Professor Dumped Over Evolution Beliefs

Table 3-1. Alternative Views of metazoan phylogeny

Source	Animalia?	Early Offshoots?	Bilateria>	Protostomes/Deuterosomes?	Arthropoda?	Other Classes?
Nursall	N	N/A	N	N	Y	M
Barnes et al (88)	N	Y	Y	D	N	L
Margulis & Schwartz	Y	Y	Y	D	Y	MA
Wilmer (90)	N	Y	N	D	N	L
Barnes (87)	Y	Y	Y	P+D	Y	M
Schram (91)	Y	Y	Y	D	Y	MA
Backeljau et al (93)	Y	Y	Y	D	Y	MA
Conway Morris (93)	Y	Y	Y	P+D	Y	A
Raff et al (94)	Y	Y	Y	P+D	Y	LM
Nielsen (95)	Y	Y*	Y	P+D	Y	MA

Notes:
Y* - yes for Cnidaria, Pacozoa, but no for Ctenrophora
D, P - Deutrostome monophyly, protostome monophyly
L, M, A - Lophophorates; a Mollusc/Annelid/Arthropod group; Aschelminthes.

From: Wallace Arthur, 'Animal Body Plans, 1997, page 58.

As the above abundantly shows, the classification of species, the 'evolutionary tree' which evolutionists constantly claim is a strong proof of evolution, cannot be agreed on amongst evolutionists themselves (the author of the book, an evolutionist himself - has his own cladistic analysis). This is just regarding the Cambrian phyla, not the whole tree!

Of course, we should not be too harsh on the evolutionists since they are trying to make so much from so little evidence. The evidence for the Cambrian phyla is not even from bones, but almost all of it is from impressions on rocks. In addition some of the phyla have clearly dissappeared so they cannot 'cheat' in classifying them by claiming that they are the substantially the same as current organisms.

Theories are never "proved".

If theories are never 'proved' then evolution cannot be a fact. When we speak of facts, we mean proven facts. Thanks for agreeing with what I have been saying for some two years! Your skull may have been pretty thick, but the truth seems to finally have penetrated through it!

The alternative explanation is that the Creator changed some species for his own reasons and made all the functions work well together.

Creationists cannot prove that any species were changed by a Creator. No one has seen a single species being created.

As the first person to gratuitously bring up Hitler, you are subject to Godwin's Law and thus automatically lose your argument.

Don't forget the Stalin was the most virulent anti-Darwinist around. He had the Darwinists executed. Most Creationists do not admit to wanting this.

Man, this is some truce! But whatcha gonna do? Crazy people are crazy all day long, every day of the week. Lunacy never sleeps! So sanity must always be vigilent. Meanwhile, let's keep this blue barf bag handy:

Ok, we didn't start it. Some flaming idiot on the creationoid side -- but I repeat myself -- has used the "H" word. This requires my well-used response:

Hitler was actually a creationist:

"For it was by the Will of God that men were made of a certain bodily shape, were given their natures and their faculties. Whoever destroys His work wages war against God's Creation and God's Will."
-- Adolph Hitler, creationist
Source: Book 2, Chapter 10, Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler.
Discussed at Adolf Hitler's Religion.

I have more to say on this topic, and I will if necessary, but there's a war out there which is distracting me.

You have to prove your theory true. I do not have to prove it false.

Yes, the burden of proof is on the new idea (evo) and the more elaborate explanation (evo). It makes sense that the theory necessarily must evolve into a fact to silence those who demand proof. I thought facts needed proof but I guess they don't.

False. Actually Natural History Museum gives as the characteristics of mammals: milk production, hair or fur, warm bloodedness, and live birth. None of these can be normally determined from fossils. In addition if we did not have live specimens we would not know that the above definition is false. The platypus is a mammal and produces milk and has mammary glands but it lays eggs. So no, fossils cannot give us evidence that an animal is a mammal. While it may be true that all mammals living have three earbones and this can be found in fossils, there is no NECESSARY CONNECTION between it and mammary glands. Further, such a feature cannot show us how the various unique features of mammals developed in a gradual manner as evolution postulates. So basically your post is totally false and just a bunch of rhetorical nonsense.

