zygotes. Curious minds want to know.

RM, Hillybilly brings up a good point. Did every animal on earth live within walking distance of Noah's house, and if they did, how did Noah fit all the dinosaurs onto the ark?

Dinosaurs are a made up fiction by the evolutionists. There is no such thing as a dinosaur. Sarcasm off.

To give you some idea of the complexity of a cell se the video below. The probabilities against chance and time assembling such a complicated chemical production factory are staggeringly small. But for the evolutionists, faith springs eternal....


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TVkdQhNdzHU

That's because evolution is not the result of chance.

It's the result of selective forces.

Many people, including geologists, believe in a single continent which broke up and formed the continents we now see. I happen to be one of those folks after watching a video called "In the Beginning". God brought the animals with the breath of life in their nostrils, including dinosaurs, to the ark. So, yes, everything was within walking distance. God gave Noah 120 years to build the ark so there was lot's of time. Maybe it took a couple generations,or maybe not, for the animals to get there. We have no way of knowing how long animals lived prior to the Flood when even the atmosphere was still "very good". Amber bubbles show there used to be a slightly higher atmospheric pressure and a higher amount of CO2. With higher pressure and higher CO2 plants would grow bigger and faster. This has been proven in modern scientific experiments.

A modern scientific discovery is the deterioration of the earth's magnetic field with a halflife of 1400 years. Another of modern scientific discoveries is the magnetic field blocks cosmic radiation. If we go back about 4,350 years when the flood happened the magnetic field would be at least eight or more times stronger than now. Another discovery is cosmic radiation can and does cause mutation and is deleterious to longevity. According to Genetic Entropy and the Mystery of the Genome The mutation accumulation rate in humans matches the decay rate of the patriarchs in Genesis Eleven. The author has over seventy patents on gene splicing so he knows a little about genetics.

Several people have come back from the Congo claiming to see a huge sauropod dinosaur. Others say they have seen flying reptiles in New Guinea. A few years ago a grave was unearth in Mexico. Apparently the guy buried there was a king or someone important. The diggers found the remains of a small dinosaur buried with him. Also scores of pottery were in the grave. Most had figurines of animals we are familiar with. About 20% had figurines of dinosaurs. The Bible talks about a flying serpent. Of course "everyone" knew that was an error. That is until a fossil of one was discovered in Southern Mexico.

If you are really serious about how Noah fit all the animals on the ark you could read the book Noah's Ark: A Feasibility Study. But let's take a look at it from an ignorant Bible thumper who didn't even get a GED till age fifty-one.

I am convinced all elephants and mastodons and mammoths were descended from the elephant kind. The same thing goes for elk, deer, moose, etc. They came from the "deer" kind. Throw in the horse kind to include horses, donkeys, zebras, etc. The same would apply to the different kinds of dinosaurs. Noah could bring in young animals and birds that would not breed until after the year long boat ride. So they could all be much smaller than adults. I read the average size of animals from shrew to supersaurus dinosaur is about the size of a sheep. So we are not looking at a bunch of monsters. We don't need any aquatic creatures on the ark.

Now the size of the ark: Cubits range in size from about 18" to 22" after the Flood. If they were the same prior to the Flood they would average 20". The ark was 300 cubits long with a ratio of six to one length to width. That number happens to coincide with modern large craft. Noah's ark was about 500 feet long based on that average. I don't know but I bet he could have fitted about 200 modern railroad double-decker cattle cars on it. I have no idea how many sheep can fit in one of those cars but I bet at least a hundred.

As far as the fesses goes, there is a simple modern concept used in cattle pens. From what I have heard the cattle are on grates close enough together so their feet are fine. Below them live worms which decompose the animal waist.

This should answer a lot more than you asked for.

Excellent debate with Stephen Meyer.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sakmq5L3IiE

Wait, so evolution happened only really really fast huh? That and Pangaea broke up and the continents water skied across to their present locations in how many years?

So, it's your contention that the pangea separated and the continents moved into their current locations in the last 1650 year?

Thanks for answering. It doesn't fit any of the science I know but thanks for answering. I guess I'll always be a block headed Deist evolutionist.

The mutations are random. Some mutations are detrimental, most are benign, and some beneficial for the organisms conditions. It's the selective forces that determine which are most likely to be passed on to descendant generations. So, although the mutations are random, their prorogation is not.

Right. Are those selective forces random and undirected?

