Posted on 06/27/2006 5:06:32 AM PDT by 7thson
Ann Coulter states in her book on page 201 -
Darwin’s theory of evolution says life on Earth began with single-celled life forms, which evolved into multicelled life forms, which over countless aeons evolved into higher life forms, including man, all as the result of the chance process of random mutation followed by natural selection, without guidance or assistance from any intelligent entity like God of the Department of Agriculture. Which is to say, evolution I the eminently plausible theory that the human eye, the complete works of Shakespeare, and Ronal Reagan (among other things) all came into existence purely be accident.
On page 202, she states The “theory” of evolution is:
1. Random mutation of desirable attributes (highly implausible)
2. Natural selection weeding out the “less fit” animals (pointless tautology)
3. Leading to the creation of new species (no evidence after 150 years of looking)
My question – is she correct in her statements? Is that Darwin’s theory?
On the ligher side, check out the first paragraph on page 212. LOL Funny!
The guy can't even cut-n-paste honestly!
your last was a pathetic attempt at sarcasm.
your departure comes too late, but is nevertheless welcome.
Had one of those on another thread the other day. I asked him to clarify his position (which was 3rd generation c-a-p) and he did his Murtha imitation and cut-and-ran.
Hey buddy!!
Don't you dare shake your Big Words at people! You might put out someone's i.
;)
No, he didn't. Of course Ichneumon documented for you that he principally, and personally, used a religious, CHRISTIAN basis for his racial purity arguments. I might also point out that the other principal architect of Nazi race theory, Alfred Rosenberg, argued in his Myth of the Twentieth Century that the various races (or at least their racial "souls") were separately CREATED.
The ultimate purpose of the race laws was to restore and then protect the purity of Aryan racial soul as God had created it.
When the Nazis did use evolutionary rhetoric it was more commonly in association with their endorsement of militarism.
You have a startling ability to repeatedly miss the point. The lack of ability to prove God's actions isn't the issue, but rather that abundant evidence runs counter to the literal biblical claims. The theological problem is where a holy book says He created the universe and everything in it 6000 years ago, but upon inspection He has filled the universe with physical evidence that it is much older than that. For a biological example take the genetic variation of human beings. It is far too high to spring from one pair of individuals 6000 years ago or 3 brothers and their wives around 5000 years ago. True, God can do anything, but why would he make human DNA appear much more diverse than is possible in 6000 years of gene-shuffling? And at the same time by an amazing coincidence make the genetic variation of all species that we have sequenced so far consistent with the archeological and paleontological evidence of an old earth.
So if God said He created Adam from the dust and even if there were people there to examine Adam he would seem to be older though he was just created? Therefore the appearance of age is a lie which God would never do? Ditto for the universe.
Adam was created fully grown but presumably didn't have scars and the accumulated damage of growing up. I don't suppose he was created with formed dental decay or an imperfect repair of a childhood broken arm or callouses on his fingers. If he had such things an independent observer could conclude that the claim that God had only just created Adam was deceptive. Similarly if YEC is true the light reaching us from SN1987A (for example) depicts an event that never occurred. Why does God need to lie in such detail?
"The dog ate my homework last Thursday" placemark
Piltdown Man (Eoanthropus dawsoni)
... was regarded with much suspicion by scientists at the time. It was relagated to a dark closet for decades, resurrected when modern dating technologies were established and determined to be a fake. Turns out the most likely person responsible for the fakery was some RC priest from France.
Since Russ says he is abandoning the thread or FR, I will post a response here.
Some researchers recognized early on that Piltdown didn't fit. Friedrichs and Weidenreich had both, by about 1932, published their research suggesting (correctly) that the lower jaws and molars were that of an orang (E.A. Hooton, Up from the Ape, revised edition; The MacMillan Co., 1946). This is what a 1946 textbook shows, several years before the claims for Piltdown were completely falsified.
(Creationist websites--better than artificial respiration for keeping Piltdown Man alive! As if it meant anything.)
It's fun to see people making ignorant statements like that! Please show which Scripture establishes a 6000 year age. I think we should all learn somethng new.
There was, however, a RC Bishop Ussher who decided on that age, but I don't think any real Scripture scholars would agree with his timeline.
In the beginning, God... and He hasn't changed anything He didn't already set in motion! Science can observe, and evolutionists can worship their science, but God... is still in control!
I challenge anyone to come up with an entiSemitic quotation by Darwin.
It is quite easy to find plenty by Martin Luther.
Feel free to try to "explain" her comments about the "first genocide in recorded history" occurring after "Darwinism" was on the rise. We'll wait. Because from here, it looks like a blatant falsehood that only a complete idiot, totally ignorant of not only history in general but the Old Testament in particular, could make.
