Posted on 05/01/2009 9:36:15 AM PDT by GodGunsGuts
“—there is NO doubt that the finely graded diversity of life (see Darwin’s Finches as the classic example) at the species level,-—”
Actually, there are those with lots of doubts.
Dynamic variation within a species was observed by creationists before there were capital E “Evolutionists.”
http://www.iconsofevolution.com/articles.php3
Why do the Galapagos finches quickly return to original phenotype? Why haven’t they become new species?
Oh yeah, time. It’s conveniently beyond the investigatory horizon.
Which means you don’t know. You’re guessing. Maybe it’s a good guess, but the fact remains, you don’t know.
That was one of my favorite pictures of Jesus when I was a boy. I had one of them bibles that zipped up around the edge. Jesus looked PISSED OFF so he did. I could relate to that. Couldn't never get too much satisfaction out of all the wussified 'turn the cheek' stuff.
I admire your courage. I guess somebody has to get in here and slog away. Just glad it aint me.
Just so you know though- you won't ever change any of these people's minds. And I mean never. If Jesus turned up and told them Darwin was right- they'd run him off the thread too.
To the religious, you represent Satan. You are his agent. (or her agent- I kind of like the idea of a Satan a fella could fornicate with) You are actually giving them an opportunity to participate in a sort of Christian jihad. They get brownie points in heaven for taking up for god. You know- higher cloud, shinier harp, closer walks with him etc.
It's like beating your head against a concrete wall. But I understand that too.
Well, I've drawn enough fire I guess. I better E and E while the getting's good.
good luck
>Unfortunately, in much of religious fundamentalism drama >must be inserted at every turn. You can’t simply [have] >gradations of theory. You have to have either right or >wrong
That’s why I’m not very interested in the “revealed” varieties of religion. It’s either true or it’s not. Time will tell and all that. Wake me up when its over, basically.
Science, on the other hand, is a constant adventure: in the interplay between theory and experiment we grow increasingly confident of some things (newtonian mechanics works very nicely for most everyday things and with the corrections from general relativity, for most large scale things, too), and get really surprised by others (i’d nominated the discovery of quantum mechanics as the most surprising result in the 20th century). And of course all those results are provisional especially with respect to their foundations. It’s quite possible that we’ll eventually be able to demonstrate that general relativity and quantum mechanics are different manifestations of the same thing, or even that quantum mechanics is a sort of optical illusion. Such a discovery, however, won’t mean that the disk drive heads that use “quantum mechanical effects” will stop working!!!
Same with evolution, of course, the deeper we dig, the more interesting and complicated it gets. A whole lot of the “knowledge” of 1968 is now known to be wrong: the one to one mapping of genes to proteins for instance. It’s WAAAAAY more complicated than that it turns out....
Despite all that change at the foundations (or at least in the first or second of many sub-basements!) , Darwin’s Dangerous Idea is still “true” too, just as apples are still falling DOWN despite general relativity, string theory, M-Branes!
But that would be beyond our reach to know, which is the whole problem. I'm not an anti-Creationist, I just don't know, and I think it's going to be a long time before we know.
Were here, life is extremely complex, possibly complex beyond human comprehension. This is what I know.
I just get aggravated when people say they "know" when in fact they don't know. This occurs on both sides of the back-and-forth.
As to "junk DNA", if IIRC, the argument is not that there is no junk DNA, but rather that there are significant portions of "junk DNA" that are not junk after all.
The Creos have their God of the Gaps.
The Evos have their Junk of the Gaps.
Divine intervention in the evolutionary process. Phew, that’s resolved.
Well, he did. I was there, even if you weren’t. It was in the 1980s, not the 1970s. He had just written “Diseases from Space,” and “Evolution from Space.”
You don’t have to believe it if you don’t want to. I really don’t give a rat’s hind end what you believe. That’s your choice.
But it all happened, exactly as I described.
Cut and paste error on #42. Meant to ping you to my reply to GGG.
What they do NOT believe in, but are not conversant or knowledgeable about the subject enough to say correctly; is the common descent of species.
Can you show me a shred of biblical evidence God made man over billions of years from a single celled organism that appeared in a swamp via evolution?
As opposed to how He told us He made us, in His image, etc.
Where is there a shred of biblical evidence that God determined that protons and electrons would attract each other?
Where is there a shred of biblical evidence that the Earth circles the Sun?
Please do not take this as a personal attack, since I do not know you and have nothing against you personally. It is rather my skeptical, somewhat weary response to a predictable line of lame reasoning that I have come to expect from the die-hard evolutionists.
No, God doesn’t talk to me, any more than fossils do.
Deny, if you dare, that evolutionary scientists have for decades, with supreme arrogance, labeled any dissenting voices as cranks, only to discover that they needed to modify their own theories in light of new discoveries. It’s easy to come up with a crappy theory that is constantly band-aided when it comes up short. After all, that’s what your evolutionist colleagues accuse the creationists of doing (I make no claim to be a “creation-scientist,” either, whatever that is.)