No. Selective forces act to cause non random changes of specific adaptive traits over time. As the name implies, selective forces are.....selective....not random....

I have no idea where the 1650 year figure came from. What would happen to the coastal lands if the continents moved into their approximate present locations in nine months!? We are talking about many yards per second! Modern tsunamis would be embarrassed. Couple that with raining continuously twenty-four seven for six weeks and then sporadically for a total of five months.

Where did all the rain come from? From the steam generated by the volcanic action under the oceans. Guess what modern geologist have discovered about the ocean floor. Most are a result of HUGE volcanic activity. Then we can couple that with tides with nothing to stop them from eroding the continents to nothing.

The Flood easily explains the folded sedimentary rock and the ice age. The Flood explains why there is no fault freesia between the layers of strata supposedly out of order based on evolutionism.

At times you forget there is a miracle working God in charge. The Flood was a judgment on a violent world of people and animals. God's Word tells us the world that existed then was destroyed by water. In one of His stories, Jesus uses the extensiveness of the Flood as an illustration of how extensive His return will be.

Many religions far older than the Bible have their own early versions of creation and world floods.

But none of them come close to explaining the stories told by the rocks. That story goes back millions of years.

It is in the rocks we find the Word.

6000-4350=1650.
Ok, maybe I had it backwards. You are saying Pangea existed 4350 years ago, and the continents expanded to cover an addition 1600 miles of the earth in the last 4k years? So continental drift has been moving at 4 miles per year?

What did the earths continents looks like in the time of Jesus and the Roman Empire?

I see. So the selective force is directed, or the outcome is directed? What is that selective force.

Considering the corner you've painted yourself into, I don't blame you for dodging my very straightforward question. Here it is again, though, so all know which question you refuse to answer:

"Then I assume you will be consistent and deny that sperm meeting egg, forming a zygote, etc., has anything to do with human reproduction since the Bible only mentions men knowing women and conceiving. RIGHT? You're not, according to you, allowed to read into that a modern scientific understanding. So all conceptions were and are caused by men and women merely coming to know each other. If you believe otherwise, i.e., that there's more detail to it than that which was glossed over by the Bible, then you're choosing man's opinions against God's Word, which mentions nothing about sperms/eggs/zygotes, etc.."

Selective forces can very with conditions. As an example, during wet conditions that favor plants with small seeds, this selective force would favor birds with small beaks, where dry conditions that favor large tough seeds could favor birds with larger tougher beaks. As the conditions vary over time and space, they will favor different adaptive traits.

The force itself is not "directed", the force is the result of prevailing conditions that vary over time and space. When you can move your thinking away from false dichotomies you can begin to under stand the nature of evolution.

Mutation doesn't cut the mustard.

http://www.discovery.org/scripts/viewDB/filesDB-download.php?id=118

Discovery.org doesn't cut the mustard.

Do you have something from a peer reviewed source?

Can't respond to the merits of the argument so you fall back on peer review? Who peer reviewed Origin of Species before its publication?

Here is how "science" deals with dissent.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VqNPlwLwIP8

What are they afraid of??

Science also deals that way with people who think the earth is flat. Must be a conspiracy I guess.

I see. Are you talking about Finch beaks in the Gallagapos? That would be an example of natural selection resulting in change in beak size; not creation of a new species or even the creation of new genetic information. How do we get from there to evidence that the power that can cause changes in beak size can create life from inanimate matter or create new body plans altogether?

Jesus H. Christ...

Is this is the best comeback you have? You're so far over your head on this subject you will never catch up.

I take it from your response that you are unable to answer the question. The fact is, The Origin of Species was published without peer review. That's just one example of an important scientific publication or new theory being published without "peer review". The point is, Peer review ,, or the lack thereof rather, tells us absolutely nothing about whether a theory or argument is or is not valid. When Sniper tried to invoke "peer review" as a response to my question above, that was just a way to try to avoid answering the merits of the question. Sniper, will you address the merits if the article I linked above or will you continue to try and evade?

Um, ya gotta publish something before it can be reviewed. That's kinda the idea. You know, throw it out there and let people try and pick it apart like has been done with say Origin of Species for example these past 154 years.

