With this kind of constant, drastic "evolution" of theory you have to admire those who continue to place all of their faith in science. God bless 'em!
Spoor don't know scat.
I was wondering the same thing! Then I saw this article this morning and felt all warm and fuzzy again:
Is there nothing left we can rely on with any degree of certainty?
Taxes.
Now that you mention it, yes...
1 In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.
2 Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters... Genesis 1ff
Is there something you think this disproves? The theory of natural selection is that up to a dizzying number of variants co-exist, and that the best fitted one survives. This does take time, and the variants will coexist. The debate I'm hearing is whether or not scientists have been correct in squeezing the several variants into one species, not whether no member of the species is ancestral to man.
If you're thinking there's a chink made in the theory of evolution, you should know that "ape-men" have never been presented as a proof of evolution. To the exact opposite, the need for a "missing link" has almost been mythologized. What this shows is that there were a plethora of organisms in that scary grey zone between human appearance and animals, whereas even evolutionary biologists have been stuck in a paradigm of expecting human lineage to somehow be pristine of the fuzziness that exists in the rest of phylogeny.
By the way, I believe the "spark" of humanity will not be something detectable in paleobiology: Adam looked no different than the mud he was created from, except that he had the breath of God within him.
Yes, you can rely on super-naturalists to migrate to any science thread.
In science? No. Every scientist knows that part of the deal is that any theory can be overturned, altered, amended, revised etc. based on new evidence. The TOE is no exception.
Unlikely.
and now our ancestors may not have all been as ape-like as we once thought?
Where do you see *that* in the above article? You might want to reread it.
Is there nothing left we can rely on with any degree of certainty?
Yes -- you can rely on science giving the best analysis of the mountains of currently available evidence, as science will always adjust itself to match what the evidence indicates. Usually these are small adjustments, as in the above article (contrary to those here who try to falsely portray it as some sort of "we were all wrong before"). Even once in a very long while there are large adjustments, but even these are usually extensions to existing theory, not replacements. For example, Relativity extended Newtonian physics to the realm of velocities close to the speed of light, but Newtonian physics was not "overturned" -- it's still perfectly valid for the vast majority of physical analysis.
On the other hand, we have the supernaturalists who say, "if all the evidence indicates something other than what we have in this ancient book, we will ignore the evidence."
With this kind of constant, drastic "evolution" of theory you have to admire those who continue to place all of their faith in science.
Your impressions of "constant, drastic" change in the theory of evolution is grossly unfounded. All of the principles that Darwin laid out for his theory in 1859 are still standing. What has changed is details like whether species X descended from species A or B, where A and B are themsleves very closely related.
God bless 'em!
Why thank you.
Those of us in science know that we NEVER have all the answers. We also tend to avoid coming right out and saying something without adding qualifiers. For instance, I might say "The resultant increase in reporter activity COULD result from reason X; an ALTERNATIVE explanation is that..."
My first published paper contradicted the results of a fairly prominent scientist in my field. In fact, scientists contradict each other all the time.
Faith isn't a topic that comes up a lot in scientific circles. Unless, of course, it is the scientist praying, "Please, God, let this experiment work."