Posted on 07/01/2002 7:25:44 AM PDT by aculeus
I would disagree with that. The evolutionary process is totally happenstance, not organized. If something was designed it could not have arisen in an disorganized way. Evolution and ID are mutually exclusive.
It may not be able to test non-natural phenomena, but it can detect its existence. We know there is thought, though we cannot touch it, feel it or make love to it. We know there is love, though it has no materiality. We know there is such a thing as conscience, though we cannot measure it. In fact, science even knows about the power of faith and recognizes its value. That is why doctors will encourage the patients to get well. They know that faith in that they can be healed, faith in wanting to continue to live, faith that their prayers will be answered, is often more powerful than any medicine they can administer. In fact, the power of faith is so much recognized by science that before a new drug is allowed to be called effective, it must pass a test where a control group is told that they are getting the drug when all they are getting is sugar pills.
Excellent point. And it shows exactly why evolution is not science. Science is about seeking the truth. Evolutionists only seek confirmation of their philosophy and seek to bar others from investigating other avenues of inquiry. The behavior of evolutionists is not that of science, which always welcomes new ways of thinking, new questions, new ideas. Their behavior is that of ideologues who seek to control others and forbid them to follow any path but their own.
Totally untrue. ID seeks to find the connections amongst different parts of an organism. This is science. In fact, for the last hundred years, that is about all that biological science has been looking at - the interconnections between different systems in the body, different cells, different genes, different bits of DNA. The evolutionists however, deny these interconnections because they cause problems for their random theory. A thoroughly interconnected organism cannot arise through random means because no part is impervious to all the other parts. Therefore gradual change in such an organism would be impossible as Darwin himself admitted in the Origins when he said:
"If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed, which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down. "
From: Charles Darwin, "On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life", Chapter 6.
In a biological system in which each part is both affected by every other part and affects every other part, gradual, haphazard modification is utterly impossible. The discoveries of science have all shown that ID's theory is correct. The human body and that of other creatures is indeed totally interconnected. Therefore ID is the way to scientifically explore biology. So it is evolution and its silly reductionist theory that is not science, and that is why evolutionists want to make sure no one hears about ID.
Actually no. This is the problem with natural selection being the agent of diversity: natural selection is a killer. All it does is kill mistakes, it destroys variety, it destroys genes, traits, etc. It does not creat any. In other words it is more like the grim reaper than a creator. Which brings me to another point about evolution. Evolutionists seem to be the only people that assert (and with a straight face!) that 4 - 2 = 6. They are the only people that say (more than that, they insist) that you can add to something by taking away things from it.
as well as the fossil record of life in prior eras.
Aah, the fossil record! What a marvelous thing! The first human descendant not so long ago was a face which was more plaster than bone. The first primate nowadays is two ankle bones and a lower jaw discovered decades before a thousand miles away. The first mammal is again a lower jaw and some crushed bones conveniently plastered together. This is some fantastic proof! Of course they cannot tell us if any of these 'proofs' had the same DNA as others in their supposed 'evolutionary tree' because of course DNA does not survive that long. They cannot tell us what their brains were like either, whether they were cold blooded or warm blooded, what they ate, how they behaved, whether they were smart or dumb, whether they had mammary glands, whether they could talk or any of the numerous very important things which could show descent. The fossil record is therefore nothing more than fairy tales for atheists.
Not at all. Essentially there is no Darwinian mechanics. What evolutionists do is once a discovery is made, they say it was predicted by evolution. There is nothing in evolutionary theory that would predict that inbreeding is bad. In fact, Darwin was so wrong, that he thought he could get rid of genetic diseases by killing the victims of those diseases. Actually, Mendelian genetics tell us that if one wishes to rid the world of such diseases in such a horrible way, what one needs to do is to kill the carriers - the parents whose genes when joined together bring out these recessive horrible genetic diseases. Note, that I am not advocating such a thing, but Darwin did indeed advocate the killing of the victims of genetic diseases.
You do not understand. For man to have descended from a bacteria, you need additions, not deletions or substitutions. This is the problem with evolution and with natural selection, it cannot account for such additions. There is no agent to accomplish such additions. Evolution requires the creation of new faculties, genes, traits.
the fact that counterexamples have not been discovered provides strong evidence that they cannot be numerous.
Examples contrary to evolution are indeed known: euglena and the platypus, two creatures which could not have descended from any other species. Check it out. However, what is worse for evolution, is that no examples of transformations of one species into another more complex one have ever been discovered.
And still you refuse to see. Take a quarter out of your pocket (again!) and start flipping (again!). Each flip equals one child. Heads they're unmutated, tails they got the mutation. Flip it ten times. How many tails (mutations) did you get (pass on)?How big is your family? Mine is four. 50% of four is 2. If my dad had a neutral mutation, he would have passed it on to two of us on average. What was in one, is now in two.No Jenny, it is you who refuses to see. What matters is not how many children the person who has the child produces, it is the differential between how many children that person and the rest of the population produce that is the problem for transmission. Unless the mutation gives a tremendous advantage to the procreation of the individual - right away - it is almost impossible for it to beat the odds of 50%.
