Posted on 12/18/2004 5:56:30 PM PST by PatrickHenry
Mark Twain never read Chick's tracts.
thanks for that quote.
Thanks, too bad ovrtaxt didn't respond. They said that they didn't believe in evolution because of all the things they knew about it. I was just wondering how much, in fact, they DID know.
Never has it been demonstrated that an isolated population will mutate into a different species that can no longer breed with the larger population.
Sure it has (2), (3), (4), (5), (6), etc. etc. etc.
Sure, organisms adapt and change behaviors and characteristics, but on a cellular level, the proliferation of species is not explained by mutation.
You don't say... (2), (3), (4), etc.
Even a demonstration of how this works with simple life forms would suffice.
Here you go. (2), (3), (4), etc. etc.
With all the gene splicing that's coming along, I would think that evolutionists could produce results in the lab that support their position.
You mean like this, for example? HARNESSING THE POWER OF EVOLUTION TO CREATE NANOSCALE BIOSENSORS. Or how about: Directed evolution of a fucosidase from a galactosidase by DNA shuffling and screening. Or maybe: Outrunning Nature: Directed Evolution of Superior Biocatalysts. And so on.
Contrary to the claims of anti-evolutionists, evolution *works*.
Not at all -- if you can provide sufficient evidence that my view is wrong or that yours is correct, I'll happily change my beliefs.
I do find it somewhat amusing that many here probably have decried how liberals immediately call conservaitves stupid and ignorant because we don`t share their social or political views and yet given the chance do the same.
What "social or political views" do you think are being discussed here? My post to you concerned your errors of *fact*, not social or political preferences.
Now I am a big boy and you can call me names all day long,it really does`nt matter to me and I don`t intend to reciprocate.
I didn't call you any names at all.
This is unfortunate because I suspect we probably agree on more things than we disagree on.
Probably so.
It is also obvious that I have offended you and for that I apologize.
You haven't offended me at all.
I do feel that the apparent need to lash out at me personally and attempt vilify me validates my point that there is a religious aspect to evolution.
How have I allegedly "vilified" you? And the closest I came to "lashing out at you personally" was to point out that you said a number of things which were mistaken, and I asked you if you wanted to reconsider your belief that you knew what you were talking about (on this subject, of course). I then asked you to put one of your beliefs to the test.
How in the heck does that qualify as "a religious aspect to evolution"?
Even if I had been much more aggressive in my reply, how would that demonstrate any "religious aspect" in my position? Is it really your contention that the only reason someone might get obnoxious is if they're doing so from a "religious" motivation? Are you sure you want to go there?
While it's true that science itself is usually (although not always) best performed dispassionately, that hardly means that someone defending a scientific position from attack is required to be inhumanly calm while doing so. Scientists are human too, and are just as likely as anyone else to get annoyed (or even downright p***ed off) when confronted with unfair attacks.
For example, let's turn the tables for a moment -- consider that no matter how calm and confident a theist might be in his faith, if someone barges into a theological discussion and smugly says something like, "you guys are idiots for not realizing that Adam couldn't have loaded Christ and the apostles onto his Ark...", we'd certainly understand if the theist was tempted to respond along the lines of, "listen, a**hole..."
I won`t pretend to know all details of PE but in general it theorizes that at certain times for unknown reasons evolution essentially ran amok.
No, sorry, it doesn't "theorize that". Honestly, even leaving the details aside, you shouldn't "pretend to know even the generalities of PE".
The reasons for fluctuations in the pace of evolution are hardly "unknown". They include population sizes, founder effects, genetic drift, extinctions, fortuitous genetic breakthroughs, varying selection pressures, and so on.
And even during periods of more rapid change evolution is not "running amok".
This results in a rapid evolutionary jump in species.
"Rapid" being a relative term, of course. It still doesn't happen overnight. We're still talking about hundreds of years, at the *very* least -- more often thousands.
This is to explain the lack of transitional species
Hardly, since there is no "lack of transitional species".
and why fossils of species suddenly appear in the rock strata.
No, that's most often caused by a species evolving in a limited geographic area (few biological events of any sort occur over entire regions of the planet), and then later its descendants spread further afield. In the lands migrated into, the new species will appear (in the fossil record) to have "suddenly appeared" there. In the same way, humans "suddenly appeared" in Australia tens of thousands of years ago, not because they were created there from scratch, but because that's when they spread to that continent from their afro-asian origins.
It is not an implausible theory but is still a theory.
