Brain Food (Amazingthing about Godless is the amount of intellectual meat Ann Coulter has packed...)

So there's a lot of "testing" in the scientific community of Darwinism. I did not know that!

See the link I provided in #233.

The bible lays it all out how we are ruthless monsters and NOT one time did God blame it on evolutionists.

Yeah, but that jerk-off Onan had something to do with it I'll bet.

Please tell us what is happening among the freaking finches at the Galapagos that is newsworthy.

I can't keep up with this thread. Go google it.

This means that there are no fossils of things like a dog with antennae or a fish with hair.

You really have no clue as to what the theory of evolution says, do you. If either of these were found EVOLUTION WOULD BE FALSIFIED.

"It is as though they were just planted there, without evolutionary history."

I cannot find this quote in anything but creationist sources, which tells me it has probably either been quote mined or made up from whole cloth. Any movement that has to lie about what someone says in order to support itself is probably not worth listening to. However, there is a ready answer (complete with footnotes) to show up your Cambrian Explosion claims:

Claim CC300:

Complex life forms appear suddenly in the Cambrian explosion, with no ancestral fossils.
Source:

Morris, Henry M. 1985. Scientific Creationism. Green Forest, AR: Master Books, pp. 80-81.
Watchtower Bible and Tract Society. 1985. Life--How Did It Get Here? Brooklyn, NY, pp. 60-62.

Response:

The Cambrian explosion was the seemingly sudden appearance of a variety of complex animals about 540 million years ago (Mya), but it was not the origin of complex life. Evidence of multicellular life from about 590 and 560 Mya appears in the Doushantuo Formation in China (Chen et al. 2000, 2004), and diverse fossil forms occurred before 555 Mya (Martin et al. 2000). (The Cambrian began 543 Mya., and the Cambrian explosion is considered by many to start with the first trilobites, about 530 Mya.) Testate amoebae are known from about 750 Mya (Porter and Knoll 2000). There are tracelike fossils more than 1,200 Mya in the Stirling Range Formation of Australia (Rasmussen et al. 2002). Eukaryotes (which have relatively complex cells) may have arisen 2,700 Mya, according to fossil chemical evidence (Brocks et al. 1999). Fossil microorganisms have been found from 3,465 Mya (Schopf 1993). There is isotopic evidence of sulfur-reducing bacteria from 3,470 Mya (Shen et al. 2001) and possible evidence of microbial etching of volcanic glass from 3,480 Mya (Furnes et al. 2004).

There are transitional fossils within the Cambrian explosion fossils. For example, there are lobopods (basically worms with legs) which are intermediate between arthropods and worms (Conway Morris 1998).

Only some phyla appear in the Cambrian explosion. In particular, all plants postdate the Cambrian, and flowering plants, by far the dominant form of land life today, only appeared about 140 Mya (Brown 1999).

Even among animals, not all types appear in the Cambrian. Cnidarians, sponges, and probably other phyla appeared before the Cambrian. Molecular evidence shows that at least six animal phyla are Precambrian (Wang et al. 1999). Bryozoans appear first in the Ordovician. Many other soft-bodied phyla do not appear in the fossil record until much later. Although many new animal forms appeared during the Cambrian, not all did. According to one reference (Collins 1994), eleven of thirty-two metazoan phyla appear during the Cambrian, one appears Precambrian, eight after the Cambrian, and twelve have no fossil record.

And that just considers phyla. Almost none of the animal groups that people think of as groups, such as mammals, reptiles, birds, insects, and spiders, appeared in the Cambrian. The fish that appeared in the Cambrian was unlike any fish alive today.

The length of the Cambrian explosion is ambiguous and uncertain, but five to ten million years is a reasonable estimate; some say the explosion spans forty million years or more, starting about 553 million years ago. Even the shortest estimate of five million years is hardly sudden.

There are some plausible explanations for why diversification may have been relatively sudden:

The evolution of active predators in the late Precambrian likely spurred the coevolution of hard parts on other animals. These hard parts fossilize much more easily than the previous soft-bodied animals, leading to many more fossils but not necessarily more animals.

Early complex animals may have been nearly microscopic. Apparent fossil animals smaller than 0.2 mm have been found in the Doushantuo Formation, China, forty to fifty-five million years before the Cambrian (Chen et al. 2004). Much of the early evolution could have simply been too small to see.

The earth was just coming out of a global ice age at the beginning of the Cambrian (Hoffman 1998; Kerr 2000). A "snowball earth" before the Cambrian explosion may have hindered development of complexity or kept populations down so that fossils would be too rare to expect to find today. The more favorable environment after the snowball earth would have opened new niches for life to evolve into.

Hox genes, which control much of an animal's basic body plan, were likely first evolving around that time. Development of these genes might have just then allowed the raw materials for body plans to diversify (Carroll 1997).

Atmospheric oxygen may have increased at the start of the Cambrian (Canfield and Teske 1996; Logan et al. 1995; Thomas 1997).

Planktonic grazers began producing fecal pellets that fell to the bottom of the ocean rapidly, profoundly changing the ocean state, especially its oxygenation (Logan et al. 1995).

