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No body is stopping you, just write out a check to the IRS and I'm sure they will cash it.

Unfortunately, I'm pretty sure you can't earmark funds specifically for NASA or particular NASA programs.

Personally, I'm hoping for retired Air Force general Pete Worden, who has been a proponent of private sector involvement in space exploration and settlement. However, he's been pretty critical of the methods used by NASA and large aerospace contractors, so there could be a lot of resistance to his nomination.

Forgive me, for I haven't seen the documentary myself. Could you elaborate on what your objection is?

I'm a little confused here... do you think the measurements showing the height of Mt Everest constantly increasing have been falsified?

Not to take your post too seriously (recognizing the winkie), One really must wonder how long it would take the slow moving sea creatures to climb from the Bay of Bengal to the heights of Everest.

I think the current rate measured is about a quarter inch per year (or four years per inch). Making the probably unsafe assumption that the rate has been constant for the past N years:

4 (year/inch) * (12 inches/foot) * 29,035 (feet) = 1,393,680 years

Of course, that's an absurdly rough calculation, but I think it's around the right order of magnitude.

I like the idea of space archaeology (sort of reminds me of programmer archaeologists), but the article itself was somewhat flawed.

On the other hand, I'm not sure how biblical literalists explain fossilized sea creatures 29,000 feet up.

The Flood put them there, of course. ;)

30 years of intelligently designed computer software should be far more sophisticated than 10 billion years of undirected RMNS.

How so? In the computer domain, there have been a number of cases in which evolved designs have surpassed those which have been "intelligently designed," in terms of both performance and sophistication. Some examples:

* Evolved radio receiver
* Evolution of wing flapping for flight
* Evolution of Dynamic Gaits in AIBO Robots
* Other work with evolving circuits

On a related note, here'a fun java applet in which you design a structure by snapping together blocks, and then the program applies evolutionary algorithms to generate proper motor commands. It's pretty fun, and it's really neat to see the thing you designed "learn" how to walk using evolutionary algorithms.

If a software programmer were to examine Windows XP and make predictions about an earlier iteration of Windows, would this prove the program has evolved by itself (without intelligent influence).

No. However, we could reasonably surmise that the code had indeed gone through several iterations/version, and wasn't simply poofed into existence. From analysis of the existing code and code from previous eras, we could also reasonably surmise that Windows XP, Linux, and FreeBSD all have a common ancestor in Berkeley BSD.

Just to repeat myself once more. If you can't make with a fruit fly--are you a fruit fly?

More specifically: If you can't mate with Drosophila melanogaster, are you Drosophila melanogaster? If you can't mate with Drosophila pseudoobscura, are you Drosophila pseudoobscura? They're both often referred to by the name "fruit fly," even though they're technically different species.

And the follow-up answer is that no, once they can't mate with each other they're no longer considered the same species, because this prevents beneficial mutations from spreading from one population to the other. Unless plasmids or something get involved, but that's a completely different matter.

If evolution was true there would be no monkeys cuz they woulda all turned into people by now.

Why would they turn into people? First, evolution doesn't in any way involve one species transforming into another already-existing species. Second, monkeys are much better adapted to a jungle environment than humans are.

What biological experiments?

There's a couple of interesting examples in the recent issue of Microbiology Today.

This page discusses some experiments in evolving fruit flies in conditions which involve specific learning tasks. Here's an overview of their research from New Scientist.

Bottom line. If you turn the clock back far enough and if you believe in evolution you have no option but to believe in non living things giving rise to living things.

Sorry, but that's not the case. Evolution only covers what happens to living organisms -- it makes no claims about where the initial organisms came from. Similarly, Newton's theory of gravity only covers objects which already exist -- it makes no claims about where those objects came from, or even what gravity itself is.

As far as evolutionary theory is concerned, it doesn't matter if life initially came about due to God saying some powerful words, autocatalytic chemicals, self-replicating vesicles, or a giant tortoise. All that matters is that it fits the data we currently have, and accurately predicts future data.

Granted, I happen to also think that the abiogenesis hypothesis will ultimately have evidence to support it, but recognize that it's not a scientific theory as there isn't any concrete evidence for it. Until the laboratories working on the problem show autocatalytic sets or self-replicating vesicles emerging from conditions like those of early earth, we can't really say for certain.

Where are the transitional life forms?????? There are none.

Problem is, whenever someone finds a fossil which fills a "gap" in the fossil record, creationists just point at it and say, "Look! Now you have two gaps!"

To delve into the math a little, species can also be thought of as somewhat like local minima of a gradient descent function. At least in computer simulations and the biological experiments which have been done so far, when a group gets knocked out of its current minima, it converges towards a new minima FAST.

However, it is an issue. That is why you had all those experiments where they tried to show that you can make amino acids using a particular atmosphere and current. Without proving that you can spontaneously generate life, evolution is dead. However, even those experiments where amino acids were produced; huge assumptions in that they don’t really know what the atmosphere was like at the time were hand waved away. They have some guesses, but no real certain information and an amino acid is still miles from a living cell. But we would rather just use (interpret) the information based on a test (designed to show what we want to hear) and extrapolate this and say that given this atmosphere and some lightning we’d get life from dead pond scum. When you really break evolution down into its most elemental state. What is it really saying? You end up realizing that this theory is pretty wild, is based on several heavy assumptions, does NOT answer many questions, has had many intentional deceits and misguided efforts to prove its validity, is in some ways contradicting and yet considered the “truth” and an undeniable fact.

