Posted on 09/28/2005 6:31:31 AM PDT by gobucks
There are ‘scientists’ such as Richard Dawkins, William Provine, David Barash, Stephen Pinker, Jacob Weisberg, Sam Harris, and a many other people who use evolution as a ‘belief sytem’.Look at the ‘Bright Movement’ and its founders:
The movement's three major aims are:
A. Promote the civic understanding and acknowledgment of the naturalistic worldview, which is free of supernatural and mystical elements.
B. Gain public recognition that persons who hold such a worldview can bring principled actions to bear on matters of civic importance.
C. Educate society toward accepting the full and equitable civic participation of all such individuals.
He said his original view, published in his book "Practical Ethics," that the parents should have 28 days to determine whether the infant should live has been modified somewhat since the book's release."So in that book, we suggested that 28 days is not a bad period of time to use because on the one hand, it gives you time to examine the infant to [see] what the nature of the disability is; gives time for the couple to recover from the shock of the birth to get well advised and informed from all sorts of groups, medical opinion and disability and to reach a decision.
"And also I think that it is clearly before the point at which the infant has those sorts of forward-looking preferences, that kind of self-awareness, that I talked about. But I now think, after a lot more discussion, that you can't really propose any particular cut-off date."
…Singer defended his previous writings that humans and nonhumans can have "mutually satisfying" sexual relationships as long as they are consensual. When asked by CNSNews.com how an animal can consent to sexual contact with a human, he replied, "Your dog can show you when he or she wants to go for a walk and equally for nonviolent sexual contact, your dog or whatever else it is can show you whether he or she wants to engage in a certain kind of contact."
Animal 'Rights' Zealot: Christianity Harmful; Infanticide OK:
Our leaders have described the recent atrocity with the customary cliche: mindless cowardice. "Mindless" may be a suitable word for the vandalising of a telephone box. It is not helpful for understanding what hit New York on September 11. Those people were not mindless and they were certainly not cowards. On the contrary, they had sufficiently effective minds braced with an insane courage, and it would pay us mightily to understand where that courage came from.It came from religion. Religion is also, of course, the underlying source of the divisiveness in the Middle East which motivated the use of this deadly weapon in the first place. But that is another story and not my concern here. My concern here is with the weapon itself. To fill a world with religion, or religions of the Abrahamic kind, is like littering the streets with loaded guns. Do not be surprised if they are used.
by Richard Dawkins
Peter Singer is not a biologist.
He's a vegetarian.
He's plantophobic.
I knew instantly because no biologist worthy of the name would be a vegetarian.
It's just not healthy. ;)
But for the Creationist, all evidence and reason that would tend to support evolution will be "very unconvincing," right? Why are the non-evolutionary explanations to be considered plausible? If the nylonase gene was in the bacteria all along, why is it not expressed in proteins? And if the DNA coding the nylonase was created by an Intelligent Designer, either at the Time Of Creation or in the very recent past, why is the nylonase enzyme only 2% as efficient as the original
An explanation from natural selection is that the mutated DNA producing nylonase has not had time to undergo the additional mutation and selection pressure to achieve a more affect nylon degrading enzyme.
A good discussion by Dave Thomas at New Mexicans for Science and Reason:
Second, I personally believe in evolution. I think the intelligent design or purpose is inherent in the universe, and there is some deeper reason why life exists and is evolving. That reason is beyond me and science, and begins to look like the design of God. IMHO, God is unknowable by man and there are things unknowable to science. That is where science and religion are destined to find a common path.
Well the scientists believe that they do know it is a mutation, and have identified the original genes.As for your second point, you are no doubt correct that if God is directing the evolution of the universe that information will be beyond human science to understand.
Okada H, Negoro S, Kimura H, Nakamura S.
