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

Correct. And, who says we're descended from the Amoeba that happens to be around today? That particular Amoeba just took a different evolutionary path that worked for its species' particular situation(s).

Personally, I'm descended from the Yeti anyway... dunno what the rest of you folks' problems are...

tah

Then what would we eat? Surely not your immediate family!

Bill Sullivan

"What if you were starving to death and the only food you had was me?"

- Slick

Damn, Phil! You sure stirred the pot this time! :-)

You got to stir the pot, otherwise the stuff at the bottom gets burned!

Whch is anecdotal evidence for the sheer variety of species, many very geographically specific.

Your argument, in a nutshell, is as follows:

"I can't figure out how it happened. Therefore, Quaquiutu the Ubiquitous must have done it. (Fill in whatever deity or tribal image you feel comfortable with.)

ID is decidedly NOT science. It fails on a number of criteria.

In order for a theory to be scientific, it must be observable and measureable. When somebody advances a "scientific" theory that cannot be measured in any manner, it is not science. It is something far less than science.

A scientific theory must be verifiable and falsifiable. The facts leading to the conclusion must be independently repeatable. "A miracle occured" or "Harry Potter waved his magic wand and made it so" cannot be independently verified or repeated.

Now hold on there, buddy. The poorly and inaccurately named Big Bang theory is the result of scientific observation that continues today. The evidence in favor includes the expansion of the universe and the background radiation left behind from The First Event. (I like that name a lot better.)

That's nice. Now prove it. Show me your experimental data and/or quantitative observations. Show me the numbers.

Once again the latter-day luddites are using the word "theory" as synonymous with "it's just a guess." Science doesn't work that way. Science demands facts. A hypothesis does not advance to the level of theory until it has facts to back it up and can be used to predict behavior. It is NOT just an opinion.

So am I. But I don't mix religion and science. We used to do that. Let's not forget that Galileo was tried and convicted of publishing heresy, (i.e., the heretical and scripturally erroneous notion that the Earth is not the center of the universe) and scripture was used to convict him.

Antway, what better proclaims the glory of God? A universe that's less than 10,000 years old? Or a universe that's at least 15 billion years in the making?

Which proves nothing. It is the preponderance of evidence that proves the theory. By your logic, atomic theory proves nothing because it has so many gaps in it, and it cannot reconcile with special relativity and quantum theory. This will, of course, be of infinite comfort to the good people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Bill Sullivan

And since the scientists who study this have yet to fully explain it they daily refer to a theory as a fact.

No one has observed evolution. Breeding for a desired result is not evolution. Evolution says one thing became something else entirely.

And no one has verified evolution or the creation of life in the beginning. They have discovered a number of species some of them agrueably related but they have not proven in the labratory or elsewhere that one thing changes into another thing entirely.

I don't think anyone really questions the event of the big bang, that wasn't my point.

I don't need to, it's one of the 'big ideas' in physics, and if Michiu Kaku thinks it's a swell idea then I'm inclined to agree with him.

So why do we still call it a theory? Why not hte law of evolution as someone else has suggested?

I never said in any post that I believed in history as portrayed in the bible and neither does ID although that is what it has been associated with. ID simply says that a watchmaker of sorts had to have a hand in the process, it doesn't say it did it in 6 days ad nauseum.

Um apples and kumquats. Trying to agrue something by comparing it to something completely unrelated just doesn't do it for me. Bombs work, so do nuclear reactors, I don't think there's much new to discover there....

See.....when $DEITY was making all the animals...there were all these left over parts....seeing how $DEITY can not violate his own laws (can not create nor destroy matter) then $DEITY _had_ to do something with them....

I figure that $DEITY just smashed 'em all together and put it in a place $DEITY figured no one would find it. Kind of like a 3 year old hiding the broccoli in a glass of milk.

-Aaron

But the only way for evolution to occur is through mutation caused by radiation(From what I've read and seen on various science shows). A fish cannot simply decide to breathe because his water hole is drying up one day. The mutation has to coincide with the environmental event and that in itself throws in a whole new level of randomness. Plus, you have to have had a significant number of fish for example with the same gene that allows air breathing to create a new viable gene pool AND they all have to breed with one another,, they can't be isolated in seperate physical regions of the world.

I eat cows not amoebas.

