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Even leading evolutionists no longer claim that evolution was a slow graduate change. Because, if it was a slow gradual change than there would be lots and lots of transitionary species as predicted by Charles Darwin. Darwin knew there was a scarcity of these transitionary species, but he predicted that a lot of them would be found.

Today there are only a few, disputable, examples of transitionary species. What the fossil record appears to show is that species appears suddenly, then they stay unchanged (or with minor changes) for the rest of their existance.

  This is why evolutionists have now come up with the concept of punctuated equilibrium. Punctuated equilibrium basically states that when evolution happens, it happens so fast that it can't be observed. The punctuated equilibrium theory is unscientific because it is unfalsifiable.

As a liberal Christian, I have a certain passionate hatred for creationism. I despise creationism because it makes Christians look like a bunch of narrow-minded idiots. For example, I was reading in a Christian newspaper an article about the ICR, which stated the earth was young, and cited four reasons for this. All four reasons [1] have been long-since refuted over at Talkorigins.org or the Evolution Wiki. I was able to refute three of the four points off of the top of my head.

I have seen creationist after creationist come to this Creation-Evolution debate board I lurk on, tell us the Earth must be young because of XXX and that we are all wrong. Once we present to them some scientific evidence that the Earth is old, they get real quiet real fast.

Basically, believing in an old Earth is only possible when a creationist is in a serious state of denial. Case in point: The only people who believe in a young Earth have a religious reason for doing so. Many Christians believe in an old Earth; not one atheist believes in a young Earth.

[1] The original offending article can be seen here. The refutations can be found here (just because you can come up with one case where we got different dates doesn't mean the 99+% of cases where we get the same age via different techniques is invalid) here, here, and here (the refutation is for creationist claims for c14 levels in coals, but the process in question can make diamonds have c14 atoms also).

As a liberal Christian, I have a certain passionate hatred for creationism. I despise creationism because it makes Christians look like a bunch of narrow-minded idiots. For example, I was reading in a Christian newspaper an article about the ICR, which stated the earth was young, and cited four reasons for this. All four reasons [1] have been long-since refuted over at Talkorigins.org or the Evolution Wiki. I was able to refute three of the four points off of the top of my head.

I have seen creationist after creationist come to this Creation-Evolution debate board I lurk on, tell us the Earth must be young because of XXX and that we are all wrong. Once we present to them some scientific evidence that the Earth is old, they get real quiet real fast.

Basically, believing in an old Earth is only possible when a creationist is in a serious state of denial. Case in point: The only people who believe in a young Earth have a religious reason for doing so. Many Christians believe in an old Earth; not one atheist believes in a young Earth.

[1] The original offending article can be seen here. The refutations can be found here (just because you can come up with one case where we got different dates doesn't mean the 99+% of cases where we get the same age via different techniques is invalid) here, here, and here (the refutation is for creationist claims for c14 levels in coals, but the process in question can make diamonds have c14 atoms also).

I don't understand your arguments at all. You initially said there were no intermediates in the fossil record. This is clearly incorrect, and a few minutes with google will pick up dozens of counter-examples. This leaves you with two arguments:

1. that the fossil record is not continuous. But neither Darwin nor anyone following him, has predicted that it would be, for the reasons outlined in my previous email. You have snipped my arguement that your own arguments are contradictory on this point.

2. that evolution in combination with mutation cannot create new information. This is an empty assertion unless you provide a rigorous definition of what you mean by "information", and then a physical or mathematical argument that it cannot be increased by (e.g.) mutation. The well resourced "Intelligent Design" people haven't even tried to do this. Even intuitively it is surely incorrect - if you accept the evolution of a wolf-like creature into the thousands of varieties of dog, are you really telling me this evolution involved no new information? It is also logically problematic - see http://www.evowiki.org/index.php/Mutations_don't_a dd_information.

You may not be a creationist but you seem to have picked up on their arguments with insufficient scepticism. The "information" argument in particular is pure pseudo-science, and it's a bit depressing that someone with a scientific or technical background can make it.

I'm sorry you find evolutionary theory boring. Darwin's claims were mind-blowing at the time, and many people find them impossibly mind-blowing today. I would urge you to delve into the vast and exciting literature on evolution mutation, and not just the pop-sci accounts of it. It would also be great if you could apply a fraction of the healthy scepticism you throw at mainstream science to the scientifically illiterate claims of the creationists about information and the fossil record.

You've gotta' love anything that comes out of Darl's mouth. Get a load of some of my favorite quotes:

"Is SCO a company that is really focused on innovating products and technology or are you just hoping to win a lawsuit against IBM and then ride off into the sunset?" "Isn't SCO just all about defeating Linux?" Of course we are innovating and we absolutely want to defeat Linux, just as we want to defeat any other competitor.

And then he goes on to badmouth Linux (as opposed to other competitors) for the rest of the letter.

Is Linux really free? Of course not.
"Free" is one of the most searched words on the Web today. When you type in "Free" in Yahoo search, it brings up more than 3 billion hits. "Free" is a very powerful marketing concept. We all love free. Linux lures you in with the promise of its being "free." But before you get out of the "store," you are surprised to find out that it was anything but free. Just remember the proverb, "Free is the most expensive price."

