Posted on 08/09/2002 10:52:13 PM PDT by jennyp
There have been a lot of little news items having to do with creation vs. evolution lately, each one not necessarily worth a thread on its own. Here are the last 10 days' worth of headlines culled from Creation/Evolution: The Eternal Debate:
Posted on 2002/08/09
New Fossil Discovery Sinks Evolutionary Theories
Harun Yahya - 2002/08/01
When the Toumaï fossil was found recently, and was quickly dismissed by some as just a female gorilla, most creationists rejoiced at the foolishness of those deluded evolutionists. But prominent Muslim creationist Harun Yahya is more impressed. He hopes Toumaï will "sink our current ideas about human evolution".
Posted on 2002/08/09
Scientific American's 15 Errors
Harun Yahya - 2002/08/01
Not to be outdone by the Christian ministry Answers in Genesis, the Muslim creationist Harun Yahya provides his own critique of Scientific American's recent "15 Answers to Creationist Nonsense".
Posted on 2002/08/09
Revolution in science: a genetic discovery to change the world
The Independent - 2002/08/10
RNA interference (RNAi) is a new technique for turning off individual genes that could turn out to be revolutionary for curing genetic diseases, cancers, & viral infections of all kinds, not to mention for our understanding of which genes do what. (Set of 4 articles)
Posted on 2002/08/09
Researchers' Latest Results in Search for Ancient Martian Life
NASA-JPL - 2002/08/02
In the latest study of a 4.5 billion-year-old Martian meteorite (ALH84001), researchers have presented new evidence confirming that 25 percent of the magnetic material in the meteorite was produced by ancient bacteria on Mars. These latest results were published in the journal Applied and Environmental Microbiology.
Posted on 2002/08/09
History of Science Society Adds its Voice for Evolution
NCSE - 2002/08/09
NCSE is pleased to announce a further addition to New Voices for Evolution: a statement from the History of Science Society reading, in part, that "such concepts as evolution and geological change are well established and belong in science curricula along with other basic scientific ideas. ... In view of this historical perspective, the History of Science Society disapproves of recent efforts by state school boards effectively to remove evolution as a subject from the secondary school curriculum, either through textbook disclaimers or censorship."
Posted on 2002/08/09
Speed of light slowing down after all?
AiG - 2002/08/09
...in addition to being different from the prediction of Barry Setterfield's theory, this research by itself does not support c-decay theory of the magnitude that Setterfield proposed. The change is billions of times too small. In fact, the newspaper hype surrounding Davies’ theory, and the quotes attributed to him, hardly seem to be justified by the Nature article itself, which is rather speculative. ...
Posted on 2002/08/09
KC conference explores evolution debate
Kansas City Star - 2002/07/29
Until intelligent design is accepted by a majority of scientists, don't look for it in public school science classes, a panel of evolution supporters said on Saturday (7/27). The idea that life arose not through unguided natural processes but from the intent of an intelligent being is an interesting postulate at this point, but nothing else, the panel said at a debate closing a Kansas City gathering of ID advocates. Four evolution advocates debated four ID adherents at the third annual Darwin, Design and Democracy conference at Rockhurst HS.
Posted on 2002/08/08
Moderates Lose 2 to Conservatives in Kansas Board of Ed Primaries
KC Star - 2002/08/07
Voters on Tuesday ousted two incumbent moderates on the Kansas Board of Education, raising the possibility that the board could return to a 5-5 moderate-conservative split. The split on the board has been an issue since Aug. 1999, when a then-conservative majority approved science standards that omitted many references to evolution, the big-bang theory and the age of the Earth. After a moderate majority was elected two years ago, the board reversed the 1999 vote.
Posted on 2002/08/07
Selection for short introns in highly expressed genes
Nature Genetics - 2002/07/22
Transcription is a slow and expensive process. Thus, at least for highly expressed genes, transcription of long introns, which are particularly common in mammals, is costly. We show that introns in highly expressed genes are substantially shorter than those in genes that are expressed at low levels.