Are you aware of how well supported a paradigm needs to be in science before it's considered "a theory"?
One final word.When I was in school dinosaurs were taught to be slow moving cold blooded reptiles.I suppose this was by comparing bone structure,tooth shape,etc and they compared to what we could observe in modern life.
Mostly the latter.
Now because of other similarities it is believed that birds evolved from dinosaurs. One problem was that birds are warm blooded so at least in part for this, dinosaurs are now believed to be perhaps warm blooded faster moving animals.
The cold-blooded view was held because of comparisons to other (still-living) reptiles, and before much other evidence was available on which to base a conclusion. But as evidence accumulated (and it has accumulated with exponential speed), it became apparent that the initial presumptions were mistaken, and today the issue of warm-blooded dinosaurs (at least some of them -- they're a very diverse family) is very well supported by many independent lines of evidence.
Science is always refining its knowledge and continually homing in closer and closer to the "right answers", in all their detailed complexity. I don't think anyone needs to apologize for that. I have no idea which is correct
As with most of science, the more recent views are more complete and accurate.
but my point is 30 years ago disagreement on the established scientific position was rejected as stupid or uneducated.
No, actually, it wasn't. Perhaps you'd care to try to support your assertion.
Fresh ideas and views are always welcome in science, just as long as they've not already been falsified by the evidence. Unfortunately for creationists, they're frequently trying to bring up attacks on evolution which have already been falsified -- some of which were falsified back in the EIGHTEENTH CENTURY, for pete's sake. So perhaps you'll begin to understand our exasperation whenever yet another person drops in eager to tell us "where we're wrong", using stuff that is *itself* flat wrong, and which was old the *first* forty or fifty times we heard it...
Now that scientific opinion has or is shifting from the earlier position any one disagreeing is once again declared stupid or uneducated.
Again, no, they're not.
I again won`t pretend to know all the evidence for the newer hypothesis but to some extent it seems to be to meld evolutionary theory.
Huh?
I simply don`t understand why on this issue any challenge to whatever the current thinking may be is rejected out of hand if it does not come from the position that evolution is an established fact beyond any question.
Look, feel free to challenge "current thinking" coming from some other position. There are no "dogma purity tests". But it *would* be nice if every once in a while the hordes who keep popping by to "disprove" evolution (or identify "holes" in it) knew what in the hell they were talking about. The number of people who *think* they understand enough about evolutionary biology to competently critique it, vastly exceeds the number of people who actually *do*. It's like watching a bunch of first-graders attempting to challenge the foundations of quantum physics. (And while I'm exaggerating there for effect, it's unfortunately not by much...)
I've got nothing with people asking questions, even challenging ones, as long as they're aware that they don't already have all the answers and might be able to learn something about the subject. But the arrogance of most anti-evolutionists is breathtaking. They seem to think they already have all the answers. They make sweeping, absolutist (but ironically incorrect) statements like, "Evolution cannot nor has been demonstrated by any means what so ever." Oh, wait, that was you, wasn't it?
Or they make insulting implications about the alleged unsavory motivations of people who believe in evolution, like, "Evolution is the religion of those who would elevate man above God." Oh, wait, that was you again, wasn't it?
I don`t know that this is a appropriate definition of science.
If it was actually practiced the way you think, you'd have a point, but since it isn't, you don't.
I don`t begrudge you or any others their opinions.
Nah, you just imply that we're stupid enough to believe something that "cannot nor has been demonstrated by any means what so ever", and that we do so because we want to "elevate man above God"... Gee, thanks.
I don`t care what you think of me personally.
I *know* what you think of *us* personally.
I do think we all deserve to be courteous to each other.
Then why don't you start?
LOL! Okay, this should be fun -- please present your evidence for your assertion(s).
Please support your claims that:
1. Evolution is not a science.
2. Evolution is a fraud.
3. Evolution is "perpetrated on us by virtually the same cast of characters" as "the global warming scare".
We'll wait.
Ooookay...
(and then we wonder why some people come to the conclusion that conservatives are scientifically illiterate?)
Just for giggles, though, 185JHP, feel free to explain what exactly about the DNA evidence is a "joke" and "jibberjabber". (Note: It would help if you could demonstrate that you actually *understand* some of the many kinds of DNA analysis sufficiently well to have an informed opinion about whether they might actually be "jibberjabber" or not...)
Actually, the key evidence is not simply that we "share" some DNA, but the exact *nature* of the matches and mismatches in all their detail.
