Posted on 09/26/2001 4:31:59 PM PDT by I_Publius
You said: Those 'facts' are incorrect.
Evolutionists went on and on about the absence of native placentals in Australia.
That is, until they discovered one.
I think it's true to say that Natural Historians went on and on about the unique flora and fauna of Aus. The only know eplanation of this observed fact is descent from a common ancestor, in other words evolution
Where else are monotremes found ? I didn't say placental mammals aren't found in Aus; I said monotremes are not found anywhere else. ditto for marsupials; they aren't found in Eurasia or Africa, but are found in Aus, N and S Amer. WHY ONE PLACE AND NOT ANOTHER ?
BTW, what placental is found in Aus (besides us and dogs?) Mice ?
Then you might be interested in this link. The Evolutionary Biology of Cave Fishes. The most relevant link on that page to your conjecture is Eyed Cave Fish in a Karst Window. This describes an isolated cave that has eyed and blind populations. The eyed most likely are descendents of the blind.
For more about Darwin/Singer, and eugenics, search Darwin and Singer.
Slavery, although in some ways beneficial during ancient times,* is a great crime; yet it was not so regarded until quite recently, even by the most civilised nations. And this was especially the case, because the slaves belonged in general to a race different from that of their masters. As barbarians do not regard the opinion of their women, wives are commonly treated like slaves. Most savages are utterly indifferent to the sufferings of strangers, or even delight in witnessing them. It is well known that the women and children of the North American Indians aided in torturing their enemies. Some savages take a horrid pleasure in cruelty to animals,*(2) and humanity is an unknown virtue.
Darwin ch 5
The great break in the organic chain between man and his nearest allies, which cannot be bridged over by any extinct or living species, has often been advanced as a grave objection to the belief that man is descended from some lower form; but this objection will not appear of much weight to those who, from general reasons, believe in the general principle of evolution. Breaks often occur in all parts of the series, some being wide, sharp and defined, others less so in various degrees; as between the orang and its nearest allies- between the Tarsius and the other Lemuridae- between the elephant, and in a more striking manner between the Ornithorhynchus or Echidna, and all other mammals. But these breaks depend merely on the number of related forms which have become extinct. At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout the world. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes, as Professor Schaaffhausen has remarked,* will no doubt be exterminated. The break between man and his nearest allies will then be wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilised state, as we may hope, even than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as now between the negro or Australian and the gorilla. * Anthropological Review, April, 1867, p. 236
Darwin ch 6
Thomas A. Edison
"Non-violence leads to the highest ethics, which is the goal of all evolution. Until we stop harming ALL other living beings, we are still savages."
http://www.all-creatures.org/quotes/edison_thomas.html
So, is that science, or only when darwin says it????
Finally, although the gradual decrease and ultimate extinction of the races of man is a highly complex problem, depending on many causes which differ in different places and at different times; it is the same problem as that presented by the extinction of one of the higher animals- of the fossil horse, for instance, which disappeared from South America, soon afterwards to be replaced, within the same districts, by countless troups of the Spanish horse. The New Zealander seems conscious of this parallelism, for he compares his future fate with that of the native rat now almost exterminated by the European rat. Though the difficulty is great to our imagination, and really great, if we wish to ascertain the precise causes and their manner of action, it ought not to be so to our reason, as long as we keep steadily in mind that the increase of each species and each race is constantly checked in various ways; so that if any new check, even a slight one, be superadded, the race will surely decrease in number; and decreasing numbers will sooner or later lead to extinction; the end, in most cases, being promptly determined by the inroads of conquering tribes.
On the Formation of the Races of Man.- In some cases the crossing of distinct races has led to the formation of a new race. The singular fact that the Europeans and Hindoos, who belong to the same Aryan stock, and speak a language fundamentally the same, differ widely in appearance, whilst Europeans differ but little from Jews, who belong to the Semitic stock, and speak quite another language, has been accounted for by Broca,* through certain Aryan branches having been largely crossed by indigenous tribes during their wide diffusion. When two races in close contact cross, the first result is a heterogeneous mixture: thus Mr. Hunter, in describing the Santali orhill-tribes of India, says that hundreds of imperceptible gradations may be traced "from the black, squat tribes of the mountains to the tall olive-coloured Brahman, with his intellectual brow, calm eyes, and high but narrow head"; so that it is necessary in courts of justice to ask the witnesses whether they are Santalis or Hindoos.*(2) Whether a heterogeneous people, such as the inhabitants of some of the Polynesian islands, formed by the crossing of two distinct races, with few or no pure members left, would ever become homogeneous, is not known from direct evidence. But as with our domesticated animals, a cross-breed can certainly be fixed and made uniform by careful selection*(3) in the course of a few generations, we may infer that the free inter-crossing of a heterogeneous mixture during a long descent would supply the place of selection, and overcome any tendency to reversion; so that the crossed race would ultimately become homogeneous, though it might not partake in an equal degree of the characters of the two parent-races.