You’re accusing me of rhetorical nonsense? You totally ignored the points I made and conveniently left out the defining skeletal characteristics of mammals in your “definition”. If “live birth” is a characteristic feature of mammals, why is the platypus included? Sure, it is a feature of two of the modern subclasses (and thus most living mammals), but it is not a characteristic feature of the Class Mammalia. If your website claims this then they’re misleading you. Also, there are other groups of animals that reproduce through live birth. Warm-bloodedness is also a feature of birds, so the presence of that does not ensure that your specimen is a mammal. The major characteristic features of mammals are lactation, fur/hair, three-ear bones, dentary jaw and dentary-squamosal jaw joint. These features are found in no other group and are found in all mammals. Given that any modern skeleton possessing this jaw and ear type is invariably mammalian, never anything else, the obvious sound conclusion is that any fossil found possessing them is also mammalian, especially when their other skeletal features are consistent with the mammalian skeleton. While you would have a case if warm-bloodedness and live birth were preserved in the fossil record given their lack of confinement to mammals, this does not apply to the skeletal features in question. There are many other skeletal features also that are mammalian, such as heterodonty, thoracic ribs, premaxillal incisors etc. that can place an animal in the mammals or mammalian subtaxa. As I said before, if you don’t want to draw the obvious sensible conclusion given the evidence, suit yourself.

Man, this is some truce! But whatcha gonna do? Crazy people are crazy all day long, every day of the week. Lunacy never sleeps! So sanity must always be vigilent. Meanwhile, let's keep this blue barf bag handy:

Do what Gore asks...specifically refute his points. You are just proving his "personal attack" assertion correct with your continual stupid posts with the blue bag. Surely those on your side of the debate must believe in the principle "seeing is believing" .

Do what Gore asks...specifically refute his points.

... And every thread is every other thread, over and over forever. Sooner or later, everyone just tunes him out. Let him bludgeon with ignorance and amnesia, an illustration of Creation Science at work.

Do what Gore asks...specifically refute his points.

You're relatively new here. Gore has been around for more than two years. His "points" have been refuted over and over again. He doesn't care. He just repeats his "points," endlessly, and when no one bothers to respond (knowing that such responses are a waste of time) gore then claims that his points are so powerful that no one dares to take him on. Does he believe such claims? Maybe. Who knows? Who cares? It's strange, but it sometimes his approach appeals to newbies, who haven't experienced the long history of these threads to provide the necessary background.

Anyway, you have correctly observed that hardly anyone responds to Gore; but it's not because of the invincibility of his arguments. I'm not responding for the same reason that I'm going to debate the shape of the earth, day after day, with a determined flat-earther. And my silence doesn't "prove" that the earth is flat. If you find his "points" persusasive, that's up to you. The world of science doesn't pay any attention to creationism anyway -- except when they try coercive politics to force their views into the schools.

Have not been following the discussion all the way

Well, I'll forgo replying until you catch up, then.

placemarker

"It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. These laws, taken in the largest sense, being Growth with Reproduction; Inheritance which is almost implied by reproduction; Variability from the indirect and direct action of the external conditions of life, and from use and disuse;. a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a consequence to Natural Selection, entailing Divergence of Character and the Extinction of less-improved forms. Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows evolution."

This is a doctored quote-- it includes at least one word Darwin didn't write, and omits a crucial sentence he did write. I pointed this out to you on another thread. Why are you still using the false version?

First off, thank you very much for your thoughtful post. Especially since we are discussing religous matters, and thus something deeply personal, I will try extra hard to keep things polite and respectful. I may disagree with your religious beliefs, but I FULLY respect your faith.

In my opinion, when one only considers the scientific evidences for origins, agnosticism is the only intellectual honest position available.

I suppose I would agree with this. I do know of many excellent scientists and others who accept scientific evidence for origins who have a deep faith in God, but who use spiritual 'evidence' for that basis. They accept scientific explanations for HOW God created the world, but maintain, based on their own faith, that God was the original creative force who used evolution/Big Bang/etc. as his/her/its means for that creation. You're right that no one has all knowledge of the universe, nor are we likely to ever have that. There should be room for both faith in God and scientific inquiry.

