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Stumble over to a creationism site, they're up to the eyeballs in investigations and arguments. Try Answers In Genesis or the Institute for Creation Research or Geoscience Research Institute for a few examples.

Only a few.

You also have to ask yourself: what would you expect an evolution-dominated textbook to say? "We're presenting six hundred pages on evolution here, but we don't think it's important?"

Repeated assertion is not proof.

Evolution is a theory (perhaps I should say Theory) which attempts to explain Linnaeus' organisation. That it succeeds is what's in question here. The Creationists explain the same things which evolutionary principle has had kingship of claimed for it, many of them far more plausibly. They claim, with this as justification, that creation is the central organising principle of biology.

You assert that "creation science has yet to generate a single testable, falsifiable, hypothesis, which is the first step to becoming a theory", but you do so speciously. Creation science sites are awash in hypotheses and you simply haven't noticed. Fixed speciation is one such hypothesis, and it matches reality exactly. The absence of interspecies fossils is another prediction of Creartion, and so far they've won the day on that one pretty convincingly (the closest to a refutation we've come is that glorified hoatzin called archaeopteryx).

Early Creationists (at least in Europe) got too carried away with this and insisted that not just species but individual subspecies of animal were immutable. This in the face of cross-breeding programs. Mind you, this was back in the day when Spontaneous Generation was accepted as the scientifically valid opposition to this concept, so I'm inclined to cut both sides some slack here.

Go and actually read some Creationist sites -- know thy enemy and all that. They've got reasonable-sounding hypotheses on geology, astronomy, all manner of stuff. If you're going into a battle of wits, do remember to go in armed! Read some of the refutations of DDI (and DCD's errata) as well. Have an argument, not a shouting match! (-:

Meanwhile, there are many evolutionary biologists who would cheerfully donate a limb to the cause if they thought they'd get a naturalistic self-organising principle out of it. That alone should be a big hint that there's something major still missing from the panacea called evolution.

"What do you think antibiotic resistance is?"

A genetic adaptive response.

"They're variant amino acid sequences for antibiotic targets that produce slightly different proteins."

Contingency loci. This is not random change.

"Or community plasmids or viral sequences that don't have any advantage normally, but the bacterial community keeps around because those that don't are periodically wiped out."

Another adaptive response.

"But if you think about it as a random genetic mutation in the structure of a blood protein that, in its heterozygous state, confers great resistance to a lethal disease"

I do think about it that way. