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To: medved
Why are most conservatives so thrilled by their own little derogatory names for things that they don't understand? "ISID"..."dog-stupid" I doubt you would last five minutes in a real debate.
I disagreee with your thought that "evolving ANY complex creature involves a probability which is basically a tenth or twentieth order infinitessimal"...Could it be that we just do not understand all of the workings of evolution? Plus, eveolution is not an instant occurance, it takes eons and eons of time to nake changes. All thru history, what man thought were impossibilities have disappeared under the light of continued scientific and technological growth. Hell, I am old enough to remember when it was thought impossible for man to travel faster than the speed of sound, much less survive the radiation of outer space, and now it is done so often, we seldom give it a second thought.
I see no need for (what you call) miricles in the evolutionary theory. Again, remember many things that were once were thought to be miracles are now common place, thanks to scientific study.
"Christianity has been barred from our schools for the last thirty years and is still thriving. Could the same be said for evolutionism some thirty years hence?"
You keep making the same mistake of comparing a scientific theory with a religon. One is a doctrine...a way to live...based on faith and believe. The other is a scientific theroy that never mentions how to live ones life. But to keep the discussion going...I do believe that if evolution was not taught in primary or secondary schools, it would still be just as prevalent and true. You may wish to suppress science, but sorry, science IS what makes the world go round.
Tell me sir...what part of Rastifari is based on science? Well of course none of it. On a personal note...do you have something against Rastafarians? That is the second time you have mentioned them. Just wondering why you focus on them and not any of the other thousands of religous beliefs?
Oldcats
1,426 posted on 03/06/2002 4:59:26 AM PST by oldcats
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To: oldcats
I disagreee with your thought that "evolving ANY complex creature involves a probability which is basically a tenth or twentieth order infinitessimal"...Could it be that we just do not understand all of the workings of evolution?

As I note, the tenth - 20'th order infinitessimal is a best possible case scenario; the reality of the situation is much worse than that. First, natural selection could not feasibly select on the basis of hoped-for functionality; you could never get the desired unidirectional march from an arm to a wing, all you'd ever get would be some sort of a random walk around a mean for an arm, which is what you started with. Second, since any new kind of creature would need more than one new kind of organ, assuming you were to ever evolve the first such new organ, then during the time the second such was evolving, the first, being at best useless and at worst antifunctional, would DE-EVOLVE and become vestigial.

Plus, eveolution is not an instant occurance, it takes eons and eons of time to nake changes.

Unfortunately, in real life, the "eons of time" turn out to be a sort of a whiteman's fairytale and aren't really there.

Evolution, and the Redneck Watermelon Truck

The story goes that two old boys named Luke and Ray-Bob had themselves a truck and were buying watermelons in Fla. and Ga. for $2 and trucking them to Chicago and Detroit and selling them for $2. After awhile, they noticed that they were not making any money; naturally enough, they had a big business meeting and came to the conclusion that they needed a bigger truck.

Evolutionists, of course, are using time in precisely the same manner in which the two rednecks are using truck size, and there is no real reason for anybody to take them any more seriously than they would take the two rednecks.

Now, You couldn't easily prove that Luke and Ray-Bob couldn't possibly make money buying and selling for $2 since they could always say they merely needed the next size bigger truck. There is one thing which would really demolish their case however: that, God forbid, would be for somebody like Algor to get elected president and immediately outlaw the internal combustion engine; after THAT, guaranteed, nobody would ever make money trucking watermelons from Florida to Chicago and selling them for what they paid for them.

Likewise, If comebody could provide a coercive case for the fact that American Indians dealt with dinosaurs on a regular basis, then the time-frames which evolutionists so love to use as a magic wand to enable their doctrines would be demolished, the entire doctrine of evolutionism, broken. Not that there is any lack of logical proofs that no amount of time would suffice for macro-evolution but, without those time scales, no version of evolution is even thinkable, much less possible.


