It is sad that your heart is so hard towards God.I wonder what turned you from His love and grace?
You are special to God! Believe it or not!
Posted on 04/27/2008 2:42:03 AM PDT by canuck_conservative
"Oh what a piece of work is man," wrote Shakespeare, long before Darwin suggested just how little work went into us. Somehow, that same process that gave us reason, language and art also left us with hernias, flatulence and hiccups.
One argument scientists often make against so-called intelligent design — the idea that evolution cannot by itself explain life — is that on closer inspection, we look like we've been put together by someone who didn't read the manual, or at least did a somewhat sloppy job of things.
Viewed as products of evolution, however, our anatomical quirks start to make sense, says University of Chicago fossil hunter and anatomy professor Neil Shubin, author of the recent book Your Inner Fish. And by focusing on our less lofty traits, evolutionary biology can help dispel one of the most egregious and even tragic fallacies surrounding Darwinian evolution — that it moves toward perfection, with man at the apex of some towering ladder.
Evolution of Hiccups
That misreading of evolution has been connected to the eugenics movement of the early 20th century, with the Nazis extending the man-as-ideal notion to blue-eyed blond German-man-as-ideal notion.
"Darwin didn't believe it, but some, who saw it through a more religious light, tended to want to interpret evolution as a steady march toward the pinnacle of humanity," says University of Pennsylvania ethicist Art Caplan, who has written extensively on the eugenics movement.
By today's understanding, evolution by natural selection doesn't march toward anything — it just modifies existing creatures to better compete in ever-shifting environments.
Understanding something as seemingly trivial as the evolution of hiccups can help clear up some profound misperceptions on the nature of life and humanity.
The sound of a hiccup echoes back to our very distant past as fish and amphibians some 375 million years ago, says Shubin. It's really just a spasm that causes a sharp intake of breath followed by a quick partial closing of our upper airway with that flap of skin known as the glottis. It's best if you can nip it in the first couple of hics, he says.
It's much harder to stop once you've let yourself get up to 10. By that point you've reverted to an ancient breathing pattern orchestrated by the brain stem that once helped amphibians breath, letting water pass the gills without leaking into the lungs.
"Tadpoles normally breathe with something like a hiccup," Shubin says.
The theme of his book is that we owe much of our anatomy to our animal ancestors. "Parts that evolved in one setting are now jury-rigged to work in another," he says. "When you look at the human body, you see layer after layer of history inside of us."
The first layer is what we share with chimpanzees and gorillas. The next goes back to mice and cows, while further down, you get to the relatively underappreciated layers we share with fish — which include the backbone and basic layout of the body.
Fishy news about hernias
Our descent from fish explains why men are so much more prone to hernias than women. In fish, Shubin explains, the testicles lie up near the heart.
(Had they remained there, he said, it would give a whole new meaning to the Pledge of Allegiance.)
The budding gonads still form up high in a human embryo, but male mammals reproduce better with their sperm kept a bit cooler than body temperature. And so during gestation, human testicles take an incredible journey down through the body to their destination in the scrotum.
The trip downward puts a loop in the cord that connects the testes to the penis, leaving a weakness in the body wall where the cord attaches that never quite repairs itself.
Hence the trouble with hernias down the road.
The matter of milk
No good story about human design flaws can pass up a discussion of flatulence — and science has addressed the kind that would occur if everyone in the world drank a tall glass of milk at the same time.
Geneticist Pragna Patel of the University of Southern California said one of her favorite examples of evolution in progress involves the gene that determines who can digest the sugars in milk and who cannot.
From genetic studies it appears that so-called lactose intolerance was our ancestral state.
A few people, however, were genetically gifted with an enzyme called lactase, which breaks down lactose, and in groups that started drinking lots of milk around 10,000 years ago, that version of the gene started to take over.
Scientists recently sequenced the lactase gene and found 43 different variations that allow adults to drink the milk of other animals.
"It's the first clear evidence of convergent evolution," Patel said, though it's not known whether those lacking this innovation failed to pass on their genes because they suffered from lack of nutrition or just didn't get invited to any parties.
Great question. And it not only applies to the species we call mankind. But what about elephants, tigers, dogs, giraffes, and so forth. I would really love to see the “fossil” trail for every singles species on earth.
Oh - and also an explanation of the “evolutionary step” just before the one that required a male and female for procreation. Which requires genitalia, sexual arousal, desire, sperm, egg, placenta...among other things. An evolutionist cannot and will not answer this question intelligently.