But why don't you top fantasizing about what Coulter might say, and defend your OWN worship of this kind of horse crap? You've read Coulter's nonsense, and you've read several cogent rebuttals to it. Are you unable to make up your own mind based on the facts, or are you just sitting there thinking, "I'm unable to evaluate anything for myself, I'll just sit here and mindlessly presume that Coulter must know what she's talking about so I'll cling worshipfully to whatever she said no matter what kinds of refutations have been presented against it, and I'll fantasize about how she probably could justify her comments if only she would descent from Heaven and bestow her infallibile wisdom upon us." I have a bit of advice: Learn to think for yourself.
I also await you to break your silence on the fact that the KKK and other groups explicitly rested their actions firmly on religious grounds, and explicitly *attacked* evolutionists. If you and Coulter can play guilt-by-association by mentioning that Marx liked Darwin, I'll be glad to return the favor and point out that you're on the same side as the KKK with regards to being pro-Christian and anti-evolution. That means exactly as much as the Hitler/Marx/Darwin twaddle, so tell me again how much stock you put into such stuff.
But that being said, there is an excellent book out there by Richard Wiekart which supports Coulters view of Hitler and the Nazis.
Only if you consider "excellent" fallacious reasoning, ad hominems, and "guild by association" slurs.
It's one thing to note that "Darwinism" has been misused and abused -- but name me one ideology that hasn't been.
It's quite another to cluelessly argue that because it has been misused, it must be wrong, like most of the idiots who try to make the "Hitler and Darwin" association using the most tenuous connections and stretched arguments.
Evolutionary biology merely describes what happens when nature operates without intervention. It's no more a "justification" for genocide than the science of hydrology (which deals with floods, among other things) is an excuse for purposely drowning people because floods occur naturally, or epidemiology is a justification for biological warfare because epidemics happen in nature.
Science describe how things happen when nature is left to take its course -- only a moron would argue that this is how things *should* be or that humans are bound to "assist" nature in killing off the weak and drowning people who live in the paths of flash floods and infecting people who are at risk of pathogens.
Nor is there any justification in evolutionary biology for the notion of "lower races" -- according to genetics we are all "equally evolved", since we have all been subjected to an equal timespan of natural selection since our last common ancestor.
Anyone who tries to use evolutionary biology as "justification" for any kind of eugenics is, frankly, an idiot, and so are the people who attempt to make such a link.
If you or Coulter or Wiekart want to go after anyone stupid enough to misuse biology in this way, I'll be glad to cheer you on. If you want to lobby for including in schools short presentations which instruct students that to misuse biology in an attempt to justify racism or eugenics or genocide is to be evil and stupid to boot, I'll be right behind you.
But to try to slur evolutionary biology, or to try to advocate that it should be hidden under a rug, or that its science is somehow incorrect, just because there are a few maniacs around who will grasp for any thin shred of excuse to "justify" the evils they would go ahead and have done anyway for their own sick purposes, is frankly one of the most disgusting displays of cynical propaganda I've ever seen, on par with Michael Moore's demagoguery, and you and Coulter and Wiekart should be denounced as the dishonest rabble-rousers that you are who are more interested in attacking science education than you are in any feigned concern about the roots of genocide, because if you were actually concerned about the causes of genocide you'd be equally vocal about the way that belief in God itself has been endlessly perverted by Hitler, the KKK, Islamofacists, Christian Identity, the terrorists in Ireland, the Inquisition, the British monarchs who (at various times) burned Catholics and Protestants, etc. etc. etc. Oddly enough, though, I never hear you denouncing religion in general for these kinds of abuses the way you denounce "evolution" for the few times *it* has been allegedly invoked and misused as an excuse by people who would have found excuses for their bigotries and hatreds even without Darwin, which isn't the case for many religious persecutions that were fueled *purely* by religious disputes.
And don't even mention that Muslims are pushing ID in the schools ...
I hope you are not a Southern Baptist ...
...In the first place, their synagogues UNIVERSITIES should be burned down and what does not burn must be covered with mud. This must be done for the honor of God and Christianity, so that God may see that we are Christians and we have not simply tolerated or approved that His Son and His Christians have been subjected to lies, curses, and slander.
So you are disagreeing with my statement: "the fossil record changes can't be duplicated and observed in a controlled environment as real science would be performed."
Yes, that's right, I am. How astute of you to be able to dimly grasp that "you have a very misguided and faulty understanding" indicates disagreement. Congratulations. Here's a cookie.
That's interesting. I would love to see where you have recreated and duplicated in the lab one of the transitions of Coyoteman's skull fossils from one skull which was found to the next one in the tree.
