PBS Offers Intelligent Design Documentary

CREATION - Evolution Headlines ^ | 04/28/2003 | Illustra Media/CREATION - Evolution Headlines

[Remedy]

According to Illustra Media, the Public Broadcasting System uploaded the film Unlocking the Mystery of Life to its satellite this past Sunday. For the next three years, it will be available for member stations to download and broadcast. In addition, PBS is offering the film on their Shop PBS website under Science/Biology videos (page 4).

The film, released a little over a year ago, has been called a definitive presentation of the Intelligent Design movement. With interviews and evidences from eight PhD scientists, it presents strictly scientific (not religious) arguments that challenge Darwinian evolution, and show instead that intelligent design is a superior explanation for the complexity of life, particularly of DNA and molecular machines. The film has been well received not only across America but in Russia and other countries. Many public school teachers are using the material in science classrooms without fear of controversies over creationism or religion in the science classroom, because the material is scientific, not religious, in all its arguments and evidences, and presents reputable scientists who are well qualified in their fields: Dean Kenyon, Michael Behe, Jonathan Wells, Steven Meyer, William Dembski, Scott Minnich, Jed Macosko, and Paul Nelson, with a couple of brief appearances by Phillip E. Johnson, the "founder" of the Intelligent Design movement.

Check with your local PBS Station to find out when they plan to air it. If it is not on their schedule, call or write and encourage them to show the film. Why should television partly supported by public tax funds present only a one-sided view on this subject, so foundational to all people believe and think? We applaud PBS's move, but it is only partial penance for the Evolution series and decades of biased reporting on evolution.

This is a wonderful film, beautifully edited and shot on many locations, including the Galápagos Islands, and scored to original music by Mark Lewis. People are not only buying it for themselves, but buying extra copies to show to friends and co-workers. Unlocking the Mystery of Life available here on our Products page in VHS and DVD formats. The film is about an hour long and includes vivid computer graphics of DNA in action. The DVD version includes an extra half-hour of bonus features, including answers to 14 frequently-asked questions about intelligent design, answered by the scientists who appear in the film.

This is a must-see video. Get it, and get it around.

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Intelligent Design Gets a Powerful New Media Boost 03/09/2002
Exclusive Over 600 guests gave a standing ovation Saturday March 9 at the premiere of a new film by Illustra Media, Unlocking the Mystery of Life. This 67-minute documentary is in many ways a definitive portrayal of the Intelligent Design movement that is sweeping the country. Intelligent Design is a non-religious, non-sectarian, strictly scientific view of origins with both negative and positive arguments: negative, that Darwinism is insufficient to explain the complexity of life, and positive, that intelligent design, or information, is a fundamental entity that must be taken into consideration in explanations of the origin of complex, specified structures like DNA. The film features interviews with a Who's Who of the Intelligent Design movement: Phillip Johnson, Michael Behe, Jonathan Wells, Paul Nelson, Stephen Meyer, Dean Kenyon, William Dembski, and others, who explain the issues and arguments for intelligent design as the key to unlocking the mystery of life. The film also features nearly 20 minutes of award-quality computer animation of molecular machines, manufacturing plants, and storage libraries of elaborate information - DNA and proteins at work in the cell, climaxing with a dazzling view of DNA transcription and translation.
In his keynote address, Dr. Paul Nelson (who appears in the film), gave reasons for optimism. He said that Time Magazine, usually solidly Darwinian, admitted just last week that these Intelligent Design scientists may be onto something. U.S. News and World Report is also coming out with a piece on I.D. And Stephen Meyer, who also appears in the film, could not be at the premiere because he was on his way to Ohio (see next headline), armed with copies of the film to give to the school board members. Nelson said that scientists should not arbitrarily rule design off the table. "Keeping science from discovering something that might be true is like having a pair of spectacles that distorts your vision," he said. "It does profound harm to science." He described how Ronald Numbers, evolutionist, once told him that design might be true, but science is a game, with the rule that scientists cannot even consider the possibility of design; "that's just the way it is," he said. (See this quote by Richard Lewontin for comparison.) Yet design is already commonly considered in archaeology, cryptography, forensics, and SETI, so why not in biology? Apparently this arbitrary rule has become a national controversy. Intelligent Design, says Nelson, is finally removing a "rule of the game" that is hindering science. If the reaction of the crowd at the premiere luncheon was any indication, Unlocking the Mystery of Life has launched a well-aimed smart weapon at the citadels of Darwinism.

We highly recommend this film. Copies are just now becoming available for $20. Visit IllustraMedia.com and order it. View it, and pass it around. Share it with your teachers, your co-workers, your church. You will have no embarrassment showing this high-quality, beautiful, amazing film to anyone, even the most ardent evolutionist.

 

 

[Ichneumon]

Yeah well try it the evolutionary way: without the goal phrase.

