OT - For those that like political discussion on rmr - you can even discuss religion with this one

Well, someone once said, if you believe your tailbone is vestigal, then he will pay to have yours removed.

Im sorry but I dont think there are such things as vestigal organs. There are organs that have been thought to be vestigal but are not. Like your appendix, it is a part of your immune system, you can live without it but you will get more diseases. You can live without your arms and legs and eyes/ear, so does that mean its vestigal?

Saying random chances created life and everything is like finding a computer or a cell phone and saying it made itself.

-- TAI FU

My personal belief is that Zod's Interplanetary Toxic Waste Disposal Service was responsible for getting the life ball rolling here on Earth.

Kevin OClassen

If schools teach creationism/ID, what is there to teach? It can be summed up in a few sentences! When I took biology, this is exactly what occured.

You can't see it because the timescale is absolutely beyond the comprehension of most people. Do you really know how long 3.8 billion years is? That's 3 point eight times ten to the ninth. The complexities we see did not happen all at once. They happened over trillions of generations over billions of years, and built upon one another.

You're off by an order of magnitude. It's 3.8 bilion years since the first life appeared on earth.

Fish did not "one day decide to get up on earth and breathe." It happened slowly. There was probably a large community of fish living near a shoreline somewhere. Over many millennia, the sea level started to drop and those fish that got stranded on land died. However, some of those who got stranded were able to last longer in the air, due to random individual characteristics, and were able to hop back into the water and subsequently reproduce and pass their genes on. The process repeated, once again over milions of years, and left us with something resembling what we would call a "mudskipper."

A million years is nothing in the grand scheme of things, but it is plenty of time for life to show slight modifications. 10 million years to show moderate changes, and 100 million years to either go extinct or diverge into two or more separate species. In smaller organisms like insects, the time scale is much shorter, and we can observe it in both nature and in the laboratory.

I should add that these "divergences" and evolutionary changes don't magically happen. They happen because of environemntal changes. Sea level falls, or a drought occurs. Do a google search on the "Giraffe example" of evolution.

Well, they say that mutation causes evolution. However can anyone give an example of a beneficial mutation? There is none, for example a cow with 5 legs or flies with 4 wings, they cannot breed and are usually at a disadvantage (natural selection takes care of them) and besides regarding fossil records, if dinosaur turned into birds and fish turned into reptiles, where are all the intermediate species? and how would a half fish half lizard live?

Also saying natural selection causes evolution is like saying a quality control person at General motors can turn a car into an airplane or a boat by rejecting bad cars. Natural selection is simply nature's way of quality control to keep a species strong, it does not create new species.

-- TAI FU

On occasion you are one funny guy. This would be one of those times.

Finally. Someone with some EVIDENCE!

;-)

Dan Cox wrote: > As far as the universe goes,, well we haven't heard from them yet either

The fact that we've not heard from anyone else in the universe indicates that the other lifeforms may be intelligent...

:-)

Mario

Not one shred? It seems you haven't been looking too closely. There's plenty of evidence to support the theory of evolution.

Granted, it doesn't *prove* evolution. But that's the nature of scientific theory. All you can do is gather evidence that gives you confidence that your theory might be the correct one, or else contradicts your theory and forces you to modify it or abandon it. No scientific principle is ever "proven", and there isn't a shred of evidence anywhere that will prove *any* scientific principle.

Not true. Have you read Darwin?

This is reminiscent of the old creationism argument that no "transitional" forms occur in the fossil record. If a transitional form were to be found, the argument would be shifted to demand a *new* transitional form between the new discovery and established species. Similarly, if a dog produced something different, creationists would merely argue that it was a *mutant* dog and not a non-dog (or some such thing) -- even if changes occurred dramatically and suddenly, which evolution generally does not support (if I may ignore punctuated equilibrium for a moment).

Oh, and by the way, transitional forms *have* been found. Scads of them. Some quick examples:

Mammal-Primate: Cantius, Palaechthon, Pelycodus, Purgatorius.

Reptile-Mammal: Biarmosuchia, Haptodus, Procynosuchus, Varanops.

Reptile-Bird: Coelophysis, Compsognathus, Deinonychus, Oviraptor.

Amphibian-Reptile: Hylonomus, Limnoscelis, Paleothyris, Proterogyrinus.

Fish-Amphibian: Cheirolepis, Eusthenopteron, Osteolepis, Sterropterygion.

Here are lots more:

Evolution can predict whether or not certain things will be true. For example, if the principles of evolution are correct, we should expect to find certain things in the fossil record, or to observe that animals (or genetics) follow certain rules. Lo and behold, they are and they do. This gives us confidence that we are on the right track.

