Not necessarily - as long as it's done without being a personal attack.
Posted on 11/16/2014 8:04:49 AM PST by SeekAndFind
Charles Darwin worried about a possible hole in his theory of evolution, but some American scientists may just have plugged it. For about a billion years after the dawn of life on Earth, organisms didn't evolve all that much.
Then about 600 million years ago came the "Cambrian explosion." Everything changed relatively quickly, with all kinds of plants and animals emerging—which doesn't quite seem to fit with Darwin's theory of slow change, hence "Darwin's dilemma." Now, within a few days of each other, two new studies have appeared that could explain the shift, ABC News reports.
One, by scientists at Yale and the Georgia Institute of Technology, suggests that oxygen levels may have been far less plentiful in the atmosphere prior to the Cambrian explosion than experts had thought.
The air may only have been .1% oxygen, which couldn't sustain today's complex organisms, indicating a shift had to happen before the "explosion" could take place.
In a separate study, a University of Texas professor explains where that oxygen burst may have come from: a major tectonic shift. Based on geological evidence, Ian Dalziel believes what is now North America remained attached to the supercontinent Gondwanaland until the early Cambrian period, in contrast with current belief, which has the separation occurring earlier.
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
Not necessarily - as long as it's done without being a personal attack.
there aren’t any ‘hard facts’ until more scientific work is done. that’s how things in science usually work.
Of course, over the past 150 years many, many thousands of fossils have been excavated, analyzed & preserved for science.
Without exception, they confirm Darwin's evolution predictions -- all fit into a "tree of life" pointing back to common ancestors.
And the same is true of now hundreds of thousands of species' DNA which has been analyzed for evidence of common ancestors.
But of course, you used the word "proved" and in science no theory is ever "proved".
Strictly speaking, a scientific theory is confirmed when tests intended to disprove it fail to do so.
That's just science, it's the way science works, and you can complain about it all you wish, FRiend, but you won't change that.
You also don't have to believe any of it.
Just don't pretend that your own beliefs are somehow "scientific".
Most all apes did die out.
I once heard that if you took every non-human great ape in the world, they would not fill a single football-sized stadium, while humans would fill 60,000 stadiums, filling another 1,000 every year.
The fact is, great-apes which survive today do so only in areas which were never densely inhabited by humans.
The article here does not tell us where they got the data suggesting a huge increase in oxygen levels, from .1% to something similar to today's 20%.
But oxygen levels would leave clues in various chemical processes, from magma to the amount of iron in sedimentary rocks.
The article should at least have mentioned where their data came from.
Could I do it until I need glasses?
Regardless of that Latin cognate, Paul wrote in Greek, and his word "gnosis" had nothing to do with science, but rather with "secret knowledge" such as was preached by, well, Gnostics.
So any claim that the Bible preaches against "science" is just itself false.
Of course Darwin never said "hundreds of millions" that is a ludicrous claim.
But here is a fact: in the past 150 years, when many, many thousands of fossils have been found, studied and preserved for science not one has ever been found to disprove evolution theory.
As for "transitional forms", the fact is that every fossil, without exception, is a "transitional form" between its ancestors and its descendants (if any).
So the evolutionary "tree of life" is chock-full of "transitional forms".
However, of all the millions of species which ever lived, the numbers of fossil species found so far is no more than 1%.
So, there are many links yet to be found.
The first DNA was 1 ... then later .....
Also, if everything is always survival of the fittest, then how does one explain symbiotic relationships? And in such relationships where both partners are dependent on one another for survival, which one came first?
You obviously wish to redefine "science" to suit your own purposes.
The fact is, you cannot have a confirmed scientific theory without first brainstorming and hypothesizing about what the answers might be.
Indeed, we can easily suppose that for every confirmed scientific theory, there are ten unconfirmed hypotheses and a hundred or a thousand brainstormed ideas.
This particular article reports on the results of new testing to determine ancient oxygen contents, leading to speculations on how that might have effected evolution of life on earth.
So, it's an interesting article, but certainly not an "article of faith".
But there is NONE that has passed muster. Let that sink in. NONE.
There have been many disparate claims that the linkage has been found, but they have all been disproven: I speak of MACRO EVOLUTION, not MICRO. Know the difference.
To summarize, there is no evidence in the fossil record that proves Darwin's theory.
Know what you are talking about before you speak.
Darwin himself noted the Cambrian explosion of life, and he supposed that more fossils would be found from previous ages.
In fact, some have been found -- Precambrian life beginning around 600 million years ago, or 60 million years before the Cambrian Explosion.
But these were all soft-bodied creatures, and so left fossils only under the rarest, most ideal conditions.
Further, the Cambrian Explosion extended for another 70 million years after the Cambrian itself.
So we are really looking at an "explosion" not of just 20 million years, but of 150 million years.
Far from claiming their findings as "settled science", the article clearly tells us we are dealing here with unconfirmed hypotheses.
Yes, in time these ideas may be confirmed by other scientists doing other work, or they may be disputed and even proved false.
Time will tell, in the mean time the findings and speculation are interesting, imho.
Nonsense, the scientific method is all about proposing and testing hypotheses concerning natural processes.
Making distinctions like "historical" and "observational" science is the work of anti-science folks like yourself.
It is impossible for me to imagine God creating the Universe without having us in mind as His end-product, and so making certain that both conditions and His natural laws worked together to make it happen.
Every serious scientist marvels at the amazing coincidences which resulted in us.
Well... of course they were amazing, but not "coincidences."
I remember, in the late 60s in school, being told about our “gill slits”. What a frickin’ joke.
Actually, those fetus tissues do look something like gills and do develop into gills in fish.
But in mammals they are reabsorbed as the fetus grows, becoming part of the pharynx, not the ears.
Science has never claimed to be perfect, or to get everything right the first time.
It does, however, have powerful mechanisms for correcting its mistakes, and this one was corrected long ago.
But they claim they do ... and yeah, it was ears ...
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