Make up your mind -- do you want to try it "without the goal phrase", or do you want to try it "the evolutionary way"? You can't have it both ways.

Evolution requires a nondiscrete selective force (along with replication and variation). If you don't understand this basic thing about evolution, it's no wonder you've got all sorts of incorrect presumptions about what it is or is not capable of doing.

But hey, that's only been known since 1859, perhaps you haven't kept up.

For evolution to occur, there has to be some method by which variations are "graded" in some fashion by whether they are more or less "successful", and this has to affect their reproductive rates. In nature, that takes place by the sheer fact of life itself -- those individuals which are better suited to survive long enough to reproduce (and reproduce successfully, and/or more often) are the ones who are going to pass on more of their genes than the ones who do so less successfully.

If you're going to use your "hello world" as an *evolutionary* example, instead of an irrelevant exercise in random walks, you're going to have to include some sort of method by which those programs that get *closer* to a "hello world" output are more likely to replicate than those which are *farther* from that output.

Evolution is an exercise in hill-climbing, not wandering aimlessly around on a flat surface hoping to bump into a lone invisible flagpole.

You can amaze yourself with false premises all day.

Indeed, so why don't you cut it out? Your "examples" are false premises in that they specifically rule out actually applying evolution. And then you declare "victory" when your non-evolutionary scenarios are self-evidently not going to evolve successfully.

If you want to discuss evolution, put for an example which meets the requirements for evolution to occur. Stop throwing out "false premises all day".

The only question that remains is, are you doing this on purpose or through error?

[tortoise]

While you?re waiting, take the time to become Biblically literate. None of us knows everything or is right about everything. But we have a rich history of scientists who took the time to study the scriptures, despite their colleague?s disparagement of the endeavor.

I am quite probably more Biblically literate than the vast majority of Christians out there (though a bit rusty at this point). As I mentioned previously, my father was a theologian and Biblical scholar with degrees from good universities, teaches at seminaries, is an ordained Protestant Reverend, was an Army chaplain, etc. Today he just preaches at a small town church in the middle of nowhere. Needless to say, I have had more exposure to the intricate details of the Bible and Biblical history than most people. I grew up surrounded by copies of the original texts from which the Bible is based (including a great many not included in the standard Bible), written in languages such as ancient Greek and Hebrew (my father is fluent in several Biblical languages and can read the source documents directly).

My point being that I grew up reading the Bible from end-to-end, and with one of the best references on the subject at my beck and call (being the inquisitive kid that I was). There isn't anything there for me that I haven't already found. Perhaps it is because my father also taught me mathematics and logic as a very young child, and I was reading at an adult level by the second grade. And my father loved to have debates myself and my siblings on all manner of topic; you didn't survive in my family without good debate skills. I was a voracious reader, and the Bible, while a rich (if uneven) book of myth and history, did not stand out as being particularly special. My father, with his hobby of mathematics and logic, always insisted on a rational and consistent construction of a position, and always said that I should never believe something was true merely because he stated it. And even now, my father will assert that there is nothing inconsistent or incorrect in my reasoning. (If you are lost at this point epistemologically, see the theologian Bartley's "Retreate to Commitment".) Now that I am older, I realize that my father never really examined his premises as much as I did. Bottom line is that I've been teflon to religion of all types for most of my life even though I was immersed in Christianity from birth. I'm not anti-religion, it just doesn't do anything for me so I ignore it.

Incidentally, there are better tomes than the Bible to live a life by in my opinion, though the Bible certain has a large chunk of wisdom in it (though dubious in a number of places, and occasionally irrelevant). I think my favorite book of proverbs and parables from all times and cultures is Heinlein's "Time Enough For Love".

[Ichneumon]

I have not been given reams of evidence.

Yes, you have. Try printing it off and count how many reams of paper it takes.

I have been presented with internet links, which do not tie into one another for a complete picture.

Ah, there's your mistake. The "tying into one another" and the "complete picture" is something that's supposed to take place in your own head.

The "big picture" is something that forms when you think about the evidence, realize how it interlocks together, and you form conclusions based on those observations. It's nothing that anyone can place on a single webpage for you to view and go "aha!". You can only reach understanding yourself. Or not.

It is sporadic, incomplete, and one questions if there is any true science involved.

One can "question" anything to the point of pigheadedness. Sooner or later, you have to presume that peer-reviewed information meets at least minimum standards of honesty and reliability. As the old saying goes, it's good to keep an open mind, but not so open that your brain falls out.

If one is stubbornly determined to reject an obvious conclusion, one can reject *any* evidence provided to support it by just "questioning" it eternally, and continually imagining alternate "possibilities". This was Atlaw's point to you when he questioned all your evidence for continental drift. At some point, healthy skepticism turns into a dogmatic refusal to ever give an inch no matter *how* strong the evidence to the contrary.