Believers of the Bible are forced to rely on historical evidences for proof of their faith

I take it that you rely on historical (prophecy) proofs as a basis for your faith. I respect that, but would question why it is necessary? Do you believe in God because Daniel made a vague pronouncement thousands of years ago or because you have felt God's influence in your own life today?

Nostradamus also made predictions that have been shown to be true, at least with a certain amount of interpretation. My point here is that if you are looking hard enough for something, you are likely to find it regardless of whether it was there or not to begin with. This is a perrenial problem in science, which we must constantly guard against in our research. Prophecies can be made vague enough that they can surely come true regardless of what actually transpires. Your own experiences and your personal relationship with God is not so sucesptible to interpretation.

In your post you said that the Bible cannot be verified by scientific investigation. I fully agree with you here, and am inherently suspiscious of anyone who claims to have proven the existence of God logically or scientifically. Newton tried to do precisely that by applying logic and math to the patterns he saw in the prophecies until they worked. I have not read the million or so pages I am told he wrote on the subject, but suspect that he again searched hard enough that he found his answer, even if he had to create it in the process. Descartes tried to do the same thing when he attempted to go from "I think, therefor I am." to prove the existence of a benevalent deity. His work was a landmark in philosophy because of his attempt to reduce human perception to its most basic level and use logic to build a stable philosophical framework from scratch. The method was enthusiastically adopted, but the framework he came up with was rapidly discarded and is given little credence in philosophical circles today.

Most Biblical students who consider the text in its entirety, take the text literally unless the text clearly sets up the context as allegorical.

I really must disagree with you here. The majority of Christians I know, including some who are VERY conservative in their views on religion, do not take the Bible as literally true. They find truth in the lessons it teaches and the relationship they establish through its message to God. The precise details are unimportant in the face of its overall message. My own mother, who has worked in the church for years and studied the Bible as a hobby is currently in seminary to become a pastor. She does not take the Bible as literally true.

I respect your belief, but you must realize that you must challenge not only biology to come to terms with a literal Biblical interpretation, but physics, mathematics, geology, astronomy, anthropology, and a hundred other subdisciplines. Alternatively, you can set your belief above any scientific reasoning process, which I fully respect. In that case, though, there is little point in arguing with me about scientific minutiae which you could never reconcile with your faith anyway. My beef with creationism is not about faith in God. It is entirely to do with the pseudo-scientific arguments I see posted so often.

Your point about our limited, linear perception of time is true, but I fail to see how that resolves the science/religion conflict. I have always thought that a literal interpretation of the Bible requires a fairly linear perception of God.

Thanks again for your post, and I look forward to reading your response and continuing this discussion.

So now you're admitting the entire paradigm for the origin of life was DRASTICALLY wrong - but we're supposed to believe all your evidence for evolution?

WHEN did I say ANYTHING was drastically wrong? How does the link I provided maodify ANY of the central ideas of evolution? Your argument is the classic "It has been changed from it's original formula, therefor it can't be true." category. We've told you a hundred times, THAT'S NOT HOW SCIENCE WORKS! You generate a theoretical framework that can be falsified and then change or abandon it as observation warrants. The details of life's early origins are by no means set in stone, nor are they likely to be EVER. Science is not dogmatic. It's a system of carefully reasoned and tested educated guesses, but I'll take biology's educated guesses over your absolute truths any day!

As Gore3000 continues to post this same doctored quote, one can only assume that he (or she as the case may be) is lying intentionally rather than being misinformed. Intentional misquoting would seem to be a favorite tactic of the Creationists.

As Gore3000 has been caught yet again doctoring quotes, there is no reason to consider anything he (or she as the case may be) posts to be reliable. One might have thought that the other Creationists would have corrected his misquotes, but that would be asking too much of them.

anti-blue flatulence™ placemarker

The g3k version, with corrections:

"It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. These laws, taken in the largest sense, being Growth with Reproduction; Inheritance which is almost implied by reproduction; Variability from the indirect and direct action of the external conditions of life, and from use and disuse;. a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a consequence to Natural Selection, entailing Divergence of Character and the Extinction of less-improved forms. Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows ~~evolution~~. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved."

Source: HERE (the last paragraph).