No it does not. Science took on the question of whether the earth was flat and answered it. If your analogy was valid, science would welcome the opportunity to disprove a competing incorrect theory, if in fact it is incorrect, rather than trying to marginalize that theory on criteria irrelevant to its truth or falsity (as we have seen throughout this thread). This is, BTW, what caused Berkeley Law Professor Phillip Johnson to remark that one of the first clues he had to the weakness of Neo-Darwinism was the way its proponents defended the theory (the form of their arguments). What were they afraid of? Also, your analogy to the flat earth assumes that the criticisms of neo-Darwinism or nominally competing theories such as ID is as to Darwinism as the theory of a flat earth is relative to the theory that the earth is round. The roundness of the earth is a fact of present day observation. The all-important aspect of the theory of evolution (the creation of new genetic material and thus new survivable phenotypes) is a theory which everyone agrees is not observed in the "here and now" but is assumed based almost entirely (if not entirely) on historical evidence. So your analogy is invalid on that basis also.

Actually, it does.

A group of experts in a chosen field evaluate the data and attempt to repeat the experiment in the exact way as the original. If they find that they (and others) are able to obtain the same results the data will be approved and deemed "Peer Reviewed".

This of course is a very simplified explanation of the process, but if you think for a second that The Origin of Species hasn't been meticulously researched and found to be repeatable you are delusional.

That is exactly what I am trying to do----but Sniper invoked Peer Review to avoid responding to the merits of the argument in the article I linked. You can't have it both ways: you can't argue for the invalidity of a new idea or theory based on lack of peer review and then deny it the opportunity for any kind of hearing. In any event, the lack of peer review tells us nothing about the validity of a new theory. Ask Francis Crick and that Watson fellow----and Charles Darwin.

Where did I ever say or imply that the Origin of Species had not been meticulously researched or reviewed. The salient point is it was not peer reviewed prior to publication. Again, the lack of peer review tells us nothing about whether a scientific theory is correct and many, many "peer reviewed" articles or research are subsequently discarded as erroneous. Peer review unfortunately is often used to exclude competition from new ideas. If you think science is not thoroughly politicized you are naieve. Take a look at global warming or resource scarcity. The entire field is dominated by an a priori political commitment to leftism and as a consequence, real science which does not tow the company line is often excluded from serious consideration, regardless of its merits. Go view the link to the movie Expelled above. The examples of this academic totalitarianism are really quite appalling.

What are they afraid of?

ID is not a "competing theory". Science doesn't and cannot deal with the supernatural. If you were to claim aliens created life on earth, then fine. Present you evidence. Claiming something is so complicated that it could only have been created therefore goddidit is not science. That's religion. I don't know is a perfectly rational response to how complicated things work. Let's see if we can find out and what does the evidence say are even better. The minute you invoke the supernatural, you're no longer looking at the evidence objectively to figure out how things work, you've jumped into the why things work territory.

Well said.

No one. But after its publication, the entire biological science community peer reviewed it, all trying to shoot it down.

The accumulation of small changes over time result in larger changes over longer periods of time, till, eventually, the horse can no longer produce fertile offspring with the donkey, even though earlier in their isolation from one another they had been able to interbreed with no difficulty, and earlier still they were indistinguishable as members of the same species.

You weary me. You are not a serious student of either creation or evolution. According to my Bible Adam had "relations" with his wife and she conceived. The details of the creation story are there. God spoke and it was. Again it the Psalms it says God spoke and it stood. There is no room for all your foolishness of contradictory belief in evolutionism.

The doctors who discovered the DNA molecule did just that. The even coined a word: Panspermia. They realized the molecule is so complex it could never happen without a maker.

This is exactly what I said yesterday. The difference is if you read your own words you would realize they don't turn into a cow or a camel. If they change enough the offspring is dead and extinction follows.

ID is an inference to the best explanation for causation of complex systems based on our common experience in the world. Science infers to intelligent causes all the time in many fields. It is a myth and falsehood promulgated by Neo-Darwinists that ID is religion or that it is outside the realm of "real" science in order to protect Darwinian evolution from competition from an idea that explains complex biological systems
far better than neo-Darwinism. Methodological naturalism is a philosophy, not a deduction from empirical science. Proponents of ID are simply saying lets go wherever the evidence leads. Methodological naturalists fight that tooth and nail because they don't like where the evidence leads. Think about it: in the name of "science", Neo-Darwinists espouse a philosophical position that prohibits empirical explanations that compete with their ideas, claim (falsely) that only their philosophical definition of science is the correct one and then use their arbitrary definition to insulate their ideas from empirical competition. That is not a search for scientific truth; its dogmatic adherence to an a priori metaphysical position.