Posted on 2002/08/07
T.O. Creates New Kent Hovind FAQs Portal
Talk.Origins - 2002/08/08
Talk.Origins has come out with a page that gathers together their several Kent Hovind pages, as well as several off-site links, into a handy starting point.
Posted on 2002/08/07
Save Me from My Comrades: Dawkins Disses Bush
Here - 2002/08/07
Inside a longer article re: Iraq appealing to England to stop the invasion: "A Guardian survey yesterday of leading politicians, diplomats, military chiefs and scientists showed the depth of scepticism across British society about any involvement in an Iraq attack. ... Richard Dawkins, an Oxford science don, suggested Mr Bush was just as much of a danger to world peace as Saddam Hussein, adding: 'It would be a tragedy if Tony Blair were to be brought down through playing poodle to this unelected and deeply stupid little oil-spiv.'"
Posted on 2002/08/07
Inconstant Speed of Light May Debunk Einstein
Reuters - 2002/08/07
A team of Australian scientists has proposed that the speed of light may not be a constant, a revolutionary idea that could unseat one of the most cherished laws of modern physics -- Einstein's theory of relativity. The team, led by theoretical physicist Paul Davies of Sydney's Macquarie University, say it is possible that the speed of light has slowed over billions of years. If so, physicists will have to rethink many of their basic ideas about the laws of the universe. "That means giving up the theory of relativity and E=mc squared and all that sort of stuff," Davies told Reuters.
Posted on 2002/08/06
Evangelical colleges paid to teach evolution
AiG - 2002/08/06
Increasing numbers of evangelical colleges around the world are accepting large monetary awards from the John Templeton Foundation to run courses that promote evolutionary teaching and millions of years. One such course, run by an evangelical Bible college and taught by theistic evolutionists, never touched on the implications of evolution and millions of years for the Gospel of Jesus Christ or the implications for the authority of Scripture.
Posted on 2002/08/05
AiG Strikes a Nerve
AiG - 2002/08/03
Ken Ham revels in the fact that Scientific American's lawyers accused AiG of copyright infringement when it responded to SA's recent article "15 Answers to Creationist Nonsense". Obviously it's proof that "the secular world is closely watching AiG and is trying to suppress our Biblical message", which "is seen as a serious threat by the ‘world.’"
Posted on 2002/08/02
Sheer vs. Real Possibilities: A Response to Allen Orr
designinference.com - 2002/08/02
This is Dembski's response to Allen Orr's review of No Free Lunch, which we reported on a week ago. Dembski repeats his demand that biologists produce actual causal explanations for IC structures instead of merely showing why they're plausible. At the same time, Dembski ignores Orr's critique of Dembski's use of No Free Lunch theorems to prove that Darwinism can't create specified complexity.
Posted on 2002/08/02
Human-Specific Retroviruses Developed When Humans, Chimps Diverged
U. of Georgia - 2002/08/02
Scientists have known that remnants of ancient germ line infections called human endogenous retroviruses make up a substantial part of the human genome. Once thought to be merely "junk" DNA, many of these elements in fact perform functions in human cells. Now, a new study suggests for the first time that a burst of transpositional activity occurred at the same time humans and chimps are believed to have diverged from a common ancestor - 6 million years ago. These new results suggest retroviruses may have had some kind of role in that divergence.
Posted on 2002/08/02
The Battle for the Cosmic Center
ICR Impact - 2002/07/25
Biblical teaching places man at the center of God's attention. Recent astronomical evidence restores man to a central place in God's universe. Over the last few decades, astronomers have become convinced that the red shifts of light from distant galaxies occur in distinct, evenly spaced groups. The Hubble Law implies that galaxies are expanding in evenly spaced spherical shells around us, who are sitting at the center of the universe - just where the Bible says we are.
Posted on 2002/08/02
Commentary on Scott and Branch's "'Intelligent design' Not Accepted by Most Scientists"
designinference.com - 2002/07/02
This is a must-read, if only to see Dembski say "All the design could have emerged through a cosmic evolutionary process that started with the Big Bang." Later, he compares evolutionists to the Taliban!
