Posted on 05/17/2004 12:55:05 PM PDT by Michael_Michaelangelo
And it never will be observed, outside of vampire movies. All there is and all there ever was is evolution in tiny steps, from one generation to the next. Over a long enough span of time, comparing an early ancestor to a descendant very much later, a great many changes will be seen to have occurred. That's what creationists call "macro evolution" and they make a big fuss over it as if it were something other than plain ol' vanilla evolution.
Thanks. Interesting. More little motors.
Think of a similar process: the way languages change over time. French, Italian, Spanish and Romanian are all derived from Latin. In a sense, these transitions were "observed", because there are a few written records surviving.
Now think of the divergence of English, Russian, Farsi, Greek, Hindi, etc etc from Proto-Indo-European. There is no sense in which this was "observed" by anyone, yet no linguist has doubted it for the last 200 years.
Part of the evidence for Proto-Indo-European is similar to that for evolution: there are simply too many shared traits that *always* point to the same genetic tree.
This phrase jumped out at me. Is there a different sort of biology in the East? I'm not aware of any such, at least since Stalin decreed Lysenkoism to be true (since it agreed with his "scripture", the Communist writings of Marx and Lenin) and sending the Darwinists to the Gulag.
Biology as taught in the Islamic countries is generally Creationist. (Often it seems that Islamic science has retreated since the thirteenth century.)
From ARN: Design theory—also called design or the design argument—is the view that nature shows tangible signs of having been designed by a preexisting intelligence. It has been around, in one form or another, since the time of ancient Greece.
From the IDEA website: Intelligent design is a scientific theory which has its roots in information theory and observations about intelligent action. Intelligent design theory makes inferences based upon observations about the types of complexity that can be produced by the action of intelligent agents vs. the types of information that can be produced through purely natural processes to infer that life was designed by an intelligence. It makes no statements about the identity of the intelligent designer, but merely says that intelligent action was involved at some points with the origins of various aspects of biological life.
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From Dr. Jonathan Wells:
"The scientific validity of ID depends on empirical findings and the logic of the design inference. In my opinion, there is already enough evidence to warrant the conclusions that (a) some features of the world are designed, and (b) Darwinian evolution is false. The truth of ID does not depend on its scientific fruitfulness, and nowhere do I claim that my hypothesis bears on the truth of ID or the falsity of Darwinism. All I maintain is that my hypothesis (and others currently being generated within an ID framework) may help to demonstrate the fruitfulness of ID in guiding scientific research."
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If you have any questions for Dr. Wells, he is answering them here:
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