It is full of "faith",

No, it isn't. Unless you call accepting direct evidence without reflexively going, "MAYBE NOT!" in response to be some sort of act of "faith". Okay, yeah -- maybe all the "evidence" is faked by some factory in Fort Wayne, Indiana... Or maybe the uber-skeptic is just acting childish.

conjecture,

Where, please?

and incomplete pictures.

See above. All evidenciary "pictures" are always "incomplete". There's never ironclad proof in this world. Maybe the Earth just *seems* round...

But sooner or later, you have to decide whether the incomplete picture implied by the evidence, like a jigsaw puzzle that's missing some of its pieces, clearly seems to show, say, a forest, or a beachfront.

Or maybe you don't want to decide, because you really don't want it to *be* a beachfront, despite all those pieces in the puzzle showing what appears to be sand, blue water, waves, a kid wearing swimtrunks making a sand castle, a sailboat, and so on. Hey, maybe you can hold out for a few more pieces being added someday which might suddenly turn the whole thing into a forest after all, better reserve judgement, eh?

Now, someone gave me a rather good link The Tree of Life, and I would like to see how that develops.

One thing you're missing is that if evolution were false, it wouldn't be possible to have developed that website even *this* far. The fossil evidence (form, age, location), the DNA evidence (paralogous sequences, shared "junk" of various types, shared sequences), the morphological comparisons, etc. etc. etc. would have *very* quickly turned up conflicting "answers" on the question of, "how do these various species fit together in an evolutionary tree"?

The fact that they *can* make a "Tree of Life" website where an evolutionary tree snaps together like pieces in a well-made (time-ordered tree-shaped) jigsaw puzzle, or the fact that you *can* find fossils that show a "ladder" of changes stretching neatly between a fish and an elephant (and which fit appropriately by age), and literally *countless* other examples, *all* strongly confirm evolution.

Think about it. If, say, creationism were true, why on earth *would* there be anything even *remotely* like transitional forms between fish/amphibian, amphibian/reptile, reptile/mammal, primitive-mammal/elephant? If the transitional forms weren't there because they evolved, why in the heck do they exist at *all*? Conversely, why aren't there any animal types that *aren't* clearly connected to other, earlier forms?

Why do all the dozens of different kinds of predictions of evolutionary theory always end up being confirmed by countless subsequent discoveries/evidence which, lo and behold, match what you'd expect to find if evolution were true? Conversely (see the same link), why do we *never* find things which are perfectly possible to exist (especially from a creationist theory) which would immediately *contradict* an evolutionary origin?

Fine, so we'll never assemble a "complete" picture. The point, however, is that why do all the literally millions of pieces of evidence that we do find, so *beautifully* fit an evolutionary jigsaw puzzle, and so poorly fit any conceivable picture which does not include evolution as the "artist"?

Just how many such pieces do you need there to be before you're going to accept evolution as "probably true" just as you already accept continental drift as "probably true", despite the fact that it's "picture" is not "complete" and never will be either?

You say that, simply, earthquakes are sufficient to convince me of plate movement. No. There are earthquakes without faults (shear pressure, buckling, etc...further proof af plate movement). Evidence: Sattelite imagery of faults, there is ocean mapping of faults, there is measurable movement in the faults, the faults are visible, the faults are continually active, and there have been massive movements of the faults...of several feet at once (alaska most recently)...within the recent past. These major fault lines are ringed with volcanic activity. We understand our earths core is molten ...how do we know this? Simple physics, gravitational pull and immense pressure. Of course you know all this. Thee are patterns of volcanic activity lining these faults. Anybody who has taken a basic geology course knows this. Its not really open to debate. Evolution is a bit more complex, isn't it?

No, actually, it's not.

It can't be reproduced in a lab (macro, not micro).

Let's see you reproduce continental drift in the lab, eh?

Why the stubborn insistence on "in the lab"? Are labs better places for experiments than in the field? More broadly, do we have to be able to personally reproduce something to demonstrate it happened and how? Have you drifted any continents lately? Furthermore, see a recent post of mine. I have personally, "in the lab", evolved predator/prey, viral, and sybiotic/parasitic varieties from where none had prior existed. Does that count? Why not?

And where exactly do you draw the line between "micro" and "macro"? *Is* there any such objective line?

It cannot be observed.

Oh, puh-leaze... It most certainly can.

There are bits of evidence; "effectively in its infancy, with enormous amounts of information yet to be learned."

That was said with respect to abiogenesis, not evolution.

It is being taught as fact in schools. It is no longer being passed off as theory. It is still a theory.

It is taught as what it is: both a fact *and* a theory. And I defy you to support your claim that it is "no longer being [taught] as theory" in schools.

No one has presented evidence sufficient to erase doubt.

In my opinion, it has been at least 30 years since evolution long passed the point of having "sufficient evidence to erase doubt" in anyone with a truly open, unbiased mind. And the evidence has only gotten stronger and more complete in the past three decades.

