Evolution: What is it? (long article)

Information Central ^ | Craig McClarren

[Heartlander]

Here is one! (LOL)

[Junior]

Nope, not a priest (happily married). "Son" is a term some Southerners use to get the listener's attention when it is apparent the listener is having a hard time understanding what is being said. It is a regionalism, not a religionism (is that even a word?).

[Dimensio]

And yes evolution denies that God created man, that has been the most controversial statement of evolution since its inception so it really cannot be denied.

"Common Descent" theory (which relies on evolution as a mechanism, but is not evolution itself) is the closest you can get to being correct in your assertion, as it offers an explanation for human origins that is not consistent with special creation of the homo sapien sapiens species. Evolution itself makes no statements regarding any acts of any dieties.

[Dimensio]

The dates in the geological record have been checked and crosschecked by many different methods: carbon dating, time for geological layers to build, distribution of gases in pockets of air, etc. I'm not an expert in this field, though I read a little. All of these methods give results that are in the same ballpark.

Careful, you might invite someone in to tell you about the "innacuracies" of carbon dating and how it gives a "millions of years" date for a bone known to be only a few weeks old.

Those people are, of course, relying on ignorance of the limitations of carbon dating -- it's only useful for samples from a specific timeframe (and if you ever got a "millions" date from it, you did something wrong).

[Dimensio]

not saying god is a parlor trickster when it comes to "evolution", but let us say that the finches of note in the article, all "adapted" rather than evolved, because after all this time, they are still finches....

Adaptation, at least as it occured with the finches, is evolution. Speciation need not occur in evolution (though speciation has been observed elsewhere).

[longshadow]

Your 260 and my 261 at least prove that you and I aren't the same person.

Yeah, well.... I bet you can't PROVE I'm NOT "Sparticus"!

[VadeRetro]

Apparently, that didn't even prove I'm not Junior. Two differently-worded exclamations of extreme suspicion to a snippet of Hendrix's anti-science screed, maximum of one minute apart.

[kinsman redeemer]

That is not quite accurate. The use of the term, "Son" is an attempt to establish a superior position in a relationship.

You have not done that, Junior.

If you were truly speaking Southern, the dialectizer would have said it like this:
Son, ah's probably one of th' mo'e devout Roman Catholics yo'll evah meet, an' ah's not terribly wo'ried about a-gonna meet mah Maker.

[VadeRetro]

What do you think Hendrix's unfootnoted claim is based on, anyway? (Bacteria and humans sharing "identical genes.") A profound misunderstanding of something--but what?--in the real literature? Introns? I don't know if even introns are shared between bacteria and humans. Functional genes? Identical? Forget it!

[Heartlander]

Maybe from:
Nature (Feb. 15, 2001) by the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium (IHGSC). Their findings will be published as part of the May 18 issue of the journal Science, online at the Science Express

But it is being debated and refuted here

[medved]

For one thing, some of the methods depend on basic forces that hold the universe together and haven't changed since shortly after the Big Bang, such as carbon dating.

You can read about the big bang on several of the catastrophism links from my post 144 on this thread. It's basically a fairytale based on misinterpretation of redshift phenomena but you don't need to be a physicist to comprehend the absurdity of it. Having all the mass in the universe collapsed to a point would be the mother of all black holes; nothing could "big-bang" its way out of something like that.

As to carbon dating, it absolutely depends on the idea of the ratios of carbon types in the atmosphere and the soil having always been what they are now, which is absurd. Even items from the beginning of the industrial revolution in England often date as if from the time of Attilla the hun because of all the soot in the air in England at that time.

[VadeRetro]

Even taking the original report and ignoring the refutation, there were never any "identical genes." The argument is over a hypothesized gene transfer to some early ancestral vertebrate to explain similarities above the chance level.

The event has to be old, not a recent cross-jumping of bacterial DNA. That's to allow time for the organism to evolve useful, integrated functions for the new genes. If it were new, the introduced material would almost certainly be out in the "junk" or it would be too harmful to be inherited.

When you get what Hendrix claimed, identical functional genes that defy the tree of life, then you have a scoop.

[VadeRetro]

I can't help but notice, too, that Hendrix lifts, with distortion in his favor, only the claimed oddity and not the non-magical mechanism proposed for same. He thus forces the reader to guess what he is talking about and attempts to force the conclusion of "special creation." IOW, he shops for miracles to stump the dummies with, pumps a little extra shazzam into the miracle ("similar" becomes "identical"), and throws away the non-magical context.

I'm not impressed with that.

[PatrickHenry]

To medved: Until then all your ranting and raving from your basement laBORatory is nothing more than that.

Watch it. I'm the one with the basement la-BOR-a-tory. Medved has a bat cave.

[donh]

If they are, they haven't made it out of the backwater into the public marketplace of ideas where us dilettantes can see them

Trust me on this. These problems of trust and verifiability and formal limits are the central core of 20th century scientific philosophy. Look up "Principia Mathematica" and it's most formidable response "Godel's Proof". Find the geminal "Logic of Scientific Discovery" by Karl Popper. There is nothing remotely obscure about all this.

[donh]

Since a satisfactory scientific theory of life's origin's does exists,

MARGINALLY satisfactory--very marginally.

[donh]

Oh, I definitely want to hear this story. I want to hear how totally inert matter arranged itself into living matter.

Well, than, why don't you go to the pointer I gave you, and read it? Or do you have a theory that that's too great a distance to measure accurately with modern technology?

[donh]

"God does play dice with the universe. "

No, except in very exceptional cases such a thing does not happen.

Get thee to an education--it is the most common thing in the universe, and TV's, radio's, and the internet wouldn't be happening without our having understood and harnessed it.