Congratulations, you're showing your inability to read again. My comment QUITE CLEARLY indicates that the problem with your comment is, as I plainly said, your misunderstanding over "how observation and duplication are used in the scientific method".
Not even a retarded gradeschooler could have been so confused as to mistake that for my taking issue with your trivial observation that one can't recreate a million years of evolution "in the lab". But then I didn't say that I took issue with that, did I? No, as I explained, but you were unable to grasp because, well, you're apparently unable to read at a fourth-grade level, what I took issue with was your claim that this kind of "history in the lab" nonsense is something that "real science" requires. It isn't. You're being a total dolt on the topic, because you haven't the first clue what "real science" entails.
I even sent you to a link that explains the fallacies in your misconceptions to you. You obviously didn't understand THAT either, because it spelled things out for you in the most simple terms. Here's the passage you managed to completely fail to understand:
[...] Instead, they *test* these various ideas to see which ones actually work when compared against reality, and which ones fail when compared against reality. You've heard of those "experiment" things, right? This is the testing.
But contrary to cartoon-level public impressions of experiments, they're not always done by guys in a lab pouring test tubes together, or by scientists attempting to actually *reproduce* the process they're studying. Those are *one* way to test a hypothesis, but nowhere near the only reliable way. It's not possible to recreate the entire Hawaiian Islands chain in order to test hypotheses about how they formed, for example, but there *are* countless other ways to test hypotheses about geology -- or evolution, or any other field.
That's why you've heard scientists talk about "predictions" so much. One of the most widely useful, and most reliable, methods of testing a hypothesis is to work out its consequences -- to determine what results would occur if that explanation *was* the correct one. If that really *is* how things happen (or happened) in the universe, what "side effects" would it have, aside from the data or phenomenon itself which we crafted the hypothesis to explain? These are its *predictions*.
This is how we test to separate the good explanations from the bad explanations. If the Hawaiian Islands formed as a result of continental drift carrying the Pacific tectonic plate across a crustal magma plume, this would leave many, many kinds of tell-tale results which would be noticeably (and *test-ably*) different than the kinds of things you'd find if some *other* explanation was correct about a different manner in which the Hawaiian Islands had formed.
So to decide between the two (or fifty) potential explanations (hypotheses), you work out the "side effects" (predictions) of each different explanation -- what you'd find if X had actually happened, versus what you'd find differently if Y had actually happened, etc., then you go and *look* to see which of those side effects (if any!) you actually find when you look.
This "looking" can take different forms depending on the nature of the process being explored. In the case of some physics questions, you can build a tabletop setup of lasers in a certain configuration, or whatever, to reproduce the conditions which should act one way if hypothesis X is right, or another way if Y is correct, etc. This is a classic "experiment" in the layman's mind. In the case of medical hypotheses about what disease a patient has, you can try different drugs to see which he responds to. In some cases of geology, you can take core samples of the rocks under the Hawaiian Islands to see whether their composition and structure matches the predictions of one hypothesis, or another. In evolutionary biology, you can go check the DNA of various species to see if the pattern of differences and similarities matches the precise patterns (not just *general* patterns) which distinguish one hypothesis from another, or go find new fossils (or re-examine old ones) to see whether predicted features which no one sat down to check before match the predictions of various hypotheses, etc.
When this is done over and over and over again, and the *dozens* of different predictions of any one particular hypothesis are tested and all the predictions are found to match, and perhaps even more importantly, the things that the hypothesis predicts you *won't* find are looked for and found *not* to be present as well, then you can have more and more confidence that the hypothesis is, if not 100% correct (since you can never be *entirely* sure), very much on the right track, and is very close to being right explanation. Meanwhile, you can have great confidence that the alternative explanations which made predictions that *failed* are wrong, and can be taken out to the trash dumpster.
(Also, any one person can obviously make mistakes about reasoning out the predictions, or how to test whether the real world matches the predictions, etc. This is why science places such stress on *repeatability* -- you have to publish your data, your reasoning, your tests, etc., so that thousands of other experts can go over it with a fine-toothed comb looking for mistakes or fraud or untested presumptions, and can repeat your tests to verify that your results were valid and/or not a fluke. Also note that *this* is the kind of "repeatability" that science requires -- creationists often think that it means that the *processes* need to be repeatable, like being able to repeat the formation of the Hawaiian Islands; that's not the case. The *tests* have to be repeatable, the *verification* needs to be repeatable by anyone who cares to double-check your results, or try a new method of validating them.)
The core tenets of evolutionary biology make *VERY* specific predictions about what we should find (and what we *shouldn't* find) when we go looking at nature, and make *hundreds* of different predictions which allow multiple independent validation tests (since any one prediction might "come true" and match just by luck, even if the explanation is wrong). The tenet of common descent doesn't just predict that DNA from closely related species will "be similar", it predicts that they will be similar in *very* precise, specific ways, and that they will *differ* in other precise, specific ways. And when we examine and compare DNA, this is *exactly* what we find, *every* time we compare new DNA sequences which we had never examined before. [...]