The more of the evidence you actually know, the greater your odds of concluding that evolution is correct. This is why polls show that while 49% of the US general public believes in evolution, 95% of "scientists" do, and over 99% of "biological scientists" do.

As for "erasing doubt", anyone can maintain doubt in the face of any amount of evidence, if they choose to.

[Ichneumon]

[Space cowboy placemarker]

That will cost you 200,000 woolongs.

I wager 50 quatloos on the tortoise!

[cookcounty]

"Posted by Ichneumon to cookcounty On News/Activism 05/03/2003 10:52 PM PDT #415 of 584 Why only once? Why not twice? Why not 1,000X? Why not a trillion times? Because any budding attempts to repeat the process would be eaten by the evolved results of the *first* success. Often"? Only if it were "easy" to occur.

How have you determined with such precision how "easy" (or difficult ) it was to occur?

[Doctor Stochastic]

You introduced the goal phrase: "Hello World." The experiment in post 572 did what you asked.

[bondserv]

Like you I am a voracious reader.

Because you are the son of a reverend I am sure that you are quite familiar with the scriptural concept of the inspiration of the scriptures by the Holy Spirit.

Over 40 authors who were inspired by the same Holy Spirit wrote the 66 books of the Bible. There is also the scriptural concept that the Holy Spirit only opens the scriptures to those who believe in the Lordship of Christ.

Unfortunately an overly scholarly approach to scripture can be a detriment to ones ability to maintain a perspective on the entirety of scripture. Jesus spent many of His discussions with the Jews of His day criticizing them for focusing to narrowly like a lawyer.

Jesus was not against knowing the scriptures, but warned against over applying the traditions of men, thereby overlooking the personal message God was conveying to the person as an individual. Evangelicals would call it being religious toward God, but not having a personal relationship with God. The difference between the two is enormous!

My prayer for you would be that you took a step of faith and asked Jesus to open your eyes to the truths that He wants to share with you as an individual. Disregard your prior knowledge of the Bible and seek His enlightenment beneath the "...uneven book of myth and history".

My personal testimony is that when I believed that Jesus died for me specifically, He began immediately improving my character and has continued to be faithful in encouraging me to change those destructive areas of my life with His strength.

When I took the step to belief a marked transformation occurred, and a simple reading of history will demonstrate that many very evil people were completely transformed well by belief in Jesus Christ. He is to this day the central figure between peoples of the world. (The United States being the only nation with a large group of Biblically oriented Christians).

1. The Muslims of the world see the United States as a Christian Nation. (Ironically the part of America Religious Muslims despise the most is Anti-Christian Hollywood, and on the opposite spectrum, Christian support for the homeland of the chosen people of the Bible).

2. Europe sees the United States as a backward over moral (especially regarding our impeachment of Clinton) Bible thumpers.

3. The major watershed debates in America are:
a. Abortion
b. Homosexuality
c. Personal responsibility (Gov. welfare, Health Care, Guns, Private property...)

Biblical morality divides the world we live in. The passages of scripture have more relevance today than they have in any time in History!

Try rereading the Bible with an open mind.

[Aric2000]

That has to be my favorite book as well, excellent laws for life in that book.

Gotta love Lazarus Long, just gotta!!

[tortoise]

Try rereading the Bible with an open mind.

I have read it with an open mind. But remember, the words in the Bible are competing with the words of everything else I have ever read. Nothing I read is ever put on a pedestal (except for perhaps the Bible when I was a child, but that didn't last), and I pick and choose the best ideas from all sources. To someone like me, words are but words no matter who writes them and they will stand or fall on their own merits. It doesn't matter if we are talking about The Bible, The Principia Mathematica, or Mao's Little Red Book. No man has a monopoly on The Truth, nor is it determined by popular consensus. Words are written by men, no matter from what is claimed to have inspired them, so no book has any intrinsic claim to authority.

Because I am not presuming the conclusion you hope I will arrive at, I have no reason to treat the Bible as anything but a book like any other, full of concepts put on paper by men. I'm willing to consider anything, but all words must earn their credit. But nothing I have ever read in the Bible suggests that it is actually the source of Truth above all other books. And indeed, many books make the this very claim. This is really the problem with the Bible: it has no intrinsic claim to authority, yet the words in it are not particularly compelling when measured by other great written works of man. Many men have written books with purer, more elegant conceptual frameworks than the Bible.

I find inspiration in the elegant construction of useful concepts and ideas, NOT in the claimed authority of the originator. It would be a fallacy of reasoning to do otherwise. But many people live life quite well on much more questionable standards of knowledge.

[Aric2000]

It is wonderful that you have found a religion that gives you comfort, but it is religion.

Science on the other hand is science.

If science has a theory that refutes, or puts into question your creation story, then perhaps you should take a closer look at the reasons you hate evolution so much.