Darwin ch 7
No excuse is needed for treating this subject in some detail; for, as the German philosopher Schopenhauer remarks, "the final aim of all love intrigues, be they comic or tragic, is really of more importance than all other ends in human life. What it all turns upon is nothing less than the composition of the next generation.... It is not the weal or woe of any one individual, but that of the human race to come, which is here at stake."*
* "Schopenhauer and Darwinism," in Journal of Anthropology, Jan., 1871, p. 323.
Darwin ch 20
is this science????
'Nations as well as men', de Tocqueville observed, 'almost always betray the most prominent features of their future destiny in their earliest years." The distinguishing feature of Prussia had always been its Army, the distinguishing feature of the Prussian Army its discipline. In the eighteenth century Prussia was described not as a state supporting an army but as an army supporting a state. As soldiers existed to serve the state. The more the materialist or plainly subversive attitudes were spread with the growth of industry, the more the Prussian ruling class, feeling threatened, exaggerated their state-centred warrior code.
Its expression changed with the changing intellectual world of the nineteenth century. Darwin had the most striking effect. 'The struggle for existence' and 'the survival of the fittest' had obvious resonances in a soldier state. Darwin's cousin, Francis Galton, helped to focus them by applying the principles of selection to human society. Arguing that medicine and civilisation acted against natural selection by protecting the unfit and eroding the pressure to adapt, he proposed that human breeding be guided to favour the better stock. He called his porposals Eugenics.
Nietzsche raised Galton's pseudo-science into moral (or super-moral) philosophy. Assuming that traditional ideas of God were myths and Christian morality a set of myths designed by the weak to protect themselves against the strong, a 'slave morality' that tamed, weakened, emasculated the vigorous natural impulses of man, he maintained that nothing was true, hence everything was permitted - a theory of relativity in values that naturally followed the removal of any fixed points of reference such as God or morality. He destroyed the logic of the argument - not that he valued logic or reason - by assuming that the theory of evolution was true and that, while the laws of morality were a tissue of inventions, the laws of heredity were also true. Thus he defined truth - and in the most unsubtle, unscientific and materialistic manner. However, it permitted him to insert, in place of God, man as evolved into Superman. Put another way, if there was not God - and evidently there was not – there was no will of God, only man’s will.
Schopenhauer had previously identified will as the reality behind all apperances - not individual will, that was an illusion, but a vast universal will which permeated all creation. Man's will was a fraction of this cosmic will, part of the oneness of the universe. Nietzsche defined the universal will - which in Schopenhauer had no end or purpose - in a Darwinistic sense as the will to power: "This world is the will to power - and nothing else.' He defined the Superman who must necessarily result from the will to power when everything is permitted as the antithesis of the masses, whom he called the 'bungled and botched'. The Superman conquered and ruled the masses as he conquered and ruled himself, the world, even destiny, to become master of the world.
It is no coincidence that Nietzsche's hero was Bonaparte. His Superman is little more than the idealisation or fantasy of the warrior-hero and Supermachiavelli combined, employing violence and cunning, cruelty and crime, although there was no conventional 'crime' in Nietzsche's system - only the will to power.
Nietzsche went mad in 1888. He was, of course, mad all the time; his writings were inspired revelations from the deepest subconscious levels of his own pysche which mirrored the culture that produced him. Since that culture was about to burst forth on the world stage they were also extraordinary books of prophecy touched with genius. That he was not a Prussian Junker, but the bourgeois son of a Protestant pastor, or that others from other cultures expressed similar views are beside the point. He was expressing in extreme, grotesque form the masculine, martial code that inspired Bismarck in the Prussian Wars of unification, and by stirring in the new 'laws' of evolutionary biology justified intellectually the compulsions of a warrior caste. Had his visions not corresponded to those of his countrymen he would not have spawned so many in his own image;
Some of the most pernicious of these concerned breeding to produce a race of Supermen. Nietzsche proposed choosing the best racial specimens for breeding, but prohibiting the reproduction of the unfit, sterilising criminals and annihilating misfits. Such a programme of 'race hygiene' was espoused towards the end of the century by Alfred Ploetz, who prefaced his book THE FITNESS OF OUR RACE with a quotation from Nietzsche, 'Upward leads our way from the Species into the Superspecies'. Ploetz followed Galton and his English successors in seeing disease as a positive selecting out of the unfit, hence like them he perceived a fundamental contradiction between mordern medicine and the health of the race. Since the race stood higher in his order of things than the individual, he proposed that the health of the individual be subordinated to race hygiene. In 1904 he founded the Society for Race Hygiene which sought to publicise practical ways in which this principle could be realized; they included new marriage laws and a new concept of sexual morality which would encourage the most fit to propagate the greatest number of children. Combined with the sterilization of the Minderwertigen, or inferior specimens, this would breed in the best, select out the worst and so improve the racial gene pool. The highest race was assumed to be the white race, the highest branch the Aryan. Aryans were to bred like stallions into a Superspecies.