Sniper:

Did the finch beak variation of which you spoke involve the creation of any new genetic information? How about the Kettlewell Moth example? Did the change in frequency of appearance of light and dark colored moths involve the creation of any new genetic information?

The answer of course is that these paradigmatic examples of 'evolution" in action do not show natural selection creating new genetic information or new species. Rather, what they show is natural selection changing the frequency of the expression of previously existing genetic information in the phenotype.

From these examples of micro-evolution we are asked to infer that the same process can create new massive quantities of= new genetic information and entirely new species. There is no good reason to accept that extrapolation. It has never been observed to happen. Scientists can't even create new species using intelligence to try and manipulate the genome.

And of course, natural selection cannot even begin to work in the absence of organic material. The simplest living cell is believed to have over 250 coordinated proteins with their attendant manufacturing processes. How did that happen? How did life begin? Science literally doesn't have a clue.

Where does the Bible say that Adam's sperm fertilized Eve's eggs, forming zygotes that became Cain, Abel, Seth, etc.? If you believe any sperm, eggs, or zygotes were involved, you are (by your own stated standard) believing in man's opinions vs God's word, since none of that is specified in the account of how Cain, Abel, Seth, etc., came to be conceived and born. Please answer this question straightforwardly.

If the horse and the donkey become sufficiently differentiated species, both the horse and the donkey become extinct?? By what mechanism?? Do you realize how ignorant you sound?

I look at this evolutionary debate as a debate between the Bible thumpers and the Deists. It's interesting.

Funny, when I thought I knew I was stupid. Now that I know, I feel stupid for not having seen it before.

I don't know why you think that. First, evolution properly understood makes belief in God utterly superfluous and illogical. Daniel Dennett has said that if evolution is true, the following propositions follow as a matter of inescapable logic: (1) there is no God; (2) there is no free will; (3) there is no purpose to life and (4) there is no right or wrong. Morality is whatever we want it to be (or not be). So properly understood, the debate is between atheism on the one and. Now with respect to ID, the designer could be a supreme being or an extra-terrestrial. Francis Crick is a non-believer and posits panspermia for the information that the genetic code contains. So, as a matter of logical necessity, ID does not require the existence of a supernatural creator. Therefore, the debate is more properly understood as a debate between a system whose logical necessity is a denial of not merely God, but even the possibility of free will and a system or theory which posits intelligence as the source of the complex genetic information required to create life and differentiate species which intelligence may be super-natural or might not be. Finally, ID does not invoke Genesis, the Bible or any aspect of Young Earth creationism. I don't know why you would tie Biblical fundamentalism to ID when they have nothing to do with one another. It is true opponents of ID try to caricature the theory as creationism. But that is a caricature. In any event, there is literally no basis to associate it with Biblical fundamentalism. Actually, fundamentalists are often hostile to ID because it tends, in their minds, to devalue God and his role in creation.

Jordan

Translation = 'If you believe in evolution, then you're an atheist...and you don't believe in morality.'

What a crock...!

All you have to do is watch Ben Steins portral of their first case of "discrimination", i.e the Sternberg peer review issue, then read The rest of the Story to understand how Stein is distorting events in a biased fashion. Sternberg peer reviewed himself, then refused to name the other the alleged reviewers. This is not exactly consistent with the peer review process.

There's nothing to respond to. Three out of context quote mines does not make an argument against the entire body of genetic research.

The finch example was an example of a selective force. I made no claim the selective force itself introduces the new genetic variation.

Believing in evolution has never require a disbelief in a Creator of the universe.

God and Evolution
Copyright � 1994-1998 by Warren Kurt VonRoeschlaub

3. Evolution and God
Q5. Does evolution deny the existence of God?
No. See question 1. There is no reason to believe that God was not a guiding force behind evolution. While it does contradict some specific interpretations of God, especially ones requiring a literal interpretation of Genesis 1, few people have this narrow of a view of God.
There are many people who believe in the existence of God and in evolution. Common descent then describes the process used by God. Until the discovery of a test to separate chance and God this interpretation is a valid one within evolution.
Q6. But isn't this Deism, the belief that God set the universe in motion and walked away?
While it could be Deism, the Bible speaks more of an active God, one who is frequently intervening in His creation. If the Bible represents such a God in historical times there is no reason to assume that He was not active in the universe before then. A guiding hand in evolution could exist, even in the time before humans came around. Just because people were not there to observe does not mean that there was nothing to observe.
Q7. So if God directed evolution, why not just say he created everything at once?
Mainly because all the evidence suggests otherwise. If God created the universe suddenly, he created it in a state that is indistinguishable from true age. If he did create it that way there must be a reason, otherwise God is a liar. Whatever that reason may be, a universe that is exactly like one that is old should be treated as if it were old.
Q8. By denying creation, aren't you denying God's power to create?
No. Because God did not create the world in seven days does not mean that he couldn't. What did, or did not, happen is not an indication of what could, or could not, have happened. All evidence suggests that evolution is the way things happened. Regardless of what could have happened, the evidence would still point to evolution.