Is 2 > 1? Or is 2 < 1?
Remember the old Alberto VO5 commercial? "Tell two friends, and they'll tell two friends, and so on, and so on, and so on..." Pretty dumb marketing idea, isn't it? To think that continually going from 1 to 2 could actually increase the number of people infected with the Alberto VO5 meme!
And still you refuse to see. Take a quarter out of your pocket (again!) and start flipping (again!). Each flip equals one child. Heads they're unmutated, tails they got the mutation. Flip it ten times. How many tails (mutations) did you get (pass on)?How big is your family? Mine is four. 50% of four is 2. If my dad had a neutral mutation, he would have passed it on to two of us on average. What was in one, is now in two.No Jenny, it is you who refuses to see. What matters is not how many children the person who has the child produces, it is the differential between how many children that person and the rest of the population produce that is the problem for transmission. Unless the mutation gives a tremendous advantage to the procreation of the individual - right away - it is almost impossible for it to beat the odds of 50%.
Is 2 > 1? Or is 2 < 1?
Remember the old Alberto VO5 commercial? "Tell two friends, and they'll tell two friends, and so on, and so on, and so on..." Pretty dumb marketing idea, isn't it? To think that continually going from 1 to 2 could actually increase the number of people infected with the Alberto VO5 meme!
[Note to moderator: there are no personal attacks in this post.]
The thicker atmosphere hypothesis doesn't work for several reasons. Before the teratorn and Texas pterosaurs were discovered people used to think the pterodactyl at 35 - 50 lbs was the largest flying or gliding creature which was possible because careful calculations indicated that even a pure gliding creature would snap its wings in turns at anything more than 50 lbs. That would, of course, just happen faster in thicker air, assuming the creature was able to breathe the thicker air and not burn up.
The bone fragments they have for the Texas pterosaurs by the way indicate wing spans of 60'; nonetheless, the aeronautic engineering dept. at UT would not allow Wann Langston to put them on display that way and forced him to limit the reconstructions to 40' wingspans, basically saying something like 'you're making us look stupid enough even at 40' since even that for a flesh and blood creature was impossible by any rational standards.
Just as your picture of a stone that has never moved is irrelevant to the possibility that gravity has changed over time.
Picture doing that with oxen or even elephants and ropes; I mean, you'd have to get all the animals to pull at the same time and just hard enough not to ever snap any one rope. That's just a big joke.
Well, the three stones that form the base of the temple were certainly moved. I don't have enough details to suggest a probable method, but this strikes me as one of those things that involves clever uses of levers, inclined planes, block-and-tackle rigging, etcetera.
Humans are pretty ingenious, and I'm sure the solution wasn't arrived at (or executed) in a day.
Changing gravity as a solution has its own problems. And even if gravity was cut in half, that's still a 600 ton monolith...
Having spent 10 years flying sailplanes (gliders) as a hobby, I can tell you that this is not correct. A coordinated turn (and birds are much better at this than human pilots) at normal cruising speeds induces very little stress in the airframe.
Sure, it's possible to make hi-G turns that will snap the wings. Birds that encountered those limits wouldn't live to reproduce. Birds that grew to 200 pounds like your Teratornis were probably not doing snap rolls.
If your 50 pound limit were correct, then gravity would have to have been less that a quarter of what it is now.
... saying something like 'you're making us look stupid enough even at 40' since even that for a flesh and blood creature was impossible by any rational standards.
A 40-foot wingspan is about seven feet larger that a Cessna 150. The Cessna has about 10-pound wing loading at a maximum weight of 1600 pounds. The pterosaur you describe probably has a wing loading of less than 1 pound. The thing would float like a kite and have very little penetration (that is, it would accelerate very slowly and encounter very low-G forces in turns).
Lower the gravity to one fourth of the current value and the thing would need to carry rocks to be able to maneuver...
From zero? No, I can't do that. The means by which naturally-occuring organic compounds drifting in earth's early oceans eventually combined to become self-replicators, and eventually living cells, is not yet known. Evolution begins at the point when simple living organisms already exist.
Please note (again) that I have never said that genetic variation and natural selection don't occur. I agree, there is abundant evidence that they are real phenomena. So what? Where is the empirical evidence of their creative power?
I'm confused about what you're asking. You seem to agree that mutations occur. I'm confident that you agree with the concept of natural selection -- that in every generation, the better adapted, stronger, least sickly individuals are likely to be the ones who breed the next generation. So what is it that you're missing?
I agree with most of what you say, but I strongly disagree with the above. Many people say they believe in evolution just to get along. They really could care less either way so just mouth it because others say it. However, there are many evolutionists, who definitely have an atheist agenda and promote evolution in order to attack religion and promote atheism. This is easily evident on these threads where you see many evolutionists when the argument starts going against them begin to bash Christianity. In fact their term 'creationism' is an insult to Christianity. Christians believe in a Creator, not in creationism. Christianity is a religion, not an ideology as evolutionists try to paint it.
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