If it were true that god speaks to those who believe through the bible, is he telling you, TAKE THIS LITERALLY, or else, or is he actually telling you a story in morality, that uses the creation story as it's basis?

So, is the bible a book of morality, or is it a literal teaching of history?

You need to make up your mind. Or do you believe that it is both and feel that you can pick out which is which?

Because I know MANY people who believe in the bible as you do, and each one comes to a different conclusion, so, tell me who's right?

[Ichneumon]

Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould said, "The extreme rarity of intermediate forms persists as the trade secret of paleontology."

Yawn. Creationists love quoting people out of context, or simply misquoting them entirely. Don't believe me? Check this out: Quotations and Misquotations: Why What Antievolutionists Quote is Not Valid Evidence Against Evolution . It's well worth reading the entire page, but pay special attention to the massive numbers of links at the bottom to websites devoted to correcting creationist "errors" when they purport to quote people, and also the first few paragraphs which discusses why even accurate quotes (from anyone) hardly prove a damned thing either way.

Let's take the Gould quote above as a case study. Gosh, sounds like Gould is saying that there are barely any "intermediate forms" at all, eh? Well, sure, when it's presented GROSSLY OUT OF CONTEXT.

In full text, Gould was clearly talking about the relative sparsity of "intermediate forms" at the species level. Gould has never denied that intermediate forms are common for *higher-level* transitions. But don't just take my word for it:

Faced with these facts of evolution and the philosophical bankruptcy of their own position, creationists rely upon distortion and innuendo to buttress their rhetorical claim. If I sound sharp or bitter, indeed I am—for I have become a major target of these practices. [...] Since we proposed punctuated equilibria to explain trends, it is infuriating to be quoted again and again by creationists -— whether through design or stupidity, I do not know -— as admitting that the fossil record includes no transitional forms. Transitional forms are generally lacking at the species level, but they are abundant between larger groups. Yet a pamphlet entitled "Harvard Scientists Agree Evolution Is a Hoax" states: "The facts of punctuated equilibrium which Gould and Eldredge…are forcing Darwinists to swallow fit the picture that Bryan insisted on, and which God has revealed to us in the Bible." [...] I am both angry at and amused by the creationists; but mostly I am deeply sad. Sad for many reasons.

( Stephen Jay Gould, "Evolution as Fact and Theory," May 1981; from Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes: Further Reflections in Natural History, New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1994, pp. 253-262. )

You might want to read the whole essay. It also discusses many of the lines of evidence for evolution.

Sir Fred Hoyle, a British astronomer famous for research on origins of the universe,

...but a lousy biologist...

"claims that believing the first cell originated by chance is like believing a tornado could sweep through a junkyard filled with airplane parts and form a Boeing 747."

Good old Hoyle and his straw man. First, no biologist believes that "the first cell originated by chance". Hoyle is grossly misstating the actual mechanism(s) by which the first replicator may have arisen, *and* how the first "cell" likely arose (note: The two are *not* the same thing).

Second, a "tornado in a junkyard" is a truly ridiculous analogy for either evolution (it lacks both replication and selection) *or* abiogenesis (a 747 and a junkyard, by their natures, share very little in common with organic systems and chemical environments -- what is highly improbable in junkyards is not nearly so absurd in organic chemistry).

Plus Hoyle believed that insects might be as intelligent as humans, so I'm not sure if he's really all that good a source.

Michael Denton, an Australian biologist and self-described agnostic. Denton writes that evolutionists once thought that comparing DNA sequences would prove the "family tree" linkage between species that Darwin conceived. But "Thousands of different sequences, protein and nucleic acid, have now been compared in hundreds of different species, but never has any sequence been found to be in any sense the lineal descendant or ancestor of any other sequence,"

To be blunt, Denton is either an idiot or a liar. His claim is flat wrong. For many specific examples of five entirely *independent* methods of linking common ancestry via DNA analysis, see Molecular Sequence Evidence. For *tons* of research studies turning up more DNA evidence of common ancestry on a regular basis, see The Journal of Molecular Biology. You can browse abstracts from hundreds of articles publshed in the past 89 issues on that site. For full text, subscribe to the online version or go visit a technical library. From just the most recent issue, for example:

The PRAT Purine Synthesis Gene Duplication in Drosophila melanogaster and Drosophila virilis Is Associated with a Retrotransposition Event and Diversification of Expression Patterns (short summary: the authors identified gene sequences which were inherited from a common ancestor of the two species 40 million years ago)

Phylogeny of Choanozoa, Apusozoa, and Other Protozoa and Early Eukaryote Megaevolution (short summary: A study of DNA sequences and the light it sheds on the very early split of the various single-cell organism types from a common ancestor)

Frequent Mitochondrial Gene Rearrangements at the Hymenopteran nad3–nad5 Junction (short summary: DNA from 21 distinct groups of wasps were compared and the implications for the family tree and "history" are discussed)

And here's one more from the Journal of Human Genetics: Molecular phylogenetics of the hominoid Y chromosome (short summary: Y-chromosome DNA from humans, chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans were compared and the results were as expected if the species share a common ancestor.)