�The idea that God is an oversized white male with a flowing beard, who sits in the sky and tallies the fall of every sparrow is ludicrous. But if by 'God,' one means the set of physical laws that govern the universe, then clearly there is such a God. This God is emotionally unsatisfying... it does not make much sense to pray to the law of gravity.�
― Carl Sagan

You can't use a reloading manual to make cookies, you need a cookbook to make cookies. Abiogenesis and evolution are two different subjects. If you wish to change subjects we can do that.

How much genetic diversity was there after the flood?

How much genetic diversity is there among humans now?

How many species were on the Ark?

How many species are there on earth now?

There is no reason to think that the life around today is comparable in complexity to the earliest life. Over 99% of all species that ever lived are now extinct. All of the simplest life would almost certainly be extinct by now, outcompeted by more complex forms. Self-replicators can be incredibly simple, as simple as a strand of six DNA nucleotides (Sievers and von Kiedrowski 1994). This is simple enough to form via prebiotic chemistry. Self-replication sets the stage for evolution to begin, whether or not you call the molecules "life."
Nobody claims the first life arose by chance. To jump from the fact that the origin is unknown to the conclusion that it could not have happened naturally is the argument from incredulity.

Somewhere upwards of five-percent of all the species that have ever existed. The rest are gone for good, along with their genetic information, except in Speilberg movies.

You are really good at obfuscating and not answering Rob's pertinent questions Snipe, so I'll ask again. What proof is there that macroevolution produces new genetic material, IE, new-gene codes, not just a different expression of an existing set of genes, IE, peppered moths, etc?

This right here is the reason some go to such absurd lengths to deny the obvious. It threatens their belief system.

This is absurd. It only makes a simplistic understanding of God, i.e., the sort of understanding propagated in children's books, implausible.

God ... the real God ... is the master even of probability and chance, i.e., he's capable of truly throwing dice to roll while, 1) knowing the outcome beforehand, yet 2) having the outcome of the roll truly be 100% random in the natural order of things.

The creation equivalent being that he commanded the earth by fiat to bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and commanded the waters by fiat to bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and fowl that may fly above the earth, and the earth and the waters brought them forth abundantly in accordance with his command. Yet he didn't determine their developing forms, even though he knew beforehand every step and stage thereof, and knew from the start by means of divine omniscience, the moment he issued the command, that it was good, i.e., in accordance with his will.

PS Fiat is Latin for let it be done. When God said "Let the Earth bring forth abundantly ... etc," and "Let the waters bring forth abundantly ... etc," he was issuing a command to the earth and the waters in the fiat form.

Its been demonstrated many times, But for a reference read Nasvall etal Science (2012) 388 pp384-387

Documentation of mutations producing new features includes the following: � the ability of a bacterium to digest nylon (Negoro et al. 1994; Thomas n.d.; Thwaites 1985);
� adaptation in yeast to a low-phosphate environment (Francis and Hansche 1972; 1973; Hansche 1975);
� the ability of E. coli to hydrolyze galactosylarabinose (Hall 1981; Hall and Zuzel 1980);
� evolution of multicellularity in a unicellular green alga (Boraas 1983; Boraas et al. 1998);
� modification of E. coli's fucose pathway to metabolize propanediol (Lin and Wu 1984);
� evolution in Klebsiella bacteria of a new metabolic pathway for metabolizing 5-carbon sugars (Hartley 1984);

As for proof of macroevolution and new genetic diversity, here's 29 proofs:

http://talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc/

Correct, but many who recite that fact wrongly believe that it's down 95% from some high point at the beginning. That's not the correct interpretation of that fact. It refers to the fact that most species that have come to exist have also disappeared, but they came to exist at various times over billions of years, and disappeared at various times over billions of years. There was no starting point when they all existed. Another way to put it is that, although that is a true fact, there are about as many species alive today as there were six million years ago or sixty million years ago. Species came and left, but the number of species remains roughly the same, apart from the geologically short periods directly after mass extinction events.

