Posted on 12/09/2004 9:21:27 AM PST by Michael_Michaelangelo
Is Darwin winning the battle, but losing the war?
As soon as one challenge to the teaching of evolution is beaten in the courts, another emerges to take its place.
The current contender is “intelligent design,” a theory that according to advocates at the Discovery Institute “makes no religious claims, but says that the best natural evidence for life’s origins points to design rather than a process of random mutation and natural selection.”
(Excerpt) Read more at firstamendmentcenter.org ...
The problem is that no matter how often you explain this (and I've seen the monoclonal culture example explained more than once in the past), they keep bringing up the same refuted argument over and over again, like they don't care that they are repeating a lie if it allows them to badmouth evolution.
"So what you're saying is that when science behaves like proponents of ID behave, science is wrong. What does that say about ID?"
Incorrect. What I am saying is that supposedly disspassionate and logical "scientists" are far from that. So, the concept that science/scientists are only interested in facts, and not ruled by emotion, is bogus. Your offering characutures of ID proponents don't make them that way. Actually, the group that tends to push for ID are the "moderates" in the spectrum of those holding to some form of divine creation.
"unless there was a survival benefit to recreating this machinery from its blueprints periodically. Such periodic re-creation might prevent problems with propagating damaged machinery."
Or perhaps, a slight molecular change in the "blueprints", brought on by nothing more fancy than entropy, produces a survival advantage. Something like resistence to antibiotics.
About 6 billion
How many BILLIONS of individual creatures are there?
A lot
How many changes, per year, would have to happen for this to occur by ET?
Changes happen in a parallel fashion, not a serial one. Organisms do not have to wait in line behind other organisms to evolve.
Again, could you state what point you're trying to make?
Huh? Isolation doesn't have to mean being castaway on a small deserted island. Isolation in this sense, can just as well be living in two different valleys only a couple of miles apart. If the two populations do not interact then they are isolated.
People without a conscience cannot be shamed. Being exposed as a "Liar for the Lord" is a badge of twisted honor to people without any sense of personal integrity.
Wow. That's actually THE most irrational thing I've ever seen said on one of these threads, and that's saying something.
Tell me more about the differences between how you have characterized the behavior of ID proponents and the behavior of the faulty scientists you described, if you would.
You mean "said", or "seen"???
Both. I saw it being said.
Eventually, in a culture of a billion cells, a few have become resistant. Expose the culture to antibiotics, and the resistant cells survive, and eventually take over the culture.
They do not ‘become’ resistant, they ‘are’ resistant regardless if you expose them to antibiotics or not – and if this resistance was not present they would all obviously die once exposed regardless if mutagens were present. To say otherwise is adding a purpose, direction, or plan to evolution. Naturally speaking; nothing becomes ‘resistant’, or is ‘beneficial’, or ‘selects’ anything. It is - or isn’t --- regardless of the situation. There is no ‘choice’ in this matter and basically natural selection boils down to survival and reproduction – that’s it…
(soapbox mode)Honestly, in a naturalistic evolutionary view – life is nothing more than fire in the way it feeds and continues in this fortuitous world it happened upon. It is basically a chemical reaction that started, grew, feeds on the current environment, changes with the wind, and will ultimately burn out. (/soapbox mode)
I notice that since your original claim -- that the only reason for antibiotic resistance in a population is their existence from the beginning -- has been soundly refuted, you're going off on a complete and total tangent, addressing claims that no one made.
Actually, this isn't part of science, but is an article of faith by many scientists (including me). However, we have no (strictly rigorous) reason to believe that the answers already exist: all we have is a reasonable expectation that this is so, because we've found this to be frequently true--and never, ever, proven untrue--in the past. Either you have to accept this (like the axiom of choice) or get nowhere. But it is an ontological proposition which strictly speaking is outside of science.
Note also, we have no reason to believe that the same answers will exist in the future, and no reason to believe that the same reasons existed in the past. There is no self-sufficent cause to believe that the laws of physics or metaphysics are constant in time.
Maybe you should re-read my post before ‘going off on a complete and total tangent’.
How many ways can you spin the obvious? One bacterium starts as nonresistant, it is allowed to breed and mutate, some in later generations become resistant, which part do you not understand?
To say bacteria somehow ‘selects’ due to its environment is not purely natural. It is resistant or it is not resistant – that is all.
Which part do you imagine you are spinning?
Your science uses ones' mind I hope.
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