A classic straw man argument.

Unfortunately for Linux, mi2g also confirmed that the Linux operating system has become somewhat of a hacker's paradise. In a study conducted only seven months ago they found that overall, the most vulnerable operating system for manual hacker attacks was Linux, accounting for 65.64% of all hacker breaches reported.

There's a cute trick, equating security with manual hacker attacks. It completely ignores the fact that most "hacking", ie unauthorized computer use, is done with automated tools ("script kiddies" in hacker parlance).

Linux will likely continue to face challenges about its development methodologies and roadmaps as long as it continues to be a loosely organized set of volunteers who develop what they want, when they want.

The results must be bad because I say the method was bad.
He goes on for pages, but it's all his usual garbage. Nothing new, of course.

I appears that Creationism and Fundamentalism are on the rise.

A good resource for people who use reason and know that evolution is the only possibility should check out evowiki. It gives some pretty good counter arguments to use against creationists and other fundumentalist moro^H^H^H^H types.

Later, GJC

I've found the most honest site on the issue to consistently be evowiki. The intelligent design and creationism pages are always worth a read if you've never done so. They actually go into which sorts of statements used by those arguing the issue are logical falacies and how you can tell.

I've found the most honest site on the issue to consistently be evowiki. The intelligent design and creationism pages are always worth a read if you've never done so. They actually go into which sorts of statements used by those arguing the issue are logical falacies and how you can tell.

You can also use Talk Origins, Talk Reason, Talk Design, EvoWiki and Panda's Thumb to find lots of info on why these people are wrong. If you want to donate money, donate it to the NCSE or Talk.Origins, or perhaps buy some of the books of creationism refuters - I'd reccomend Robert Pennock's book 'Tower of Babel' as quite a good introduction.

Even my lowly blog has a few things on the ID/creationism debacle.

...there's no mention of this at Dr. Dino, clearly this is a clever hoax... It's impossible anyhow since we all know the earth (and therefore the universe) is only 6000 years old!

(humor folks, humor)

No. I suppose I could have been clearer on the point. Fallacy isn't error in deduction, which is always suspect. Fallacy is applying rules which are known to be in error. What you're suggesting is an interesting and subtle misinterpretation of what I said, and something I'm going to need to be a lot more careful about specifying in the future.

Induction and deduction are implicitly guesses, and therefore suspect. More specifically, they're best guesses; you go with the available evidence, and if something new crops up that replaces it, well, great, let's all jump ship. Common sense was replaced by classical physics was replaced by newtonian physics was replaced by relativistic physics was replaced by quantuum mechanics; we'll probably be adding something to that list in the next 30 years or so (strings and branes are the horse i'm putting my money on.) Herbalism to Alchemy to Phlogiston to Oxidation to Modern Chemistry to Materials Science. The list for math is obscene. Computer science is already doing pretty well for lists itself, but that's my field, so that may just reflect my better understanding of its history than the other topics.

None of that is fallacy. It's falsehood. Granted, history of science is /also/ peppered with fallacy, but on the whole, that list represents a revealing of and refinement of knowledge, not (in any real sense) the undoing of bad logic. We weren't cavement because we believed quantuum mechanics due to the teachings of our parents/elders (argumentum ad verecundiam,) out of appeal to furce (ad baculum,) or because all the other cavemen believed in QM (ad populum;) it was simply because we didn't know not only about QM, but about physics, or in most cases fire.

The issue here is that they've been given a good explanation, and facts which support it. At that point, no amount of re-explanation is a fallacy; if it were the case that the glass had been flat and then that the glass after N years was thicker at the bottom, then the explanation they were giving would in fact be both logical and sound. The issue is that their supporting facts are false - the glass was never univorm, and therefore there is a question of whether significant flow has in fact occurred, which it has not.

Arguments topple due to both fallacies and falsehoods. The germane difference is whether it's the initial facts or the logic which led to a result which is in error. This would be fallacy if this guy had said "it's true because Bill Nye said so," or "It's obviously true because everybody knows it," or "It's been known since such-and-such ancient book, so clearly it's true" (This kills me - one of my favorite comics, Lewis Black, indulged in argumentum ad lazarum when mocking the Atkins Diet, questioning whether we'd in fact been eating exactly the wrong thing since the dawn of civilization. Though it left me in tears laughing, which is probably the important part, that is in fact fallacy.)

I should point out that making a misstep during reasoning is not the same thing as a fallacy. A fallacy is using one of a concrete series of logical errors; an error in reasoning is an error in reasoning. If you neglect to take an issue into account, or go through a complex series of reasoning and accidentally swap two individuals leading to error, or if you make a judgement based on a misimpression regarding an individual or situation, that's not a fallacy; that's an error, which leads to a falsehood. Fallacies are using mechanisms which are in error in justification. Whereas this list isn't complete, there's a good primer at each of these links.

Therefore:
- I killed the queen because she was an alien, so she'll ruin us all.
Action on false