Unusual amounts of phosphate were deposited in shallow seas at the start of the Cambrian (Cook and Shergold 1986; Lipps and Signor 1992).

Cambrian life was still unlike almost everything alive today. Using number of cell types as a measure of complexity, we see that complexity has been increasing more or less constantly since the beginning of the Cambrian (Valentine et al. 1994).

Major radiations of life forms have occurred at other times, too. One of the most extensive diversifications of life occurred in the Ordovician, for example (Miller 1997).

References:

Brocks, J. J., G. A. Logan, R. Buick and R. E. Summons, 1999. Archean molecular fossils and the early rise of eukaryotes. Science 285: 1033-1036. See also Knoll, A. H., 1999. A new molecular window on early life. Science 285: 1025-1026. http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/285/5430/1025
Brown, Kathryn S., 1999. Deep Green rewrites evolutionary history of plants. Science 285: 990-991.
Canfield, D. E. and A. Teske, 1996. Late Proterozoic rise in atmospheric oxygen concentration inferred from phylogenetic and sulphur-isotope studies. Nature 382: 127-132. See also: Knoll, A. H., 1996. Breathing room for early animals. Nature 382: 111-112.
Carroll, Robert L., 1997. Patterns and Processes of Vertebrate Evolution. Cambridge University Press.
Chen, J.-Y. et al., 2000. Precambrian animal diversity: Putative phosphatized embryos from the Doushantuo Formation of China. Proceedings of the National Academy of Science USA 97(9): 4457-4462. http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/full/97/9/4457
Chen, J.-Y. et al., 2004. Small bilaterian fossils from 40 to 55 million years before the Cambrian. Science 305: 218-222, http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/1099213 . See also Stokstad, E., 2004. Controversial fossil could shed light on early animals' blueprint. Science 304: 1425.
Collins, Allen G., 1994. Metazoa: Fossil record. http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/phyla/metazoafr.html
Conway Morris, Simon, 1998. The Crucible of Creation, Oxford.
Cook, P. J. and J. H. Shergold (eds.), 1986. Phosphate Deposits of the World, Volume 1. Proterozoic and Cambrian Phosphorites. Cambridge University Press.
Furnes, H., N. R. Banerjee, K. Muehlenbachs, H. Staudigel and M. de Wit, 2004. Early life recorded in Archean pillow lavas. Science 304: 578-581.
Hoffman, Paul F. et al., 1998. A Neoproterozoic snowball earth. Science 281: 1342-1346. See also: Kerr, Richard A., 1998. Did an ancient deep freeze nearly doom life? Science 281: 1259,1261.
Kerr, Richard A., 2000. An appealing snowball earth that's still hard to swallow. Science 287: 1734-1736.
Logan, G. A., J. M. Hayes, G. B. Hieshima and R. E. Summons, 1995. Terminal Proterozoic reorganization of biogeochemical cycles. Nature 376: 53-56. See also Walter, M., 1995. Faecal pellets in world events. Nature 376: 16-17.
Lipps, J. H. and P. W. Signor (eds.), 1992. Origin and Early Evolution of the Metazoa. New York: Plenum Press.
Martin, M. W. et al., 2000. Age of Neoproterozoic bilatarian body and trace fossils, White Sea, Russia: Implications for metazoan evolution. Science 288: 841-845. See also Kerr, Richard A., 2000. Stretching the reign of early animals. Science 288: 789.
Miller, Arnold I., 1997. Dissecting global diversity patterns: Examples from the Ordovician radiation. Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics 28: 85-104.
Porter, Susannah M. and Andrew H. Knoll, 2000. Testate amoebae in the Neoproterozoic Era: evidence from vase-shaped microfossils in the Chuar Group, Grand Canyon. Paleobiology 26(3): 360-385.
Rasmussen, B., S. Bengtson, I. R. Fletcher and N. J. McNaughton, 2002. Discoidal impressions and trace-like fossils more than 1200 million years old. Science 296: 1112-1115.
Schopf, J. W., 1993. Microfossils of the Early Archean Apex Chert: New evidence of the antiquity of life. Science 260: 640-646.
Shen, Y., R. Buick and D. E. Canfield, 2001. Isotopic evidence for microbial sulphate reduction in the early Archaean era. Nature 410: 77-81.
Thomas, A. L. R., 1997. The breath of life -- did increased oxygen levels trigger the Cambrian Explosion? Trends in Ecology and Evolution 12: 44-45.
Valentine, James W., Allen G. Collins and C. Porter Meyer, 1994. Morphological complexity increase in metazoans. Paleobiology 20(2): 131-142.
Wang, D. Y.-C., S. Kumar and S. B. Hedges, 1999. Divergence time estimates for the early history of animal phyla and the origin of plants, animals and fungi. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, Series B, Biological Sciences 266: 163-71.

Further Reading:

Conway Morris, Simon. 1998. The Crucible of Creation. Oxford.

