Posted on 12/22/2001 7:04:34 PM PST by Exnihilo
Who's to say there can't be a combination of factors? God used evolution as a means of experimenting to find out what things worked and what things didn't, but decided to spin a few wrinkles of his own into the mix as well?
Personally I think some sort of hybrid theory is probably closer to reality than either theory taken alone.
Anyone who voices even the meekest criticism of Darwinism gets the usual ad-hominem hysterical pregnancies from you.
Why does it bother you so much that people disagree with you?
Where? In the parent DNA? One parent or both? Or all humans have coding for six fingers and toes? What? What's the basis for your claim? The Bible?
You are inventing a novel idea of God -- one that isn't all knowing and therefore one who has to experiment -- therefore there is some fabric of the universe that he does not control, but that he is constrained to test and obey.
Good night.
Who cares about Darwinism? If you have proof for your theories of creationism or ID -- bring it forth. You are just wasting time shooting arrows at other theories when you could be blowing us away with these great proofs for your ideas -- you'd be on your way to a Nobel Prize -- instead you just plink away, fritter away your lives worrying about these "silly theories."
Look, when an astronomer has a new theory, he doesn't spend his life attacking astrologers -- he just publishes his theory and his evidence.
Do that. Prove ID, prove Creationism. Prove the Bible. I don't care if you can deductively prove that Astrology is bunk. Get to the good stuff.
So now you've opened the "toolkit" approach to macro-evolution. Can have another finger, 'cuz the codings already there. Can have another eye. Can have another knuckle. Can have a longer leg, a shorter leg, a bigger ear, a smaller ear. Can have a moved nose. Can have two legs or four legs. Can have enlongated toes that look like fingers, etc etc.
You've just admitted to the last 200 million years of macro evolution -- because many of modern physical structures existed in various forms back then.
Second, there is no evidence of a transitional form of any kind.
Interesting... You're emphatically NOT a creationist, yet you, against all evidence, emphatically claim there are NO transitional forms.
OK, so tell us: What DO you believe, exactly?
And so, most likely, would their kids. That one of the cells that's supposed to become the middle finger splits in two when it shouldn't and thus produces two middle fingers is not due to a genetic change, but due instead to an 'errant' split in fetal development.
You do raise a somewhat valid point in that subtle changes can lead to discrete effects. As a simple example, the number of offspring a female of a species will normally have at once is determined genetically, and yet the females of any species will almost always give birth to an integer number of young.
Even a trait like 'number of simultaneous young', however, could have intermediate states; between a species whose average litter was three and one whose average litter was four could quite easily be one whose average litter was 3.5 (about half were 3 or fewer, and about half were four or more). Any individual pregancy would result in an integer number of young, but the species' average need not be an integer.
Where? In the parent DNA? One parent or both? Or all humans have coding for six fingers and toes? What? What's the basis for your claim? The Bible?
Uh, you have fingers, right (I'm just guessing)? So unless you're using some odd sort of input device, you obviously have information for fingers in your genome.
As for having an extra one, that's most likely a result of an errant cell separation during prenatal development--not a genetic trait. A cell which was supposed to develop into a finger split and the two cells got separated, each becoming a separate finger. Since such a trait is not genetic, it cannot be inherited and is thus unlikely to play a role in evolution (unless certain genetic traits make such splits more or less likely to occur).
We take the side of science in spite of ... Lewis Beck used to say that anyone who could believe in God could believe in anything. To appeal to an omnipotent deity is to allow that at any moment the regularities of nature may be ruptured, that miracles may happen.he is simply a scientist admitting two things that many religionists have known for a long time. FIRST, that evolution vs. creationism is NOT science vs. religion: it is one religion against another. SECOND, that scientists are consummate hypocrites about the first.
First, for Lewontin & Johnson to call it "materialism" is a bad choice. Johnson has said that "naturalism" is synonymous with what he calls "materialism", so I'll use that term. Naturalism really only means the lawfulness & fundamental consistency & predictability of nature. After all, a miracle is precisely the suspension of natural laws, presumably by a person who lives in some kind of "super"-natural realm with the power to suspend the laws of nature in our lumpen universe.
Even with just the one paragraph you & Johnson are quoting, it looks like that's precisely the point that Lewontin is making.
So, Kyrie, if natural laws could be suspended by these otherworlders whenever they feel like it, then what would happen to science? This would happen: Only wizards would be the "true" scientists. Proper science would consist of knowing the right incantations & prayers to the right supernatural people needed for us to suspend natural laws when we need them to be.
There is no other form that true science could take if naturalism were false. What other form could science take if Johnson is correct?
But astronomy is based on observation. That's what those big long metal things with the glass on each end are for. For the astronomer, theory is product of observation, not the other way around.
Noting that transitional forms are horribly lacking from the fossil record--that's an observation.
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