Denton is quite simply flat wrong.

And of course Darwin himself, “Lastly, looking not to any one time, but to all time, if my theory be true, numberless intermediate varieties, linking closely together all the species of the same group, must assuredly have existed. But, as by this theory, innumerable transitional forms must have existed, why do we not find them embedded in countless numbers in the crust of the earth?”

The dishonesty of this "assembled" quote has already been discussed by others, and in fact Darwin *answered* his own question, while the creationist out-of-context quote tries to make it look like a declaration of failure.

But the primary response to the quote is, "so what?" Yes, there were few transitional fossils yet found when Darwin wrote this in *1859*. Paelontology was still in its infancy back then. Needless to say, we've found a *hell* of a lot of new fossils in the past 144 years. Plus there has been a major explosion of finds in just the past decade or so, including a wonderful cascade of new finds involving the dinosaur-to-bird transition, and the land-mammal-to-whale transition (including, drumroll please, *whales with legs*!)

The state of paleontology in 1859 is hardly relevant to where it stands today.

Now go from fish to ape,

I *already* provided you with the link for that. Do I have to hold your hand?

fish to dog,

I *already* provided you with the link for that. Do I have to hold your hand?

fish to horse,

I *already* provided you with the link for that. Do I have to hold your hand?

fish to...you get the point.

Yes, I do -- I get the point that you're not willing to do even the slightest bit of homework on this topic, even when we provide you with a direct link to the information.

The fossil record does not contain the evidence.

It does. You just refuse to look at it.

Go find me 10 more examples...

I gave you *hundreds*. What's your excuse now?

Furthermore, you originally declared that:

Where are all of your intermediary forms? I'll tell you where...well, they don't exist.

You were, as I showed, flatly and completely wrong. Contrary to your claim that they "don't exist" at all, I gave you roughly 50, in *specific* response to your request concerning transitions from fish to elephant. You claimed that "they don't exist". Well, they do, after all.

Did you acknowledge your error? No. Suddenly you change your tune and want to see "10" other lineages. If the existence of one well-documented lineage, which you didn't believe existed *at all*, didn't open your eyes, will 10? 100? 1,000,000?

You claimed in another post that you didn't "blow off" my post, but you most certainly have -- I gave you *exactly* what you asked for, in *huge* detail, in contrast to your belief that it didn't exist *at all*, and what do you do? You in effect say, "so what? How about another 10 for me to ignore?"

there should literally be millions upon millions. There are about 250 million fossils that have been found.

There are "literally millions upons millions". Every ancient fossil (well, not counting the ones which have gone entirely extinct) is a transitional form between what came before it, and their modern descendants, which are *not* the same as the ancient fossil forms. Even so-called "living fossils" such as the modern shark, horseshoe crab, and coelocanth are actually quite modified (in detail if not in general shape) from their ancient ancestors.

Are you sure you understand what a transitional form *is*?

Surely you can give me more (and realistic) examples than what you did.

Surely you can stop making excuses for trivializing how badly the fish-to-elephant fossil lineage punctures your original incorrect presumptions.

And what, exactly, do you believe to be "unrealistic" about it?

[Ichneumon]

How have you determined with such precision how "easy" (or difficult ) it was to occur?

I haven't. (Where on earth did you get the impression I said any such thing?)

I merely pointed out that *you* were the one who made an unsupported presumption about its apparent ease when you wrote: "Inded, it goes against all rationality to suggest that it did not happen often." This implies that you not only believed it was "easy" enough to "happen often", but that you were so sure of your estimation that, you say, it "goes against all rationality" to even consider otherwise.

*You* made a claim about it being that easy, *you* support it.

All I did was to say in effect, "that ain't necessarily the case, you're presuming it *was*necessarily easy".

[Ichneumon]

I now firmly believe that I can breed a german shepherd with a rot wheiler and convince you that it is the transitional form.

And what bizarre, error-filled line of "reasoning" leads you to that silly conclusion?

[Ichneumon]

You missed my point. I was challenging shawne (a creationist) to provide an explanation as to why he accepts inland seashells as inferential evidence of continental drift. My statement (for shawne's benefit) was in the spirit of a devil's advocate.

Yes, I had already figured that out by my post #405. I had even snapped to the "devil's advocate" label. That's what I get for reading parting of the thread backwards (I sometimes start with the most recent posts.)

If you trace back in the thread, you will find a rather interesting discussion in which shawne accepts inferences for continental drift, but rejects inferences for evolution.

Yes, and it's too bad he abandoned it so early. If he had kept with it, he might have taught himself something about epistemology.