Posted on 2002/08/02
Boiled Creationist with a Side of Hexaglycine: Sarfati on Imai et al. (1999)
No Answers in Genesis - 2002/07/31
In an AiG web article titled Hydrothermal origin of life? Jonathan Sarfati manages to write three pages about a single five page original peer reviewed paper on growing short peptides in a simulated hydrothermal vent system, published in Science by Imai et al. (1999), and to make over seventeen errors of fact, emphasis or interpretation. Not bad, even for a fanatical creationist.
Posted on 2002/08/01
Updates to Talk.Origins Fossil Hominids Pages
Talk.Origins - 2002/07/31
Jim Foley's comprehensive set of pages on hominid & australopithicene fossils at Talk.Origins has been updated. Includes new pages on the spectacular new skull from Dmanisi, Georgia, which causes problems for creationists who claim that habilis is an ape and erectus is a human, the new 6-7 million year old Toumaï skull from Chad, and Homo habilis: is it an invalid taxon?
Posted on 2002/07/31
Pufferfish DNA Yields Clues to Human Biology [Another 1,000 Human Genes?]
DOE Joint Genome Institute - 2002/07/25
An int'l research consortium led by the US DoE’s Joint Genome Institute reported today on the draft sequencing, assembly, and analysis of the genome of the Japanese pufferfish Fugu rubripes. Pufferfish have the smallest known genomes among vertebrates. While it has roughly the same number of genes as the much larger human genome, it's in a compact form streamlined by the relative scarcity of the “junk” DNA that fills much of the human sequence. Through comparison of the human and pufferfish genomes, the researchers were able to predict the existence of nearly 1,000 previously unidentified human genes.
Posted on 2002/07/30
Race Is Seen as Real Guide to Track Roots of Disease
NY Times - 2002/07/30
Challenging the widely held view that race is a "biologically meaningless" concept, a leading population geneticist says that race is helpful for understanding ethnic differences in disease and response to drugs. Dr. Neil Risch of Stanford U says that genetic differences have arisen among people living on different continents and that race (i.e. geographically based ancestry) is a valid way of categorizing these differences.
Posted on 2002/07/30
Species and languages flock together
Nature Science Update - 2002/07/30
Areas with the most animal species also contain the greatest number of human languages, say researchers. The coincidence of biological and cultural diversity hints that preserving cultures may also preserve species, and vice versa. Development and conservation "probably need to go hand in hand", says Carsten Rahbek of the U. of Copenhagen. His findings call into question the wisdom of trying to save wildlife in remote uninhabited areas.
Posted on 2002/07/30
U.S. News and World Report joins in the evolution onslaught
AiG - 2002/07/30
U.S. News and World Report ran a major story pushing evolution on 29 July, 2002, giving it cover story exposure. The usual evolutionist hand-waving and bait-and-switch tactics were employed in a grand piece of propaganda. Here is our detailed response, interspersed between their actual item which is reproduced in full to avoid suggestions of misrepresentation:
Posted on 2002/07/29
Boeing tries to defy gravity
BBC News: Science/Nature - 2002/07/29
Researchers at the world's largest aircraft maker, Boeing, are using the work of a controversial Russian scientist to try to create a device that will defy gravity. The company is examining an experiment by Yevgeny Podkletnov, who claims to have developed a device which can shield objects from the Earth's pull. Dr Podkletnov is viewed with suspicion by many conventional scientists. They have not been able to reproduce his results.
Posted on 2002/07/29
Bacteria defies last-resort antibiotic
Nature Science Update - 2002/07/29
US doctors have reported the first case of a new strain of Staphylococcus aureus that is completely resistant to the antibiotic vancomycin, one of the last lines of defence against bacteria. Further outbreaks of infection are expected.
Posted on 2002/07/29
Jonathan Wells and Darwin's Finches
Talk.Origins - 2002/07/27
In Chapter 8 of Icons of Evolution, Jonathan Wells examines the case of "Darwin's Finches", and claims that textbooks exaggerate not only the importance of the finches to Darwin's thinking, but also the evidence that they are an excellent example of evolution in action. He also accuses biologists Rosemary and Peter Grant, who spent 30 years studying these birds, of exaggerating the evidence as well. As we shall see, Wells's case is weak. Darwin's Finches remain one of the best examples of adaptive radiation in the literature of evolutionary biology.