BTW, I didn’t start off disbelieving evolution. I was raised a mainstream Presbyterian, not a Baptist or a fundamentalist. I still don’t know if God created everything in six days, but the implausibility of chance resulting in what I see around me required too big a leap of faith. It just became too difficult to deny that the Darwinian emperor had no clothes.
And yes, they did “lie.” Just as the hot-air cultists are doing today, it is the evolutionists who have been enshrining vast bodies of theory as though they are some sort of gospel from on high. They are teaching it as fact, “more compelling than the THEORY that the earth revolves around the sun,” to quote a previous post. For God’s sake, wake up. Most of my stalwart evolutionist friends are a very small part of the academy. Most scholars tend to comparmentalize, seeing no need to deny either the Bible or evolution.
Nobody outside your own pitifully small mutual admiration society believes you anymore.
Here’s a good relatively nontechnical description of ways that “evolution as we know it” can result in fast (sometimes!) and large changes in phenotype:
“When Evolution is Revolution - origins of innovation”
Jim Crutchfield
>enshrining vast bodies of theory
the beauty of science is that theory DOESN’T get “enshrined” at least not for long. When it’s refuted by experiment (and sometimes by better theory) it gets replaced. Of course that’s the perfect model, because scientists are human, sometimes you have to wait for the current crop of “lead bulls” to die off before the new paradigm prevails, See Thomas Kuhn’s http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_Revolutions for a good overview of THAT dynamic!) but usually not.
Thank you for the brief refresher course in Kuhn. Best wishes, etc.
Actually, the Evos predicted that 97% of our DNA is “junk”/fossil leftovers from millions of years of evolution. Creationists predicted that our Designer-God would not be so wasteful and inefficient as to create a genome that is almost completely comprised of useless/unused DNA. As it turns out the Evos were dead wrong, and the creationist were spot-on, as Project ENCODE has recently discovered that our DNA is at least 93% functional, and that %-age will likely go up to 100% with futher study.
Well, since you’ve now called me a liar twice, there doesn’t seem to be too much else to discuss, does there?
I will only say, in parting, since I do not suffer being called a liar in a forum where I can’t call for satisfaction, that evolution is hardly the sole possession of biologists. Perhaps it seems so because modern biology NEEDS evolution so. Without evolution, biology degrades into mere taxonomy. If your attack on astrophysics is your defense of evolution, then your words speak for themselves.
Your knowledge of my study of evolution will remain at about zero, because I really don’t have time to try to understand people who are so much smarter than I am (or who at least think they are). I find your analogy regarding germ theory and the analysis of humors to be sophomoric and irrelevant at best. You can’t claim that evolutionary aspects of theories in palentology, astrophysics, climatology, and other disciplines as evidence for evolution in one setting and then deride them as the products of, yes, here it comes again, cranks in another setting and expect to retain any credibility.
Now, you are free once again to respond by calling me a liar, should you choose.
But I won’t be listening. I have meaningful work to do.
Enjoy your time in front of the mirror.
i’ve talked with many evolutionary theorists and evolutionary bio-chemists over the years and i’ve never met one who thought that so called “junk DNA” was likely to turn out to be in the main entirely functionless. There were/are various theories on what the functions might be: gene regulation, raw material for further evolution, physical spacing for more efficient enzymatic action, etc.
The overarching theory of Parsimony alone would indicate the likelihood of that.
Some of the theories kicking around have been confirmed, some refuted, and some are still open. No doubt there are additional functions in the non-coding regions (the more accurate term) that nobody has guessed yet. Why is this a problem? Seems to me to be typical science at the cutting edge.
“Deny, if you dare, that evolutionary scientists have for decades, with supreme arrogance, labeled any dissenting voices as cranks, only to discover that they needed to modify their own theories in light of new discoveries.”
You call it arrogance when science incorporates new findings and research and modifies theories and understanding when such information becomes available?
That’s what science IS, my friend.
What is arrogant is not bothering to understand that science is not static, and to trying to exploit that there are always new findings that increase the scientific body of knowledge as somehow being a fatal flaw in scientific endeavors.
Science is humble.
And your claim is that, upon hearing these notions of Hoyle's at the Rice lecture, you rejected the theory of evolution. Which, of course, suggests that you also accepted as credible Hoyle's panspermia alternatives.
Hoyle's panspermia alternatives include the following:
1. The basic features of life, such as enzymes, tRNA, histones, and the genetic code, are extraterrestrial in origin.I take it this represents a synopsis of your beliefs regarding the appearance and development of life on earth. Correct?2. Presently extant genes were already present in the metazoans that invaded the Earth 570 million years ago at the beginning of the Cambrian Era, "making the subsequent story of terrestrial evolution into one in which genes have been called into operation as ecological conditions permitted them to be so."
3. Particles from space less than 100 µm could contain micro-organisms, eggs, sperm of lower animals, viruses, and viroids, which add genes to the gene pool of the Earth. And,
4. Multiple extraterrestrial invasions of biological materials have seeded earth with genetic variations.
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