Conway Morris, Simon. 2000. The Cambrian "explosion": Slow-fuse or megatonnage? Proceedings of the National Academy of Science USA 97(9): 4426-4429. (technical)

Schopf, J. William. 2000. Solution to Darwin's dilemma: Discovery of the missing Precambrian record of life. Proceedings of the National Academy of Science USA 97(13): 6947-6953. http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/full/97/13/6947

I cannot find your finch quote either. And, 200 years is a little short for speciation, even by Darwin's lights, so I call BS on this one.

Furthermore, they rest on the underside of branches, not on the outside of tree trunks. Subsequent studies showed that the moths that were supposed to have proven the "fact of evolution" had been dead, and pinned to the tree trunks by the "scientists" conducting the "study".

The underside of branches have bark too, dipstick. The moths had to hide from more than just birds. And, why would they resemble bark from pre-Industrial trees if they did not need to blend in? As for the contention the moths in the photograph were pinned to their branches, so what? How do you take a picture of a moth? Just about every photograph of insects made prior to a decade or so ago were made with dead, posed insects. This does absolutely nothing to support your position.

Indeed, all your "points" appear to be nothing more than rehashed crap from creationist sites -- and they don't do science there.

Yeah...OK...

Clinton almost saved the world because he increased funding for the CDC, and a boatload of other liberal BS projects, and he raised the standards for water purification projects on his last day in office.

Meanwhile, Evil Reagan did not adequately support research for a disease which was clearly confined to people who were exercising aberrant lifestyle choices.

Are you in the right forum?

I think we should leave it go until the next time...

I also like to "get it" if the gettin is good :)

So there's a lot of "testing" in the scientific community of Darwinism. I did not know that!

We didn't expect that you did. Now that you are aware, please do a little research on it and you will be amazed at the wealth of information out there on the subject.

I'm not expecting you to accept that the purely biological path is how we humans came to have a moral sense. I was more just (tacitly) pointing out that the end picture, what the moral sense looks like and how it operates, isn't much different on the biological versus divine origin account. Of course more explicitly my point was that, therefore, the religious rhetoric that evolution "should" have us all behaving like ruthless monsters is silly and stupid.

O.K. I see where you are coming from. I hope you won’t dump on me for the colloquial language.

What would evolution-only imply about moral / immoral behavior? I don’t know. This may be a problem for evolution generally - it is hard to know what it predicts. But you do make a good case!!!!!!!!!

The question I was asking was this - what reason can one give to anyone, including oneself, for good behavior? (As you can see, I’m trying to remain general, and not demonize anyone.)

Go highjack anther thread Evo.

Hey idiot, half of the OP had to do with Ann's moronic anti-science chapters. And guess what? About half the thread's posts have to do with the same.

PS, your 5-word sentence contains 2 misspellings, an erroneous capitalization, a missing comma, and the use of a pronoun that only exists in the fevered minds of creationists. Congrats.

On the topic of evolution, that's not meat. It's fudge.

Er, yes, in the sense of that word used in the derogatory name "fudge-packer" (male homosexual).

And our very own Ichneumon has promised us a very lengthy posting of some several hundred of Ms. Coulter's more egregious errors.

Given that he's already caught her in at least one, not mere "error", but flat-out lie, that should be most enlightening.

There is NO WAY she desended from that ape. She doesn'even have legs. Just thigh stumps, poor girl.

I recommend you decide I'm too stupid for the debate and allow me to be.

Already done!

"But, the courts are not doing what you say they are doing."<.

Oh. I'm sorry I thought that you were a Doctor.

Now you are an Attorney.

Please do a drive by of my state house.

I like to call it the Hole at Be-A-Con Hill.

Everybody swears that they are not doing things either, Still, I don't get to vote on what I consider to be important things.

You know, that gay marriage stuff and more.

The courts are sticking it up our behinds every which way but loose, and if you are in denial of that...well then, you are not like the average FReeper as far as I can discern.

Stop saying stupid stuff.

Are you in the right forum?

Which former president is an evangelic Christian on a mission for God?

I've gone through the science classes and have heard the arguments evolutionists make. To me, they don't make logical sense and the evidence doesn't add up.

Just a note, Bryan, your inability to understand a fairly complex subject does not make that subject fraudelent. I'm willling to be you don't quite fully understand many things, yet accept them just fine. Please admit your bias is religiously based and we can move forward.

Oh yeah, your trite Alabama-ism is hilarious in that you used it on a fellow Alabamiam (or whatever you guys are called)!

That said, Ann Coulter says whatever she thinks will sell books to the hard right, whether it makes really sense or not.

And, once she decides that it's the best way to get attention, she'll reverse polarity (a la David Brock) and bat for the other team.

You heard it here first.

I gotta stop.

Please ping me to the next thread on this stuff.

My friends want me to go hang.

It has been fun, and believe it or not, I like you guys.

I've gone through the science classes and have heard the arguments evolutionists make. To me, they don't make logical sense and the evidence doesn't add up.

It appears you failed to read the article we are discussing; you know, the one which spent half its words discussing Ann's embarrassing creationist talking points.