Posted on 2002/07/26
Book Review: No Free Lunch
Boston Review - 2002/07/25
Excellent, engaging article by Orr, as he cooly dismantles Dembski's latest book. Assuming his understanding of "NFL" was correct, his critique is devastating. And to think I found this at the ARN site! If they're highlighting this review, then it can only mean there's a fierce counterattack in the works. Read this article now to understand what all the fireworks will be about shortly.
Posted on 2002/07/25
Paranormal beliefs linked to brain chemistry
New Scientist - 2002/07/24
Whether or not you believe in the paranormal may depend entirely on your brain chemistry. People with high levels of dopamine are more likely to find significance in coincidences, and pick out meaning and patterns where there are none.
Posted on 2002/07/24
UCSD Researchers Identify Eye-Formation Strategy in Mice That Provides Clues to Development of Other Organs
UCSD Health Sciences - 2002/07/23
Researchers at the UC San Diego School of Medicine have discovered a linkage between proteins that is an essential part of the complex series of molecular events leading to normal eye development in mice. The investigators also suggest that the combination of specific proteins in eye formation may be similar to yet unidentified genes that act together to allow development of other organs.
(Excerpt) Read more at crevo.bestmessageboard.com ...
Well, as I see it, you have two choices. You can go to a place where your moral views are not subject to outside domination (Somalia or Afghanistan) or you can go to jail. In this country, the majority get to set the rules that everybody else live by. And if you don't have rules, you have chaos. I, personally, support a minimum of rules, but you've got to have rules nonetheless.
If morality is nothing more than a set of rules man has reasoned to and forced upon by others, it has no bind on anyone who chooses to ignore.
I'm not sure what you're trying to say. Everybody wants their morality to be universal. Due to the realities of human existence, that will always be impossible. What we've done, nevertheless, is to create a framework of a few rules by which most of us can agree (i.e. murder is wrong). Many other moral points are far more contentious, but at least we've agreed to set up a framework where each side to an issue can present their view without fear of being in physical danger.
If however morality is a set of rules set by a moral (un-corruptible, in-fallible) authority. A moral authority gained through authorship. Then what?
Again, I must be slow today, because I don't understand what you're trying to argue. As an atheist, I don't believe in any sort of supreme moral authority.
killing is wrong because man has reasoned it to be so.
Exactly
If you subscribe to the later I'd say that is fairly communist of you, or at least fascist. A body of men ruling morality from intellectualism or power.
Huh? I don't mean to pass judgement, I'm only reflecting on what I see as the reality of the world.
I am a Free man and no reasoning of another will constrain me. I will not be kept from killing simply because society says it is wrong.
Fine. Kill. But we will impose our morality on you, whether you like it or not, and you'll go to prison. Because murder poses a threat to the continued existence of any sort of society, free or not.
Society has no hold on me, it has no Moral Authority over me.
Tell that to the Judge.
Are you a free man or are you told what is right and wrong by the ruling society of men.
I can have enough freedom living within the wide bounds of acceptable behavior determined by society at-large. The small degree of freedom I relinquish(to punch my neighbor in the nose, for example) is inconsequential in comparison to the security I gain.
Let's talk straw-man burning. This is a straw man and you know it. By the way, I'm against the death penalty.
I'm taking your argument first here. Here's your strawman: that I'm for a theocracy. I'm not. I'm perfectly fine with the Constitution as is.
All I need for this debate is this: there is a God. I cannot know his value on your life, or mine, and thus I cannot take your life or mine. My personal beliefs in the Christian faith are just that, personal. But the Judeo Christian respect for life came from just that--Judeo-Christianity.
It would be far more likely to see autos de fe in an atheistic society; no respect for life you see.
Right. The 'argumentum ad populum'. The majority of the people decide what liberty means. How does the majority enforce its view? Force.
