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To: stanz
This group is making 3 specific claims. If science is against them it should be easy to shoot them down.

1 According to the theory of evolution a mutation must be immediately beneficial to survive through selection. But many phenomena explained by evolution (for example the eye) involve so many, small immediately detrimental mutations that only give a long-term beneficial effect.
2 There is no fossil evidence to indicate transitional forms between, for example, fish and land animals or apes and humans.
3 Evolution assumes too many extremely improbably events occurring over too short a span of time.

If the Dean had a backbone he'd say let there be debate. Actually I like and agree with his claim that "evolution had a rather minor spot in medical education."

118 posted on 11/19/2003 7:53:33 PM PST by Tribune7 (It's not like he let his secretary drown in his car or something.)
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To: Tribune7
According to the theory of evolution a mutation must be immediately beneficial to survive through selection.

Evolutionary theory proposes no such thing. Perhaps people decline to debate with people who continually misstate what evolutionary theory actually proposes. Creationists often do not have the courtesy to state evolutionary theory correctly.

120 posted on 11/19/2003 8:32:25 PM PST by Doctor Stochastic (Vegetabilisch = chaotisch is der Charakter der Modernen. - Friedrich Schlegel)
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To: Tribune7
This group is making 3 specific claims. If science is against them it should be easy to shoot them down.

What an odd locution. Science is not "against" anything. All these claims could be true, if enough evidence piles up to countervail current thinking on the subject, and science will never "shoot them down" as it's not equipped to do so. They will always remain a possibility. Any or all of them might even prove true, and the effect on science will be a great deal less dramatic than you are imagining.

But many phenomena explained by evolution (for example the eye) involve so many, small immediately detrimental mutations that only give a long-term beneficial effect.

You can only really make this case--if at all--for the micro-tools of evolution: ribosomes, tRNA, transcriptase & such. It is tiresome beyond belief that this argument continues to crop up in the face of myriad very primitive, poorly working examples of, for example, eyes--barely different from the skin or antenna sensors they evolved from, that still benefit their users enough to provide incremental survival advantages.

2 There is no fossil evidence to indicate transitional forms between, for example, fish and land animals or apes and humans.

Horse Manure. There are periods of drought in the fossil record, of no more particular interest than that there are transitional events implied by the Hartzsprung-Russell diagram for which no actual example stars have been observed. However, your statement is a vast over-reach of the feeble case that can be made.

3 Evolution assumes too many extremely improbably events occurring over too short a span of time.

You (and anyone else) have no way of knowing how probable, or improbable these events were, because you don't know how any of them happened with sufficient accuity to do the math.

128 posted on 11/20/2003 1:31:07 AM PST by donh
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