Padfield "Himmler" pg 32-33
This Manichaean argument of opposing forces locked in never-ending conflict fitted in with the 'Darwinian' doctrine of the 'struggle for existence' which Hitler had made his own - and Himmler too.
Padfield "Himmler" pg 171
And exactly where can I find this evidence?
You have failed, so far, to demonstrate any scientific evidence for Creation.
While I believe there is a substantial amount of evidence in support of the creation/intelligent design model, I will repeat myself once again. A agree that creation/intelligent design cannot be proven with absolute certainty and that anyone who said there is a strictly positive argument for that position is not being intellectually honest.
Because neither model can be proven in a positive sense - because no living person was there at the beginning - we are left to make observations of the world around us and attempt to formulate models that may help explain how we got here in the present state. Observation where one looks for evidence that confirms what one wants to believe certainly has its drawbacks regarding potential or actual bias. This problem exists on both sides of the argument and at least I am willing to recognize it.
This, once again, gets us back to the only real method of determining whether creation or evolution is plausible. Although there are a number of books - too many for me to read them all - Behe's Darwin's Black Box addresses some very significant problems with evolutions ability to address what Behe calls 'irreducibly complex' features in 5-6 specific microbiological situations, some of which would have required an adaptation prior to the existence of a particular living organism or subsystem. Evolution can't possibly provide an answer to these particular problems. It also helps that Behe had no 'creation ax' to grind. He simply concludes that however we got here, it wasn't evolution.
Therefore Evolution is the preferred scientific model to describe speciation on this planet.
Why should any scientific model be 'preferred'? We should be more interested in creating (pun not intended) a model that best explains life and the world as it exists today. If nothing else, at least we agree that the science associated with creation or evolution has not, nor will it likely ever, develope to the point of being able to truly call it a 'scientific theory'.
If you are waiting for me to become frustrated, you are in for a very long wait. Unlike most people, my self-image does not depend on what others say or imply about me. The God, whose only begotten Son Jesus Christ, in whom I entrusted with my very soul, is the only Person whose approval I want or need. Certainly I consult with wise men and women of faith who share the same God, but as for others, their criticisms are not worthy of a moments consideration.
I haven't found a good description of the mechanism by which meisosis fails in hybrids whether due to nonhomologous chromosomes or different numbers of chromosomes. It seems that when good homology is present there is a greater likelihood of fertile hybrids even with aneuploidy than if there is poor homology and the same number of chromosomes. The success of meiosis depends on the synaptonemal complex and the separation of the paired chromosomes at Meiosis I. Cell death seems to be triggered by the mere presence of unpaired chromosomes. Can you recommend a good source describing exactly how this occurs?
The ancients believed that there were many levels of existence but that the same laws applied on every level. "What is above is the same as what is below."
If you don't care to know the laws that operate on the physical plane of existence how can you be sure about the laws that operate on a supposed higher plane of existence (e.g., mental, emotional, spiritual).
"I suspect the motivation behind evolution supporters is to reduce life to a simple random process, without essential meaning and subject to man's intervention." -- lightstream
Your suspicions are groundless. The real motivation is simply the desire to know and to understand.
And obligatory amongst earthworms.
Not really. Meiotic checkpoints are active in G2 and the usual candidates players for them are kinases like p53 and various topoisomerases. I also recall reading somewhere that it was cytoskeletally mediated with particular involvement by actin. There's probably a fair amount of research from the infertility crowd.
"Current Topics in Developmental Biology: Meiosis and Gametogenesis, Vol. 37" by Handel
"Meiotic Inhibition: Molecular Control of Meiosis" by Haseltine and First
"Understanding Mitosis and Meiosis : An Interactive Education Tool" by Oud and Rickards
Great!
The Rickards material will point you to actin involvement.
Haseltine (one of the infertility people) would be an excellent source.
Handel may not be quite as useful for this specific topic.
Every man follows the path he chooses for himself. The first "Christians" considered themselves to be Gods intrinsically capable of spiritual wisdom. If this is what you are suggesting then you may well have already entered the ranks of the divine and are now as infallible in matters of faith and morals as the Pope himself. Having reached this state you may as well turn your attention to the physical world in which you find yourself. My spiritual intuition tells me (for I am also a God} that there is something about this existence that is worth pondering for its own sake.
Convergence refers to adapting to the same niche. A classic case is the Tasmanian "Tiger"; which is not closely related to regular tigers, being a marsupial. Homology is the fact that many species share the same underlying structure, even if it's well-disguised. Birds and bats are both adapted to fly, and they've onverged on having wings. Both are chordates, so the limbs are similar.
Are they all blind IN THE SAME WAY? Or did some lose gene "A" and others lose "B", both of which are necessary tos sight, but aren't needed in the cave environment.
Look at the links given in post 363 and decide for yourself. What about the Karst window population (these are all 1 species of fish). Oh and another thing, give the blind ones a lens and they get an eye.
Bird and Bat wings are not technically homologous. The Bird wing is made from the bones of the arm while the Bat wing is constructed from the bones of the hand. These are analagous structures in that they have the same function but are made from nonhomologous components.
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