See also:
Evolution and Philosophy: Is Evolution Science, and What Does 'Science' Mean?The General Anti-Creationism FAQ: Science and Evolution
29+ Evidences for Macroevolution: The Scientific Case for Common Descent
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/evolution-fact.html
Index to Creationist Claims, especially the following subsections:
CA100-CA499: Epistemology
- CA100: Foundation of Knowledge
- CA100. Argument from incredulity
- CA110: Argument from Authority
- CA110. Evolution will soon be widely rejected.
- CA111. Many current scientists reject evolution.
- CA112. Many scientists find problems with evolution.
- CA113. Quote mining
- CA113.1. Darwin on evolution of the eye.
- CA114. Many famous scientists were creationists.
- CA114.1. Lord Kelvin was a creationist.
- CA114.2. Linnaeus was a creationist.
- CA114.10. Fabre was a creationist.
- CA114.22. Louis Pasteur was a creationist.
- CA114.28. Steno was a creationist.
- CA118. Your arguments do not count because you are not qualified.
- CA120. An evolved mind is fallible, its conclusions untrustworthy.
- CA131. Darwin suffered from psychoneurosis.
- CA200: Theory of Science
- CA201. Evolution is only a theory.
- CA202. Evolution has not been proved.
- CA210. Evolution does not make predictions.
- CA211. Evolution can not be falsified.
- CA212. Evolution is ambiguously defined.
- CA215. Evolution is a useless theory.
- CA220. Evolution can not be replicated.
- CA221. Were you there?
- CA230. Interpreting evidence is not the same as observation.
[...]
I did read your link, though.
No, obviously, you didn't. Or at least you completely failed to understand it, or else you wouldn't be coming back to this bizarre "re-evolve it or it isn't real science" horse crap.
W.R.T. "concerning how science tests things which can't be directly observed", you can test for the existence of a phenomenon caused by quarks and other particles. These experiments can be duplicated and verified. This is not even remotely comparable to what goes on in the study of evolution.
Yes it is, which you'd know if you actually READ and UNDERSTOOD the material at the link. It describes in great detail exactly how evolutionary hypotheses are directly tested, verified, and duplicated. Sheesh, are you really this dense, or are you just trolling?
And your link compares the evidence for common descent to the evidence for O.J. as a killer. (Science is now down to what is Beyond a Reasonable doubt? It's a poor state of existence that science is in if that's the case. Poor Newton must be spinning in his grave.)
It always has been of that nature, son -- all scientific knowledge is provisional. Stop trying to lecture us on "real science" if you haven't the first clue how it actually works. Sigh.
It's not a FACT that O.J. killed his wife.
Ooookay.. We'll let that speak for your credibility.
I have declared a belief but it is not completely unsupported. I haven't claimed it as if it were established fact, though.
Sure you did. You just flat out declared that "No, those weren't designed in by a deity. Ever heard of the Fall of Man? Lots of stuff on earth wasn't designed in, it came about as a result of man's rebellion." You declared these things as if they had been established to the point where you could just say without qualification how they did not happen, and what they did happen as a result of.
I said the opposite: I said it was a belief.
ONLY after your empty claims were challenged.
But I also added that since you can't go back and duplicate the findings that you purport as established fact then yours is a system of belief, also.
You really *are* as dense as you seem, aren't you? All of the prior explanations just bounced off your forehead with a sharp *ping*, didn't they?
That should read...
On the gripping hand were the tails of mermaids...
One minor point. webstersII wrote: I would love to see where you have recreated and duplicated in the lab one of the transitions of Coyoteman's skull fossils from one skull which was found to the next one in the tree.
The photographs I post occasionally of the dozen or so fossil skulls are some of the best of the lot, the most photogenic.
But they are not the only ones out there. For each of those photographs there are thousands of pieces from other specimens; a jaw fragment here, a humerus fragment and a couple of leg bones there, sometimes a lot of bones together, but thousands overall.
Those are your "recreated and duplicated in the lab" -- but in this case the lab is the Rift Valley, East Rudolph, Olduvai, Afar, and the other inhospitable areas where fossils are found, one by one, by dedicated researchers.
And what is the reward for these scientists? To be badmouthed by those who don't bother to study science in general, and evolutionary sciences in particular, and who glory in their sullen and militant ignorance.
Again, a splendid post! And once more, the angels sing.
Incorrect. That FACT was determined by a Jury.
Law. The aspect of a case at law comprising events determined by evidence: The jury made a finding of fact.
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