Why don't you find me an example of this mythical libertarian society that permits abortion regardless of the stage of pregnancy? And I'll find some Christian societies that condoned witch-burning - that way, we can discuss the specifics of each case, rather than deal in straw-man hypotheticals....
This was all you needed to type, it is the base of your ideology. And yet you condemn Christians for doing the same thing.
This is the similarity between Atheist, Communist, Neo-Pagans and all non-Judeo-Christian ideologies. One body forcing another into whatever it deems fit. The only law that can be enforce is a prefect law from a moral authority. Man can never meet those requirements. The American system of Law and Morality was based on the perfect Law of the Creator, the one who has true Moral Authority. I cannot believe I am reading a Freeper who believes that a group of men can rule over another group. For the betterment of society of course. Though I am sure that when that same majority takes your right (your group of man given i.e. GOVERNMENT right) to bear arms you will protest. What a load of BS.
Your ideology says man in all his corruption can group together and force others to submit to whatever standard they deem fit. How very similar to Communism and Nazism
Let me ask you this--why did all of the major atrocities of the 20th Century occur in atheist/neopagan nations, and why did the Christian nations of the world champion life and freedom?
It's the same reason America has a Special Olympics and China doesn't. Christian respect for life. Children with Down's syndrome never make it out of the delivery room in China. That's atheism in a nutshell.
We also know that "preemie" children can survive and grow up normally. Are you trying to tell me that no child has ever been aborted in a D&X procedure that couldn't have been delivered?
And here I wondered why they just passed the Born Alive Infants Protection Act?
But you dodged the question nonetheless. How do you establish a libertarian society when people can't agree on what "liberty" entails? Ayn Rand tried to solve this problem by stating that "Between rational men there can be no disagreements". But this is utter nonsense. Of course rational men can have disputes. That's what we're doing right now. But what Rand doesn't say is that the above statement about rational men and disagreements is completely *non-negotiable* in her philosophy. Because if rational men can have disagreements, then Objectivism is nonsense.
By the way, Rand used to solve that particular problem by essentially stating that anyone who disagreed with her was "irrational". Convenient.
Correct. While I fear the tyranny of the majority, it is the least-bad way of effecting a civil society. I'd like to minimize the role majority-morality imposes itself on minorities, but like it or not, it has to happen to a certain degree.
Being Created gives Moral Authority to the Author of the Creation. He can set rules and give inalienable rights. We as men can then protect those rights and enforce those rules. We can reason ways to enforce morality if and only if that morality comes from the Moral Authority over all men. And when a body of men reason new rules that violate the Creator's standards we can fight, as they have no right to rule over us outside the Creators standard.
Now, if someone hurts someone else or acts in a way that is completely detrimental to the social order, they can be removed from society. A country is a culture--shared values and norms, and people who violate those norms must be removed from the culture. But IMHO, not killed. I know a lot of FReepers may disagree with me on the death penalty, but I'm a consistent pro-lifer.
There was no question to "dodge" - merely repeated attempts to associate atheism with fascism, communism, libertarianism, abortion, objectivism, or whatever convenient boogeyman presents itself.
Why did all the major atrocities of the 19'th century occur under the auspices of Christianity? Your 4.5 million dead is ludicrously low - try 2-5 million dead in the Belgian Congo alone...
Neat country. They'll need a flag with a hammer, a syckle, and a pink flamingo on it.
"Sir, the majority has decided that you must die for the betterment of society. Take comfort knowing that it is the moral thing to do."
"Why chose me?"
"Well, not you individually, all Jews."
I will not, however, count the Black Plague or the many diseases that killed people in Central and South America and so on.
Au contraire, mon frere. If you don't observe society's standards you will, at best, be ostracized (at worst, society will kill you to get you out of its hair). Humans are social critters out of necessity; we don't survive well outside the group.
I want to make a personal note here as well. I do not disrespect atheists, even the ones who insulted me earlier. I think it is taken as a given among atheists that the Christian faith is intellectually indefensible. I'm taking the time on this thread to hopefully prove that to be not the case. All of this is in the interest of healthy debate between various factions of conservatives and libertarians.
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