The details of DNA comparisons are extremely indicative of an evolutionary origin, not a design origin. Or as a Freeper once said, not without justification, "if DNA is the result of design, the designer must have been drunk." There are a lot of features in DNA which no sane designer would have put in there, but which make perfect sense from an evolutionary standpoint. For just one example, there are genetic "scars" of ancient retroviral infections, shared across "kinds" which were allegedly separately created.
The DNA in each organism on Earth is a massive "book", which contains megabytes to gigabytes of information telling its biological story, including ancestral changes. Now that DNA sequencing has become routine on an industrial scale in the past few years, the amount of detail being learned from DNA has reached the proportions of a Niagara Falls of new knowledge about evolution.
Really? In what way, exactly?
Evolutionary theory cannot be so easily demonstrated.
True, but neither can atomic theory, yet we don't have folks running around denouncing it on nearly every science thread or forming local chapters of the "Anti-Atomic League".
Nor does that invalidate the statement that evolution is "as valid or demonstrable as the fact of gravity" -- it is. Both can be validated and demonstrated to anyone who cares to pay attention for a bit with an open mind. Likewise for atomic theory, and so on.
For that matter, gravity isn't all that trivial to demonstrate either. Sure, you can show that "things fall down", but that doesn't necessarily prove *gravity* (remember the old joke, "there's no gravity, the Earth sucks"). Establishing *gravity* is not so simple. Recall that it took Isaac Newton to make the realization that a universal force proportional to mass and inversely proportional to the square of the distance was at work on both falling apples, *and* celestial bodies, and that it took Galileo to realize that contrary to intuition (and discounting air resistance) heavy objects fell just as fast as lighter ones (and why). Parabolic ballistic arcs are a direct result of gravity, and yet the great Aristotle believed that a thrown object travels in a straight line to the top of its trajectory, then loses all momentum and plummets straight down.
Actually demonstrating gravity, its properties, its universality, and its consequences is not something that can be done in a few minutes, or is immediately obvious from day-to-day experiences with falling objects (or falling people). And yet it *can* be validted and demonstrated given enough time. And so can evolution.
For that matter, the driving forces of evolution are *far* better understood than the root cause of gravity. Physicists are still pretty much 100% in the dark about whence gravity springs, or how it exerts its force, or how fast it is propagated, etc.
...and yet a lot of people still get it wrong. ;-)
As a followup to my previous post, I'd like to post this very relevant link I just discovered: Naive Theories of Motion. Apparently even college students are often unclear on the elementary behavior of objects in motion and under the effects of gravity...
Define "soul" as you are using it in this question, and I'll take a stab at it.
The E crowd never addresses this either
Sure we do.
they are completely obsessed with their flesh.
Do you actually believe this nonsense?
Clue: If I were "completely obsessed with my flesh", why would I spend time posting on these threads, for example?
Ah, but note I did not appoint a TIME I said in "GOD's" TIME, we are told we would not know the day, but the season.
Oh, come now. You said more than that, you said that the "hour glass ... is nigh on to empty". You were clearly saying that the time was getting close, not just that it would happen in "GOD's TIME", whenever that might be...
"It pains me to suggest that my religious brothers are telling falsehoods" when they say evolutionary theory is "in crisis" and claim that there is widespread skepticism about it among scientists. "Such statements are blatantly untrue," he argues; "evolution has stood the test of time and considerable scrutiny."
This is pure bunk. Evolution has not withstood the test of time as he says and doesn't hold up under scrutiny.. that's for starters. As soon as you start poking at it, the theories many holes become apparent. Given the theory is written on crepe paper to begin with, poking holes has pretty serious consequences.
As a Christian, I do feel obliged. And for some fairly obvious reasons. This is the differnece between Christianity and those who model themselves after it - including many protestant sects. Those who are just playing religion, have no grounding, no understanding of authority for their beliefs and thusly don't understand or care about the impact of undermining said authority. The only authority to them is their clergy and feelings - that is cultic - not Christian. And it's a most dangerous ground to be standing on.
Then you know nothing of the Biblical account. Evolution literally labels the Scripture a lie on its face. There is no reconciling the two.
Scripture says Death came to the world because of the sin of man. Evolution contradicts that on it's face. Therein is the entire basis for the Old and new covenants. And that's only one point where evolution contradicts scripture; but, in one swoop, it's destroyed the need for a sacrificial system for the Children of Israel and subsequently for a Savior for all of us. You are decieved, ignorant of scripture, or a liar. I don't know which; but, I'd recommend remedying it. Grace & Peace
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