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To: Condorman
Mikey_Mike's 514: Since I have been here I must say that the Creationists have overwhelmingly swayed me to their side by presenting factual information, answering posts/challenges, and being respectful to others no matter how difficult it may be.

The above is clear evidence for an alternate universe connected to our own only through these threads. In that world, creationists overwhelm with factual information. They never dodge, distract, or distort. They are unfailingly respectful in the face of every manner of immature and spiteful attack by the scummy evos.

Kinda reminds me of the Planet of the Apes movies, only not so realistic.

1,547 posted on 07/15/2002 12:48:45 PM PDT by VadeRetro
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To: VadeRetro
11. Natural selection might explain microevolution, but it cannot explain the origin of new species and higher orders of life.
A straw man, because creationists accept new species arising within the kind, since reproductive isolation can be the result of information loss. See What is the Biblical creationist model? for more discussion on kinds and speciation.

Evolutionary biologists have written extensively about how natural selection could produce new species. For instance, in the model called allopatry, developed by Ernst Mayr of Harvard University, if a population of organisms were isolated from the rest of its species by geographical boundaries, it might be subjected to different selective pressures. Changes would accumulate in the isolated population. If those changes became so significant that the splinter group could not or routinely would not breed with the original stock, then the splinter group would be reproductively isolated and on its way toward becoming a new species.


Indeed, creationists point out that the allopatric model would explain the origin of the different people groups (‘races’) when the confusion of languages at Babel induced a separation of small population groups which spread out all over the Earth. See How could all the races come from Noah and his family? and One Blood (right). Of course, the different people groups are NOT reproductively isolated and are still a single biological species.

Creationists also point out that the montane (mountainous) topography of the Ark’s landing place would also be ideal for geographical isolation. This would allow much post-Flood diversification from comparatively few (~8,000) kinds of land vertebrates, by splitting up the original high genetic variety.

Note that the reproductive isolation is an informationally negative change, even if beneficial, because it blocks the interchange of genetic information between populations.

Natural selection is the best studied of the evolutionary mechanisms, …

Yes, it is the best studied, but these studies show that it has nothing to do with evolution of more complex life forms! All we observe it doing is removing information, not adding it.

… but biologists are open to other possibilities as well. Biologists are constantly assessing the potential of unusual genetic mechanisms for causing speciation or for producing complex features in organisms. Lynn Margulis of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and others have persuasively argued that some cellular organelles, such as the energy-generating mitochondria, evolved through the symbiotic merger of ancient organisms.

But this endosymbiosis theory has many problems, e.g. the lack of evidence that prokaryotes are capable of ingesting another cell and keeping it alive, and the large differences in genes between mitochondria and prokaryotes. See Did cells acquire organelles such as mitochondria by gobbling up other cells?

Thus, science welcomes the possibility of evolution resulting from forces beyond natural selection. Yet those forces must be natural; they cannot be attributed to the actions of mysterious creative intelligences whose existence, in scientific terms, is unproved.

Mainly because evolutionists reject the possibility of proof of the supernatural a priori—see these admissions from evolutionists Lewontin and Todd.

1,549 posted on 07/15/2002 12:52:54 PM PDT by f.Christian
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To: VadeRetro
The above is clear evidence for an alternate universe connected to our own only through these threads.

As I am now rereading the collected works of Douglas Adams, this does not seem so terribly strange...

1,552 posted on 07/15/2002 1:02:57 PM PDT by Junior
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To: VadeRetro
Kinda reminds me of the Planet of the Apes movies, only not so realistic.

I know what you mean. Charlton Heston clearly doesn't know beans about primates.

1,572 posted on 07/15/2002 1:54:01 PM PDT by Condorman
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