You cook the cows first to kill the amoebas. Otherwise you would get a nasty case of dysentary.

Bill Sullivan

Ya know, this whole thread is turning into a Monty Python skit.

"To be sure, Darwin's theory of evolution is imperfect. However, the fact that a scientific theory cannot yet render an explanation on every point should not be used as a pretext to thrust an untestable alternative hypothesis, grounded in religion, into the science classroom or to misrepresent well-established scientific propositions."

"Yes it can!"

"It can't!"

"It can too!"

"No, you can't!"

"Yes, I can!"

-ding-

"I'm sorry, your time is up."

"But I'm not done arguing!"

-silence-

Bill Sullivan

hehe.. yeah, he needs to be in on this thread..

It'd be like trying to put out a fire with lacquer thinner...

tah

This is just so wrong.

See above.

Just where did You get the idea that, "Evolution says one thing became something else entirely."?

You are not identical to Your parents. You are also not, "something else entirely". Now imagine, say a million generations down the "road", how big a difference there could be between Your parents and those Coxs

It does not *have* to be cause by mutation, but it *can* be caused by mutation. As I've said, the environmental factor is the main player, hence the name "natural selection."

A certain environmental event can cause certain individuals in a poplation to be favored over others. On a micro-scale, imagine a population of a particular species of insect. These insects can come in two colors, tan or green. Now imagine that these insects live in a grassy field, where both green and brown grasses can exist, allowing the bus to blend in and avoid predators.

Suppose that one day, something caused the grass' water source to dry up permanently. Perhaps a river got diverted or whatever. Now that the green grass is gone, the green bugs stick out like sore thumbs on the tan-colored earth. The tan bugs, on the other hand, still blend in relatively well. The green ones get eaten up because of their lack of camoflague, while the tan ones live on and reproduce. The bugs with the "tan genes" will be favored, while the ones with the "green genes" will be eliminated from the gene pool after a few generations. The end result is a species of only tan bugs.

That was micro-evolution. The same thing can, and does happen on a much larger and longer scale.

Dave Grayvis wrote:

You start with a single celled organism and somehow that became a human being,, that's what I'm referring to and that's what I don't buy. And in regards to the 20 million years question: That's just it we don't know, just as we do not know that everything that preceeded us indeed resulted IN us. I'd really like to believe that evolution as it is taught explains it but for me it doesn't. Life is just too complex, hell the fact that we're sentient throws a whole nother 'monkey' wrench in the works when nothing else on the planet is.......

I do think that some of the processes that are said to have occurred did, but I do not think they happened by chance. It is interesting to realize that if it is so against the odds for life to even occur which is what they always seem to state then why do we have the abundance and variety of life that we do? You would think that one thing would have succeeded and that would be all, not this plethora of successful creatures. That's a hell of a lot of luck. Think also of all the little customized adaptations that creatures have. It just makes no sense to me that they somehow created those for themselves even with random mutation because even with random mutation you'd have to have enough of them with the same mutation to breed a new line of 'critters'. One fish is born for instance with a glowing dangling bit off the top of his head in the deep ocean,,so he lives better because he can trick other little fish in to looking at it which he promply eats,, he may pass that mutation on to his kids but they by themselves can't create the new species,, they'd be inbred,, and the mutation would disappear when they breed outside the family line. Every single successful mutation has to happen on a widespread scale to succeed. That single element has never been explained in anything I have read or seen on the various tv programs. And, that same happenstance has to happen for EVERY single other animal on the planet in different USEFUL ways.

Some would argue that looking at it in the way I do is a on a Micro scale as opposed to a Macro one but I disagree. I've pointed out how you must have successful mutations in enough of a population for every creature to successfully generate an improved version. I 'believe' there is simply a serious breach of logic in the whole arguement which is frankly why we still refer to it as a theory even today.... (As I already mentioned somewhere else, we do know there were probably a lot of things that didn't succeed, because everything that is not here,, didn't,, but an awful lot of things somehow still managed to.)

But somewhere along the line those two colors of bugs had to branch genetically. That's the point, how did they do that. The pressures that then favored one or the other are beside the point. HOW did they change their appearance.

God has a sense of humor.

Randy

What state are you from? Here in PA, we are naturally clean and do not smell.