[tortoise]

I don't give a nickels worth of attention to literary studies (it is just an excuse for liberal arts graduates to wax eloquent about bullshit), but I have always found "Time Enough For Love" to be a significant departure from much of Heinlein's other work. It is a very deep and wonderfully written tome that was clearly intended to emulate the model of great theological epics.

One thing that I have come to recognize is that this book actually follows the format of the Judeo-Christian bible. If you map how the styles of various chapters proceed, it follows a remarkably similar progression to the Bible, right down to the musical, poetic, and proverbial books of the Old Testament. Not only that, but more diligent scholars will notice that it includes many archetypes and myths of Judaic culture, carefully woven into the story. Except that the stories have been rewritten with an ethos and moral sense that a Thomas Jefferson or Ben Franklin could identify with. In fact, it has a very explicit American cultural context. My belief is that Heinlein was writing a theological epic, modeled on the Judeo-Christian theological epic, but replacing the Hebrew cultural elements and religious law with what he believed to be the fundamentally American principles of morality and ethics, and following the logical consequences of this premise in a Judaic mythological framework. In a sense, it is a complete, thorough, and well-thought out theological epic in its own right, comparable to the theological epics of many other religions (except better written and more accessible).

And yes, Lazarus Long is a man to aspire to in that book and a hell of a character. The embodiment of wisdom and experience; I wish I knew people like him. But yeah, "Time Enough For Love" is one of my all-time favorites. A collection of parables, proverbs, and epic histories that happen around the life of an otherwise ordinary man born in the early 20th century who somehow lives for thousands of years, as seen through the eyes of his future historians. Simply classic in my opinion.

[Ichneumon]

Since you guys seem to just love using google:

Do you have some sort of point here? You posted 5 links, all of which agree with what I *already* corrected you on, that the only dinosaurs known to have feathers were, and I quote myself, "On the branch of the dinosaur family that evolved to birds, yeah." The theropods, just as your 5 links all say.

Now, is this in some way supposed to rescue you from your original goofy error when you asked, "Why is it then that we believed, without a doubt, for so many years that dinosaurs had scales."

My answer, in case you've forgotten it already, is that we "believed" it "without a doubt" for "so many years" because, by gosh, they *did* have scales. I even gave you photographs of fossil dinosaurs clearly showing scales.

You were originally trying to imply that paleontologists were somehow in error about scaled dinosaurs for decades and that we all stupidly believed them, but recently we learned differently. Your implication is quite simply false.

If you had any honor, you'd retract your post and issue some form of admission of error and apology, instead of just posting 5 links and blithely pretending that they somehow salvage your original screwup or ameliorate my catching you at it.

They are saying maybe even mighty rex had feathers...

They're saying he *might* have and *if* he did, it was likely only while as a juvenile form.

And this still in no way rescues your gaffe, since T-Rex is yet another theropod, which agrees with my correction of you in post #457.

welcome to 2003

Well thanks, but *I* already knew this stuff several years ago. So glad you can finally catch up, though. Better late than never.

[Aric2000]

I have to write out my favorite from Lazarus long's notebook, just because it is so excellent.

"History does not record anywhere at anytime a religion that has any rational basis. Religion is a crutch for people not strong enough to stand up to the unknown without help. But, like dandruff, most people do have a religion and spend time and money on it and seem to derive considerable pleasure from fiddling with it."

or

"All men are created unequal"

or

"Men rarely (if ever) manage to dream up a god superior to themselves. Most god's have the manners and morals of a spoiled child."

OK, last one, for now.

"One man's theology is another man's belly laugh"

Gotta love them!!

[Ichneumon]

Please grace us with and example of something proven to not have a cause.

Positron-electron pair formation. Vacuum energy fluctuations. The particular moment of particle decay. There are many other quantum examples. What do I win?

This would be a violation of the law of cause and effect, another miracle!

Actually, it would be "another miracle!" if you were to make a post without major errors in it.

What exactly is this alleged "law of cause and effect" of which you speak, please?

Perhaps you're a Buddhist.

Or maybe you're agreeing with William Tiller when he writes of his "Law of Cause and Effect" and says, Our spiritual parents dressed us in our biobodysuits and put us in this playpen, which we call a universe, in order to grow in coherence, in order to develop our gifts of intentionality and in order to ultimately become what we were meant to become -- effective cocreators with our spiritual parents. . Hmm, that *does* sound like some of your posts...

Or maybe you meant the "Law of Cause and Effect" of the voice of Thoth, the Atlantean.

Because I can assure you that there's no "Law of Cause and Effect" in the field of physics. Ever since the advent of quantum mechanics, physicists are quite aware that things can happen without "causes". Causality took a hell of a beating in the earlier part of the 20th century, from which it has never recovered. The belief in "hidden variables" (i.e., underlying causes we just can't see) has been refuted in experiment after experiment. Even Einstein, who originally strongly resisted such a notion, was forced to concede.

