Finally, a non-infantile response.
Don't lie, it doesn't become you. You received several responses which dealt directly with the merits of your claim.
I tempted to grant you your claim just in gratitude for an evolutionist willing to engage in the conversation at a post-pubescent level.
Don't get snotty, son. If you want a conversation beyond a "post-pubescent level", then you would be advised to not START your topic by being childishly sarcastic, as you were when you wrote:
Marx and Freud's disciples would have marshalled impressive defenses of their Prophets during the heady days of their dominance. Darwin is still in his heyday. But I'm sure it's oh-so-different in this case. Yes, that's right, it's different with Darwin..Frankly, now I'm sorry I wasted my time on you. You don't deserve it. Instead of taking my straightforward response as an opportunity to leave aside your schoolyard asides and just discuss a topic on its merits, you couldn't resist starting out your reply with an insulting broadside against "evolutionists"
If you get abuse, you've earned it.
But I would be remiss if I didn't point out that Marxists and Freudians would have made exactly the same claim as you are making here.
"Would have"? If what?
As I explained in a previous thread, no-one is in a position to speak authoritatively to the extent of the alleged evidence for evolution, because it exists in a host of very specialized fields which require very parochial knowledge in order for one truly to decide for oneself about the state of the evidence.
This is a really lame attempt to cast doubt on the strength of the evidence and statements about its scope and validity. If you want to take issue with any particular piece of evidence, feel free, but this kind of attempt to raise a vague question about the evidence on the whole is just pitiful.
First, you're grossly misrepresenting the case when you employ half a dozen overblown qualifiers in an attempt to make it sound as if it's nearly impossible for any person to verify any point of evidence without, say, thirty years of expertise. Horse manure. Most of the evidence for evolution is very accessible with just an ordinary college education and some brushing up on a few specialized topics.
Second, you're "forgetting" about one of the biggest strengths of science -- its repeatability requirement. All evidence and research results, etc., must be verifiable by independent peers in the field. Almost *nothing* gets cataloged, described, or published without being checked and doublechecked and re-examined by countless other specialists in the appropriate field.
So the kind of "maybe someone's misrepresenting the state of the evidence, who could tell?" argument you're trying to make here falls on its silly face when you realize that it would require a vast conspiracy by all the researchers who have examined each particular piece of evidence. Uh huh. Sure.
The same goes for assessments of the "big picture" summary of the evidence in a particular field. And the same goes for the "biggest picture" summary drawing together findings across all fields. It has all been checked and rechecked countless times by the people most qualified to do so.
So when you try to imply that maybe vast subcollections of the totality of the evidence for evolution might somehow all be an "oopsy" that got overlooked because no one's in a position to doublecheck it, you're just being ridiculous.
So one must make an argument from authority, taking it on faith that those individuals who are truly in a position to speak to the nature of the evidence in the various scientific fields attest that the preponderance of the evidence is positive for evolution.
This whole paragraph deflates when you realize that it's not a matter of "individuals". There are many, many checks and balances built into these kinds of scientific assessments, and thus it ends up not being a matter of having to accept the "authority" of one "individual", it's a matter of having good reason to trust the process by which many eyes and minds cross-check findings and kick them around in every conceivable way to rule out potential errors.
FURTHERMORE, skeptics are always welcome to take a stab at finding any flaws they think might be there -- and do on a regular basis. This again provides yet another cross-check that increases confidence in the validity of the evidence.
If the body of evidence for evolution was a questionable as you try to imply, before long one of these skeptics would have homed in on one of the questionable things, spotted the problem, and issued a press conference or whatever blowing the lid off the "evolution fraud" you darkly imply might be hidden by the (allegedly) esoteric nature of the evidence. The "ID" folks would certainly have done so by now if they had found such a thing. And yet, there's a notable lack of such announcements. (Yes, I know creationists make such "announcements" on a regular basis, but to date their examples have been laughable examples of creationist misunderstanding or misrepresentation, rather than actual examples of "uncovered error".)
Go verify a representative sampling of the evidence yourself, if you're all that paranoid about its quality. Many people have, you won't be the first one.
What you find, however, is that often scientists are far more confident about the support evolution receives from the scientific fields in which they are not experts than the one to which they are qualified to speak.
This is utterly and completely false. Did you make it up, or parrot it from some creationist pamphlet?
Anyway, for anyone to claim that the evidence for evolution is overwhelming is silly.
Nonsense. The evidence for evolution *is* overwhelming. Hell, just the portion of the evidence accessible to proper examination and verification by someone with a couple courses in Biology and pre-college math is *still* overwhelming.
So stop the hand-waving, eh? You just look ridiculous.
At best you are saying that you take it on faith, based on authority and consensus, that this is true. Right now.
Horse manure, son. I myself have enough knowledge of the relevant fields to personally verify a large fraction of it, and have done so, and I'm by no means the only "evolutionist" who has done so. Go peddle your nonsense elsewhere.
Hmm... that's odd, you'd think they'd have shown up in my web browser then.
...childishly sarcastic...
I'm sorry if the distinction between being didactically sarcastic and childishly sarcastic is lost on you.
...you couldn't resist starting out your reply with an insulting broadside against "evolutionists".
I thought I was dealing with Ichneumon chordatum. My mistake. Given the dripping contempt every one of you folks starts out with, this is perhaps a little rich, don't you think?
Most of the evidence for evolution is very accessible with just an ordinary college education and some brushing up on a few specialized topics.
Interesting. It's odd how many times you Darwinists reject any criticism of evolution, even when it is made by a practicising, published, scientist with perfectly good "secular" credentials because, say, this scientist is a biochemist but he/she is criticizing something from the field of genetics. All of a suddden you have to be an expert in the precise field in question to disagree, but you can just have a B.A. from SUNY Bumbleshoot if you agree? Ya, whatever pal. Pick one position and get back to me.
Second, you're "forgetting" about one of the biggest strengths of science -- its repeatability requirement. All evidence and research results, etc., must be verifiable by independent peers in the field.
Too funny. It's odd how human beings in the business world are prone to self-serving corruption. And in government. And in the arts. And labor. And everywhere. Oh, except in science where they are sanctified and operate out of pure motives, beyond corruption, because the blessed process.
Anyone who has spent any time in academia -- as have I -- knows full well that academics are as self-serving as anyone. Academic publications exist for one reason: to get academics published. I have a very close relative who has been a professor all his life. He has the utmost integrity. Yet even when he is asked to peer review an article in which he is the most qualified, he is still frequently not sufficiently familiar with every single area in which the writer is writing, and between gradin exams, doing his own lectures, doing his own research, pursuing his next round of funding, he doesn't have time to be personally validating every single claim. And this isn't even in the harder sciences.
Go look in a random journal and pick a random article. Figure out how many people are truly qualified to validate every claim made in that article. And they figure out how many are truly motivated. And if you find someone who has actually rejected numerous publications because of their quality, find out how many of his publications have suddenly encountered the same scrutiny? This whole process has been well documented. You scratch my back, etc...
As I explained in a previous post, most evolution science is done within a closed loop of true believers and so new theses are never examined from a truly critical point of view. I have read numerous publications where obvious objections are never even addressed. So all of this body of "science" which is adduced as evidence of evolution is essentially part of an incestuous body of work which may be iternally coherent for evolution science, but can hardly be summoned as evidence for evolution against non-evolutionary theories.
As I discovered in a previous thread, evolutionists assume evolution, hence every biological entity that is discovered is considered to be evidence of evolution because we know that it got to be the way it did by evolution, ergo, it is evidence of evolution. So all of nature is evidence of evolution! Excellent science, Sherlock.