You're referring to the abiogenesis hypothesis, not evolutionary theory. Abiogenesis is interesting in its own right, but since we don't have any sort of record from anywhere near that time period, and we haven't yet been able to completely recreate primordial life in laboratory conditions, it remains very much a hypothesis. It's a complement to evolutionary theory, not a part of the theory itself.

However, my question to you was very simple. Has mating of fruit flies ever produced anything other than fruit flies?

The fruit fly populations referred to here cannot mate with each other so....if you continue your lunkheaded insistence that an arbitrary naming distinction is a binding law of nature, than I have to inform you that the entity produced in the lab is not a fruit fly. It is merely being called a fruit fly as a labeling convenience. It cannot breed with the other fruit flies, and that is the most universally accepted technical quality that it takes to be a fruit fly.

Minor nitpick: the term "fruit fly" is used to refer to all of the species within the genus Drosophila, which includes things like Drosophila melanogaster (the species typically used in research).

The theory is that *ALL** of the species on earth came about that way. They managed to do that despite extinction also occurring. In other words, to arrive at the multiple millions of species on earth, things would have to evolve faster than the rate of extinction. After all, if there were 30 species on earth, and two became extinct for every new one that evolved, where would we be? So evolution not only has to occur, but it has to occur faster than extinction. Much faster to account for the massive numbers of species we see today.

This is a very interesting question. Allow me to engage in a thought experiment...

DISCLAIMER: What I've written below is just a thought experiment, and I have no idea if it's supported by scientific evidence. I'm betting there's been computer simulations of such phenomena, but those are admittedly not always the best way to confirm a hypothesis. Just allow me to muse for a moment.

Imagine a diverse environment which contains a number of organisms, which belong to a number of different species. According to evolutionary theory (I think), if there are a lot of different environmental niches and only a few species, over time you'll tend to see the emergence of new species to fill the different niches -- if a new species is better adapted to a niche than the already-existing species, it'll prosper and potentially lead to even more species. In this way, the number of species tends to increase. There's some complications because organisms themselves can create new niches (e.g. parasites), but that's the general idea.

However, this can only go so far. An environment can only support a finite number of species. For one, if there's absurdly many species that means that there's only a few organisms belonging to each species, which tends to make the species very vulnerable to extinction. Additionally, if an organism is adapted to an incredibly specific niche it can be screwed over if anything happens to that niche. So, this tends to put a limit on the maximum number of species.

However, there are a number of ways in which we can have extinction. One way is that a new species emerges which takes over the niche of another species -- this tends to break even in the total number of species. Another way is that there's some sort of mass extinction event, like an ice age. In this case, we see all of the species which aren't able to adapt to the new conditions die off. The surviving species produce more species to fit the emptied niches, until a limit is reached as described above.

If one were to graph the number of species in an environment over time, I imagine that you'd see something like a sigmoidal curve, with the number of species increasing until it reaches a particular equilibrium value (where the rate of increase is balanced by the limit of available niches and small-scale extinction). Periodically you'd see mass extinction events, which would correspond to a sharp drop in the graph. However, after such a drop you'd see it climb back up to the equilibrium point.

Now that I look back at my musing, species are a lot like companies in a free-market economy in many ways, in how they adapt to different niches. I wonder if there's any plots available of the number of companies in existence in a country at a given time, also showing things like depressions/recessions and the following bounce-back.

But we've never observed such a thing and there's no indication that such a thing ever occurred. There's no reason to believe any creature on earth ever evolved from any other creature.

On shorter time scales (i.e. what we've been able to observe in the past hundred or so years), we've seen populations speciate (i.e. become unable to mate with each other) and mutations which have resulted in significantly different individuals. We've also seen many of the microbes which cause disease evolve resistances to our antibiotics and adapt to infect new host species. Arguably, computer programs using evolution-based algorithms have proven to be an effective means of developing robotic and electronic systems, sometimes generating systems where humans have been unable to understand how they work.

In the long term, from the fossil record we have been able to construct a "tree of life," based on when different species were known to have been alive. This has been made confirmed by cross-referencing data from comparative embryology and comparative genetics -- species with less distant common ancestors have more in common in terms of their embryonic development and genetic composition. Really, the genetic evidence is darned hard to dismiss.

And let's face it, evolution **IS** the socialist left's pet theory of how we as humans got to where we are.

I'm not so sure about that. Except for when they're whining about creationists, the socialists I've known absolutely -hate- evolution. Its findings regarding competitiveness as an innate part of human nature tends to fly in the face of their communist utopias.

More like Chaotic Good.

HAhaahaa! I just said that. You can anything you want to be except a Paladin.

Or a Druid -- not that anybody in their right mind would actually want to be one.

But it isn't the job of evolution's critics to prove that this latter event will never happen. It's the job of evolution's backers to prove that it will happen, and in fact has happened even without human intervention. Not only once, but the millions upon millions of times it would have to have occurred to arrive at the number of species we have on earth today. If evolution's proponents cannot prove that, they can still offer their theory, but they should be willing to admit the problems with it and stop shouting down anyone who questions it.

According to the theory of gravity, an object launched from a particular position at a particular velocity would be able to orbit around the planet Mercury. Is it the job of proponents of the theory of gravity to launch such a probe to verify that the theory works in this particular instance, or are they permitted to generalize from the mountains of evidence which suggests that gravity works the way they think it does?

Well actually using domesticated dogs as an example is not good since they are all members of the same species regardless of the consequences of their mating. If the teacup were to survive being mated with a Great Dane, then it is absolutely possible for it to bear a pup. It would be a mutt, and the teacup may not survive the birth, but it does not invalidate the fact that they could possibly bear an offspring.

I'd be very curious to see if any dog breeder has ever tried this before. Certainly somebody, somewhere must have...