Perhaps you were misled by the name of the "Causality Principle" of physics, which says something very different from your claim that every event must have a cause. Instead, the Causality Principle only says that if event A affects event B (or in layman's terms, A "causes" a change in B), then B cannot affect A. In short, the principle says that when there *is* causality, it will only run one direction. Incidentally, either faster-than-light signals, or time-travel would violate the Causality Principle. And evidence is starting to mount which may imply faster-than-light signals.

But I digress. In short, although you clearly enjoy fantasizing about its existence, there is no such thing as the "Law of Cause and Effect", and thus there's no cosmic uproar when it's "violated".

I am continually amazed at how you evos will point the finger at creationists and reduce their explanations to "goddidit!" while your explanations remain "itdidititself!"

What you fail to grasp is that there is plenty of strong evidence for the latter and little for the former.

Furthermore, creationists have no issue with "itdidititself" when asked to explain where God might have come from, and yet they strain at the very same gnat when asked, if they agree such a thing is possible, whether perhaps the universe might then have that same property. This is especially ironic in that they often invoke "goddidit" in order to *avoid* conceding that maybe "itdidititself", and then immediately turn around and happily accept "itdidititself" to explain where God came from. That begs the question, why not just remove the middleman?

For more elucidation on the creationists' several fallacies on that topic, check this out.

And while it doesn't give a cite (I'll have to go digging), this passage from that essay is especially intriguing: "Stephen Hawking's study of probability amplitudes has lead to the conclusion that our sort of universe has about a 99% chance of existing uncaused." Food for thought.

[Sure, his origin wouldn't be via anything *in* this Universe, but you've hardly "proven" that he therefore could exist without a "Cause" of some sort, from somewhere *other* than our universe.]

For you, I'm sure there is no proof of anything but evolution.

Wow, three major screwups in one short statement:

1. You're utterly mistaken when you presume that I think there is a "proof" for evolution. As I've already explained previously, science does not deal in "proofs". Perhaps eventually someone will listen.

2. There are plenty of proofs, but mostly in the realm of mathematics, formal systems, and logical argument.

3. Your little snide remark in no way strengthens the flaws in your original argument, nor lessens my demonstration of the existence of those flaws.

You presumed that, almost by definition, a being which created a universe would be "uncaused". I demonstrated that that ain't necessarily so, by providing a possible counterexample. That there *could* be an alternative is enough to puncture your presumption that your conclusion *had* to be true. QED.

Please detail your thinking on how an Ultimate Being could have an origin.

By being born of (or created by) another Ultimate Being, for example.

Your turn: Please detail your thinking on why an "Ultimate" being necessarily needs to exist at all, especially given the fact that universe creation, etc. could for example at least conceivably be the work of an incredibly powerful, incredibly intelligent (but somewhat less than "Ultimate") alien from the dimension Gaqlstan.

Why not Xarg, the Sufficiently Powerful, Sufficiently Smart, instead of Mr. Ultimate Being There Could Ever Be Who Has Absolutely No Limitations Of Any Kind?

Sometimes I wonder if the early Yahweh-worshippers (in a time of many competing theisms, remember) weren't just playing a game of "my god's bigger than your god because mine's infinite, so there, try to top that, nyah nyah".

[It only proves that if they have a Cause (and as far as we know, everything *needs* a Cause), it lies somewhere *else*.]

If everything needs a cause -- and I'm surprised to see that you agree with this law--

Me too, my mistake. It was very late at night and somehow quantum physics had slipped my mind. I retract the statement, becaues it's untrue.

then what caused our universe?

There's that "cause" presumption again...

If you'll be so kind as to rephrase your question as, "how did our universe form", then here's a good scenario

[Ichneumon]

Your list is such a mish-mash of stupidities (e.g. "Rocks gave rise to intelligence") gross misrepresentations of what science actually says (e.g. "Particles departing from each other at the speed of light formed planets and stars") and falsehoods ("Modern spores are found in precambrian shale" -- Burdick's a moron) that I sincerely *hope* you're trolling.

If you're not, then there's really no point in trying to correct all of your incredible misunderstandings -- it would be a full-time job.

But neither option inspires confidence.

In any case, your failure to respond to 3 of the requests to support your 4 declarations, your failure to choose only your *best* single example in response for each of the 4 questions, and the utterly laughable nature of your attempted response, I'm afraid that we're going to have to give you a failing grade on the matter I mentioned in the post to which you are responding:

Let's see if you've got anything better than empty accusations. Your reputation is riding on the quality of your responses.

The "quality" of your response is, in a word, pitiful, and readers will thus draw their own conclusions about your reputation.

I further wrote:

That'll not only save everyone (including you) a lot of time, it'll let us dismiss you once and for all if your "best" examples are shown to be misfires.

Consider yourself duly dismissed once and for all as a lightweight.