This being the case, speciation by evolution would seem a no brainer, unless one meant to suggest that God was busy snapping into existence new species to replace the species that have been disappearing throughout time.

Well, I guess we'll find out who's right when we die.

One thing for sure, evolutionary dead-ends do not fit into the Bible story of Creation.

How so?

These creatures start as bacteria. Into what did they macro evolve?

After reading the article I realized the author didn't say anything with the multiplicity of words.

You're starting with your belief in evolution to support your idea. What observable, testable, repeatable, verifiable evidence do you have the 100% didn't live at the same time?

Common sense tells me that with Creationism there is no purpose for live forms that go nowhere.

Yet they came and went in a process of evolving.

Smarter men than me have said the same thing.

�The fossil record implies trial and error, an inability to anticipate the future, features inconsistent with an efficient Great Designer.�
Carl Sagan

This is pretty amazing. I never expected that this would turn into such a huge discussion.

My take on this is

Give unto Caesar what is Caesars and give into God what is Gods. The same goes for science. The origin of the species is a matter for science and the scientific method. Your deceiving yourselves if you think this isn't true. Just consider all the amazing things that science has provided us from airplanes to nuclear power to cures for diseases. Science works and is the correct way to solve scientific problems.

The bible was written be wise men who knew a lot about people and that is the reason the it has value. They may have been inspired by God but they didn't have any knowledge of science or the scientific method which is the only way to determine scientific facts. So you can't rely on the to provide facts about science. What they did in regards to the origin of life was provide the best answer that they could to something they had no knowledge about other than myths from the past.

I think that it helps for you to consider that it would have been impossible for them to provide answers to any scientific questions. No one could think that they could have provided answers to any of the basic and funamental scientific facts that we have discovered. E = MC^2 is fundamental to the understanding of the universe but the men who wrote the bible had no way of determining it. They also didn't know about how our solar system is structured or of the universe of almost unlimited stars. They lacked the knowledge of chemistry and nuclear physics. They couldn't conceive of the nuclear bomb and its massive power. They had no way to determine scientific facts and the origin of life and species is a matter for science.

However, some people tie their faith in their religion to believing that the unscientific authors explanation of the origin of life and species. If they were wise the would realize that God works in mysterious ways and it's only after hundreds of years of study using the scientific method that we are starting to find out some of his methods.

Sagan was right when he said biology offers no evidence for a designer of species, but you are not in what you said. Right though Sagan was as to the above, he was wrong to the extent he suggested that evidence for the absence of a designer of species is evidence for the absence of God.

God clearly didn't design the physicality of any living creature on the earth. Said creatures, by all the available evidence, were the product of evolution, which brings about species through successive and varied adaptations to successive and varied environmental pressures over long periods of time.

The God of Genesis didn't design creatures. He commanded by fiat that nature bring them forth. He designed nature to bring forth living creatures via evolution. The fact that God knew beforehand every stage of said process (including the so called dead ends) in no way suggests his interference with the process as a designer. Causation and foreknowledge of process and outcomes don't equate to design. Nor do dead ends (a product of nature) imply the absence of God's intentional causal role in the process as a whole. God can permit his creations to make all sorts of errors, yet still produce end products pleasing to him in accordance with his will.

Look at the history of the Jews, for example. Were each of the leaders of the Jews, even those specifically chosen by God, perfect in their obedience to God? Certainly not. Far from it, in fact. Yet they served God's ultimate purpose (as God knew from the start that they would) in preserving revealed truth and ultimately bringing about Jesus, our Savior.

They appear and disappear in strata in such a way as overwhelmingly to evince their appearance and disappearance at vastly differing times in geological history. It's repeatable at multiple points on the globe, as proven by the fact that geologists use this knowledge to find the proper depths and locations for fossil fuel drilling, and get paid handsomely for doing so.

The_Real_Hawkeye,



Genesis 2:7
"Then the Lord God formed man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being."

How many proofs you're wrong do you need before you give up belief in the Bible as a reliable Book? You constantly contradict what It says. YOu don't accept the clear teaching of a Global Flood; which would have destroyed any evidence of a geological column.' Why don't you admit to yourself and us that you are your final authority and don't really beleive in the God of the Bible?