Flavobacterium sp. KI72 metabolizes 6-aminohexanoic acid cyclic dimer, a by-product of nylon manufacture, through two newly evolved enzymes, 6-aminohexanoic acid cyclic dimer hydrolase (EI) and 6-aminohexanoic acid linear oligomer hydrolase (EII). These enzymes are active towards man-made compounds, the cyclic dimer and linear oligomers of 6-aminohexanoic acid respectively, but not towards any of the natural amide bonds tested. The structural genes of EI (nylA) and EII (nylB) are encoded on pOAD2, one of three plasmids harboured in Flavobacterium sp. KI72. This plasmid contains two kinds of repeated sequence (RS-I and RS-II); one of the two RS-II sequences, RS-IIA, contains the nylB gene, while the other, RS-IIB, contains a homologous nylB' gene. From comparisons of the nucleotide sequences and gene products of the nylB and nylB' genes, we now conclude that EII enzyme is newly evolved by gene duplication followed by base substitutions on the same plasmid. PMID: 6646204 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]
"So DNA replicates by RNA transcription. Except when the IntelligentDesigner waves the magic wand." Yeah, that'll work.
So, did you just make that up? Just pull it out of your butt to prove some moronic point? When did I talk about RNA or DNA mechanisms? Why never in this thread, so go blow blowfish.
"Golf is almost a metaphysical experience, isn't it? I've noticed that no matter what their differences, golfers have something very basic in common, however completely meaningless, useless, and senseless it may seem to the rest of the world. It's almost like a brotherhood."
Yes, and I have noticed the exact same thing. (And Christianity as an 'experience' matches this description exactly as well, oddly enough).
To me, golf is like falling in love. You don't really "plan" on becoming a golfer. Tempermentally, golf was impossible for me - until Mrs. Gb was nearly killed in an accident. That accident resulted in a major change in my career path ... and freed up lots of time. All I was doing was goofing off at a Par 3 .... and then my life changed. Sounds really senseless...
I have only been a golfer for about 2 years, btw. But I own about 30 books on the subject...
Much better, lol.
Many thanks ... I hadn't heard of this particular outfit before; had the look and feel of Scientology a bit...
Every day, I am struck by the sheer amount of stuff I have flat out never ever heard of ...
thanks for the link to a really unusual website.
"AND I didn't claim the hypothesis was correct, only that such a hypothesis might stem from ID conjecture, that it would be testable."
Not only is it not correct, it has nothing to do with ID.
All consuming??? You are KIDDING!! (When I saw how Chris reacted when he made that last putt Sunday, I just about cried. If someone was going to argue w/ me the President's Cup was worth watching, I was just going to scoff - but I couldn't move much of Sunday afternoon; and who would have guessed Freddie had it in him....).
Mrs. Gb is doing great ... now. She just came up stairs and handed little Gb to me. It's weird - the accident is also responsible for him too. A son and golf. It's been a wild ride (we had thought her infertility was pretty much hopeless...).
I have to start by saying I don't have a dogma in this fight, beinst I'm a Catholic and my Church does not require a literal view of the first chapters of Genesis (and hasn't at least since St. Augustine of Hippo and the Alexandrian Fathers 1700 years ago--- who interpreted it spiritually and allegorically)---
But having said that, I say that I.D. is not actually a faith. It is testable, at least implicitly, as illustrated in this article itself. If you can show that an "irreducibly complex" bacterial flagellum is in fact reducible to working sub-parts, you've successfully tested an I.D. concept by proving it to be dubious in that particular case.
Similarly, if you show that a bacterium has developed a previously-nonexistent gene for producing nylonase, and a gene is (per Dembski's definition) Complex Specified Information, you've shown that CSI is a natural, mutable phenomenon.
This looks a an UH-oh moment, a major challenge for the ID people. But let them debate: the debate itself may be the spur that drives even more scientific investigation. ID may not be a fully ramified descriptive-explanatory-predictive theory, but it is still a stimulating heuristic critical tool. O felix culpa.
ID's most interesting claim, to me, is that design is empirically detectable (and thus, not a matter of "blind faith.") Criminal detectives, cryptography experts, archaeologists, and SETI investigators proceed on the assumption that there are some measurable criteria by which they can distinguish naturally-occurring patterns from designed messages and rubble from designed artifacts.
Let the ID proponents like Dembski and Behe work out their empirical criteria and see where we go from there. And if God is doing His work via a quantum-driven mutation-selection mechanism, what is that but His Word echoing through the ages? He's not bound by time and space. Deo gratias.
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