In this regard, evolutionists and geologists would appear to have developed a sort of a dinosaur-in-the-livingroom problem over the last few years. Take the case of Mishipishu, the "Water panther" for instance.

Petroglyphs show him with the dorsal blades of the stegosaur and Indian legends speak of him using his "great spiked tail" as a weapon. Remarkably, the Canadian national parks which maintain these pictographs are unaware of the notion of interpreting Mishipishu as a stegosaur, and refer to him only as a "manatou", or water spirit.

Vine Deloria is probably the best known native American author of the last half century or so. He is a past president of the National Council of American Indians, and several of his books, including the familiar "Custer Died for Your Sins", are standard university texts on Indian affairs.

One of Vine's books, "Red Earth, White Lies", is a book about catastrophism and about the great North American megaufauna extinctions which occurred around 12000 years ago (using conventional dating). In this book, Vine utterly destroys the standard "overkill" and "blitzkrieg" hypotheses which are used to explain these die-outs.

Vine informs me that "Red Earth, White Lies" is one of several books which arise from decades of research including conversations with nearly every story-teller and keeper of oral traditions from Alaska down to Central and South America. He tells me that, if there was one thing which used to completely floor him early on in this research, it was the extent to which most of these tribes retain oral traditions of Indians having to deal not only with pleistocene megafauna, but with dinosaurs as well. In "Red Earth, White Lies", he notes (pages 242-243) that:

Indians generfly speak with a precise and literal imagery. As a rule, when trying to identify creatures of the old stories, they say they are "like" familiar neighborhood animals, but then carefully differentiate the perceived differences. I have found that if the animal being described was in any way comparable to modern animals, that similarity would be pointed out; the word "monster" would not be used.

Only in instances where the creature bears no resemblance to anything we know today will it be described as a monster. Since no dinosaur shape resembles any modern animal, and since the reports are to be given literal credibility I must suggest that we are identifying a dinosaur. Thus, in the story of large animals at Pomme de Terre prairie in southwestern Missouri, a variant of the story suggests that the western animals were megafauna and the creatures who crossed the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers and invaded the lands of the megafauna were dinosaurs. The dinosaurs thus easily displace the familiar, perhaps Pleistocene, megafauna and move west, where we find their remains in the Rocky Mountains today

In numerous places in the Great Lakes are found pictographs of a creature who has been described in the English translation as the "water panther" This animal has a saw-toothed back and a benign, catlike face in many of the carvings. Various deeds are attributed to this panther, and it seems likely that the pictographs of this creature which are frequently carved near streams and lakes are a warning to others that a water panther inhabits that body of water. The Sioux have a tale about such a monster in the Missouri River. According to reports, the monster had ". . . red hair all over its body . . . and its body was shaped like that of a buffalo. It had one eye and in the middle of its forehead was one horn. Its backbone was just like a cross- cut saw; it was flat and notched like a saw or cogwheel" I suspect that the dinosaur in question here must be a stegosaurus.


Then there is the case of the Brontosaur Pictograph on rough stone.

This petroglyph, in fact, first came to light with the Doheney Expedition to Java Supai, the report of which comes not from the National Enquirer, but from the Peabody Muscum of American Ethnology at Harvard University.

Then there is the case of the man and brontosaur petroglyph at the Natural Bridges National Monument in Utah:

A book on Indian rock art sold atthe park visitors center notes:

"There is a petroglyph in Natural Bridges National Monument that bears a startling resemblance to dinosaur, specifically a Brontosaurus, with a long tail and neck, small head and all." (Prehistoric Indians, Barnes and Pendleton, 1995, p.201) The desert varnish, which indicates age, is especially heavy over this section.

Then again, there is the picture which the people at Bible.ca snapped of Don Patten with the petroglyph of the triceroptops:

And the pterodactyle at San Rafael Swell in Black Dragon Wash, Utah:

Like I say, it's never been easy to be an evolutionist, and it's not getting any easier.

1,428 posted on 03/06/2002 5:34:41 AM PST by medved
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