What predictive ideas does creationism hold that can be tested?

No, it doesn't. This is a gross oversimplification from the creationist camp.

The Second Law of Thermodynamics teaches that everything tends towards

*equilibrium*, not chaos. Complex, organized structures arise spontaneously all the time that are closer to equilibrium than their individual parts were: crystals, for example, are *highly* organized structures.

The unfortunate thing is that a mixture of gases in a closed chamber or miscible liquids tend to approach equilibrium by getting all mixed up, a state that certainly seems much more chaotic than organized; the layman sees this, is informed that entropy has increased, and equates "entropy" with "chaos". It ain't necessarily so.

Kent Hovind? Are you effin *kidding* me? Even as a creationist, I'd be embarrassed to be allied with the man in any sense. He has committed income tax fraud; has been accused of assault; has an illegitimate doctorate; and has multiple times refused to stop spouting misinformation to his adherents, even in the light of *directly observable evidence* to the contrary. If he has ever taught *anyone* (as he claims to have done -- physics for high school students, yet!), I suggest those students re-learn what he has handed them with actual

*fact*.

This page has much evidence and many links to get you started:

And here's a blow-by-blow critique of his points in a single lecture: If creationism is a matter of faith for you (as it appears to be for Hovind), let me try to gently reassure you that Genesis is not as definite as Hovind and his ilk might like to think. Without straining too hard, I can give you *four* distinct theories of the origin of the Universe that are fully consistent with Genesis and the rest of the Bible, some of which fit the Bible and available natural evidence even better than Hovind-style creationism.

That WOULD be quite a leap, wouldn't it?

But one thing I don't think people really grasp is how long a million or billion years is. When you look at the number of individuals in a species, how long they live, and how often they reproduce, that's a lot of reproductive events! Enough for almost anything to happen, even given random chance. Natural selection can be subtle, but over long enough it's very powerful.

Also, it's becoming more apparent that a lot of past characteristics still remain latent in our genes - recent articles have talked about "turning on" the gene for humans to have tails, or (more usefully) allowing us to manufacture our own vitamin C.

I can easily see latent characteristics "suddenly" expressing themselves and causing significant changes in a species.

Oh, and cars don't have DNA.

Some bacteria have developed immunity to antibiotics we have created. Darned beneficial from the point of view of the bacterium.

Note the links and species I provided in another message.

Define "new species". Make sure that it is not self-referential. Demonstrate how it is impossible for natural selection to do what you describe.

Note how evolution defines "species", and what principles the theory uses to assert that it is possible for natural selection to do what it describes.

Are you confusing your appendix with your spleen?

-Fred Shecter NAR 20117

"Vestigial" doesn't mean "better off without" or even "useless". It merely means that it has a reduced and rudimentary structure compared to the same structure in other organisms. The functions they perform are done using structures that are clearly capable of more complex behavior. Non-functionality is not a requirement for vestigial character. (For example, the wings of an ostrich are vestigial, even though they are clearly useful for balance, courtship displays, and defense; they are merely not used in the complex way that wings are usually used on birds.)

It's a bit like using a television to hammer in a nail. The television would serve a function, and would even perform the function to which I was setting it. Clearly, though, the television was not designed merely to pound in nails, which one can see if one compares it to the televisions in entertainment systems elsewhere.

Besides, even if my tailbone *were* useless, why would I submit to an operation to remove it? Any operation is, by its very invasive nature, hazardous. Why submit to a pointless hazard with no (or almost no) potential payoff?

Nope. You have the wrong definition of "vestigial". See above.

No -- it's more akin to finding laws under which pieces of cell-phone-like structures tend to organize spontaneously, and then arguing that the cell phones we see with no clear origin could have arisen spontaneously.

Biological proteins tend to organize spontaneously under the laws of organic chemistry. Your analogy is flawed because we have observed no laws that allow elements to combine on their own into the small structures required for a cell phone.

Customer: Look matey, I know an empty 'argument from incredulity' when I see one, and I'm looking at one right now.

Bill Sullivan

This assumes that all of the other species "out there" are more highly advanced than we are here on Sol 3, at least from a technological point of view. How do you know this is the case? Could it be possible that WE are the most highly advanced life form in this neck of the universe?

Somebody has to be first. Why not us?

Bill Sullivan

It was the Jaggeroth! I saw it on Dr. Who!

Bill Sullivan

I gotta believe in the grand scheme of things other intelligent lifeforms view our *lifeform* much like how we view ants.

Ted Novak TRA#5512 IEAS#75