God is invisible because we can’t see him. God can sin if he wants to. Knocking up a married man’s wife is a sin by his alleged own commandment against adultery. God may not claim in your conversations with him that he was created from nothing, but it is a logical consequence of creationist arguments that everything has a cause.
It is sad that your heart is so hard towards God.I wonder what turned you from His love and grace?
You are special to God! Believe it or not!
You are correct. A scientific theory is based on the preponderance of evidence, a natural law is based on proof beyond a reasonable doubt. There is NO scientific evidence for ID. That is called a myth.
5 Come and see what God has done,
how awesome his works in man’s behalf!
http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?book_id=23&chapter=66&version=31
Please do not miss all the treasure that God has set aside for you.
The same criticisim would still apply. There must have been many generations of squirls with flaps of skin big enough to get in the way, but not big enough to be useful.
A Discovery / BBC documentary once showed an experiment where they took this water-dwelling insect and cut its wings incrementally, to see for what minimum size they would remain useful.
Even on complete removal, just the flapping of the stumps was good enough for the insect to generate enough lift to bea able to skate over water with good speed.
You could try searching for that documentary. I’ll paste the link as soon as I find it.
Likewise for the squirrels, even a tiny bit of flap will increase the effects of drag, to allow the squirrel to survive higher falls than without them.
The smaller the creature, more pronounced is this aerodynamic effect.
Bzzt. Sorry. Wrong. A single contrary example can negate a theory and no amount of evidence can make a theory a fact.
I assume nothing.
within an roughly anatomically identical population, there are thousands of variations of functional proteins. If there were selective pressures preferring enzymes working at higher temperature, that population as a whole would shift over time to having a higher proportion of individuals with that protein.
If the selective pressure is high, this shift can occur rather quickly.
The testes should never have had time to see the light of day. Ok a rather bad pun, but the point is, using the fosil record, how quickly do body lay outs change. Hardly ever, mammals have mammel parts, the shapes change but the parts are still there.
On the otherhand, enzymes change frequently, enough that you can tract human migrations bw measuring them and we are only talking about what 40,000 years.
Insects and microbes are being selected for resistence to chemicals in front of our very eyes. They are not evolving another pair of legs or an external organ which was formerly internal, they are simply using natural variation withing their enzyme tool box to adapt.
LOL...fair warning...if the evolution of your “discussion” with this poster progresses, it’ll end with your beliefs being mythology and the possibility that God created this world for HIS purposes and therefore imperfect in THIS world, will simply not register with him.
God is not created. He is the Creator.
Have you ever read the Bible?
Lay your presumptions, your preconceptions, aside and truly ask God to reveal Himself to you - and as you read the Bible, if you are seeking to know Him, you will.
God honors those who seek Him in truth.
I have zero fears that anything discovered in science will or can “disprove God”.....it cannot. He invented science. He invented the natural laws just as He laid down the moral laws and the spiritual laws of life.
On the contrary, creation testifies to its Creator - in myraid ways and glories. It also testifies to the cataclysmic fall in which creation itself was subjected to corruption. Yet it shall not always be so.
What we see today is just the old ways of worshiping the created thing (things) rather than the Creator. We see the worship of the earth .....and the worship of living things....as opposed to worshiping the Creator of the earth and of living things.
This is nothing new. It just the old ways repackaged by unredeemed minds and voices which “interpret” the data/facts to fit their “worldview”....instead of pursuing the facts/evidence where they lead.
Hundreds of scientists / professors have seen the evidence and are convinced that it points to intelligent design by a Designer / a Creator.
HOwever their views/evidence/discoveries are squelched, silenced, excluded, ignored by the scientific politburo that protects the evolution doctrines because to allow evolution to crumble (as it should have done decades ago)....ENDS their control, their philosophy, their justification for their positions....and their POWER.
mark
I have read the King James version cover to cover a few times and the Catholic Bible once. I have several Bibles in my library along with a number of concordances, including wycliff’s bible comentary. Don’t spout glory to me in a discussion of science. Science is about evidence.
Your ignorance of scientific theory is profound.
I will debate you on youtube any day. email me and I will set it up.
Exactly. Knowledge and free will were dangerous things God gave to humans.
We simply don’t know how to experience life outside our current confinement, let alone make sense of it.
I suppose it’s easier to think of themselves as worm food than contemplate where God came from.
In this existence, we simply can’t get our mind around our own world yet, so how should we be so presumptuous as to remotely understand supernatural intelligence?
A big bang from nothing leaves me far less satisfied than any other possibilities, to say the least! Scientific or otherwise!
OR demonstrating the enemy will go to any lengh to hide or obscure the truth!
and all that from a big bang out of nothingness?
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