The_Real_Hawkeye,



You ever hear of out of place artifacts? It proves your above statement wrong. The artifacts are only out of place if one does not accept God's Word about a year long global flood. The artifacts of man or his bones are found in every strata as documented by the new science of Out Of Place Artifacts. It is called OOP-ART. Do yourself a favor and check into it.

Well Ringman you are right about one thing I don't believe the "Word" of God is in the Bible. The Bible is a nice book with some good pointers but it is still a work of man. I believe God's "Word" is to be found in the study of science and natural observation. Hence, why I'm a Deist.

I did google it, I found a wiki entry that was pretty negative about it and a couple of Chritsian sites. Maybe you could help by telling us about some of the OOP-ART along with the primary documentation (and what the dissenting folks have to say)

So now you are wrong about both Carl and I.

Once again you have demonstrated your God given ability to put words in people mouths that they never said.

Believe me, I was fully expecting you to post this, but didn't wish to anticipate you. God formed man of the dust from the ground in precisely the same sense in which he formed the physicality of every living creature, i.e., by fiat command to nature to do so. Genesis also states many times that God was the creator of all living things. Yes indeed, because he created all the matter and energy in the universe, then commanded part of his creation to bring forth all living things from said matter (if you deny this, you call Scripture a liar), thus he formed us from the dust of the ground, as he did all living things.

As to man, however, he breathed a soul into us (making us living beings ... i.e., possessing supernatural life), which is not said of the other living creatures. In this sense, we are created ex nihilo in his image, distinct from the other animals.

Makes sense to me. Most astrophysicists agree all matter including human matter comes from star dust and earth has been formed from star dust and I've always said that our soul has been made in the image of the Divine Soul not the human body.

Poor Ringman everybody is ganging up on him.

We have the strata.
We have mass extinction events in different strata, taking place millions of years apart.

Carl Sagan never said there was no God.

�The fossil record implies trial and error, an inability to anticipate the future, features inconsistent with an efficient Great Designer.�
― Carl Sagan

Carl was talking about Creation theory losing the battle with Evolution theory.

Carl has always written clean and concise words of wisdom about the Cosmos.

I do not know if he was smoking anything or not when he wrote those words.

Here is a small part of what he said about God.

�The idea that God is an oversized white male with a flowing beard, who sits in the sky and tallies the fall of every sparrow is ludicrous. But if by 'God,' one means the set of physical laws that govern the universe, then clearly there is such a God. This God is emotionally unsatisfying... it does not make much sense to pray to the law of gravity.�
Carl Sagan

Who is more humble? The scientist who looks at the universe with an open mind and accepts whatever it has to teach us, or somebody who says everything in this book must be considered the literal truth and never mind the fallibility of all the human beings involved?
Carl Sagan Interview with Charlie Rose (1996)

An atheist has to know a lot more than I know. An atheist is someone who knows there is no god. By some definitions atheism is very stupid.
Carl Sagan

You're starting with the assumption Noah's Flood didn't happen.

This is an assertion unsupported by evidence.



We have the geological column. By your standards, this disproves the flood.

Seriously, I actually feel sorry for you but I guess you prove ignorance is bliss. No offense intended.

Says the guy who takes the old testament as absolute, literal history and goes to absurd lengths to "adjust" any and all evidence to fit that conclusion.

I did no such thing. I started with the EVIDENCE, and the evidence does not support the conclusion that the world experienced a world wide flood 4300 years ago. We do have strata that supports the occurrence of a LOCAL flood in the ancient Sumerian lands circa 2300 BCE, and stories predating the biblical accounts of this local flood, but no evidence to support the Biblical account of a world wide flood covering the top of Everest.

DITTOS.

Some of ya'll need to read some Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn...

Some folks grasp on their religious beliefs is so shaky, so tenuous they they are afraid the least puff of knowledge will blow it away...! If ones belief in God depends upon the non-existence of evolution or the universe not being billions of years old, then maybe you're in deeper trouble than you imagined...'oh ye of little faith'.
Those who hope to use the Bible to beat evolution, and a very old earth, into non-existence represent only a small fragment of real believing, church going, followers of Christ...the majority of whom have no problem with evolution or the reality of a very old earth.

I would like to believe that. I really would but............

http://www.gallup.com/poll/155003/Hold-Creationist-View-Human-Origins.aspx

That's an interesting survey.

I get your point, but it's likely that an emphasis should be place on the "real believing, church going, followers of Christ" part, as opposed to the "Forty-six percent of Americans" part.

This.