Posted on 02/24/2009 6:37:38 AM PST by GodGunsGuts
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The tree-of-life concept was absolutely central to Darwin's thinking, equal in importance to natural selection...Without it the theory of evolution would never have happened. The tree also helped carry the day for evolution.
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For much of the past 150 years, biology has largely concerned itself with filling in the details of the tree. "For a long time the holy grail was to build a tree of life," says Eric Bapteste, an evolutionary biologist at the Pierre and Marie Curie University in Paris, France. A few years ago it looked as though the grail was within reach. But today the project lies in tatters, torn to pieces by an onslaught of negative evidence. Many biologists now argue that the tree concept is obsolete and needs to be discarded. "We have no evidence at all that the tree of life is a reality," says Bapteste. That bombshell has even persuaded some that our fundamental view of biology needs to change...
(Excerpt) Read more at newscientist.com ...
Let’s let them speak for themselves, shall we?:
Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.”
Lewontin, Richard C. [Professor of Zoology and Biology, Harvard University], “Billions and Billions of Demons”, Review of “The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark,” by Carl Sagan, New York Review, January 9, 1997.
“I had motive for not wanting the world to have a meaning; consequently assumed that it had none, and was able without any difficulty to find satisfying reasons for this assumption. The philosopher who finds no meaning in the world is not concerned exclusively with a problem in pure metaphysics, he is also concerned to prove that there is no valid reason why he personally should not do as he wants to do, or why his friends should not seize political power and govern in the way that they find most advantageous to themselves. … For myself, the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation, sexual and political.”
Aldous Huxley: Ends and Means, pp. 270 ff.
Evolution is the greatest engine of atheism ever invented.”
Provine William B., [Professor of Biological Sciences, Cornell University], “Darwin Day” website, University of Tennessee Knoxville, 1998.
“Naturalistic evolution has clear consequences that Charles Darwin understood perfectly. 1) No gods worth having exist; 2) no life after death exists; 3) no ultimate foundation for ethics exists; 4) no ultimate meaning in life exists; and 5) human free will is nonexistent.”
Provine, William B. [Professor of Biological Sciences, Cornell University], “, “Evolution: Free will and punishment and meaning in life”, Abstract of Will Provine’s 1998 Darwin Day Keynote Address.
“It is no more heretical to say the Universe displays purpose, as Hoyle has done, than to say that it is pointless, as Steven Weinberg has done. Both statements are metaphysical and outside science. Yet it seems that scientists are permitted by their own colleagues to say metaphysical things about lack of purpose and not the reverse. This suggests to me that science, in allowing this metaphysical notion, sees itself as religion and presumably as an atheistic religion (if you can have such a thing).”
Shallis, Michael [Astrophysicist, Oxford University], “In the eye of a storm”, New Scientist, January 19, 1984, pp.42-43.
“Man is the result of a purposeless and materialistic process that did not have him in mind. He was not planned. He is a state of matter, a form of life, a sort of animal, and a species of the Order Primates, akin nearly or remotely to all of life and indeed to all that is material.”
Simpson, George Gaylord [late Professor of Vertebrate Paleontology, Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard University, USA], “The Meaning of Evolution: A Study of the History of Life and of its Significance for Man,” [1949], Yale University Press: New Haven CT, 1960, reprint, p.344.
yep, it’s as I thought.
It is the absence of accountability
OK, but what I asked for was a link to a source comparing bird DNA with frog DNA and dinosaur DNA.
I would appreciate a link to your source for this information. I'm still waiting.
You can argue, demonstrate, prove that the Emperor has no clothes and that there is no Emperor either and his footmen will still take the credit saying they convinced the crowds of that fact.
see post #63
Lucky he lived so long. Sixty-five years is a LONG time to be wrong.
Do you have a link to the finding of dinosaur DNA?
That's certainly among the hottest fields of research at the moment. It's clearing up a number of disputed lineages.
OK, I’ve had time to look into your claims about dinosaur DNA.
In 1994 a guy named Woodward claimed to have found a few tiny snippets of dinosaur DNA. At the time, the human genome had not been sequenced, so it was not immediately possible to demonstrate the snippets were contamination. But they almost certainly were. You don’t find many references to the Woodward find after 1996.
The same thing is happening to the more recent claim of finding dinosaur collagen (protein). As more work is done, it appears to be microbial contamination.
Construction of Jurassic Park in on hold..
js1138: "Do you have a link to the finding of dinosaur DNA? "
This is too laughable for words. Dinosaur DNA! ;-)
Yes, of course, DINOSAUR DNA! It was in a book, don't you see? About mosquitoes trapped in amber, remember? They even made a real scary movie from it, then sequels -- about a park, from the Jurassic era... now I remember, those frog-like velociraptors... ;-)
js1138, I hate to say this pal, but you are way too subtle for these guys! ;-)
It was probably amino acid sequencing, come to think of it...
Just trying to move the debate forward without being rude.
There are bits and pieces of reality scattered throughout the discussion of dino DNA and frogs. But since the advent of DNA sequencing machines, anything said about DNA and lineages before 2000 is likely to be out of date.
You said — “There is another tree of life, Revelation.”
The same tree of life, just with more of a description of it... The tree of life was preserved and protected by the angel sent by God to guard the way to it.
I think it’s likely that Darwin drew his tree of life as an analogy to family trees, which have been around for a long time. Family trees are gross oversimplifications, of course. For example, one of my ex-wife’s father’s brothers married one of her mother’s cousins. That required drawing a few extra lines in the family tree (making it—horrors!—look something more like a web), but it didn’t mean she was no longer related to the great-grandfather back in Russia.
You're worse off now than you were then. Shoulda quit while you behind 'cause now you're behinder.
The science of evolution is not dependent upon fossils
Ya, I know. Nor the geologic column, nor carbon 14, nor the 2nd law of thermodynamics, nor mathematics, nor genetics, nor honest evidence of any kind, nor integrity.
Second law of thermodynamics? Wow. That is so dumb even other Creationists warn against using that argument.
Do you think that the Sun doesn’t provide energy to the Earth?
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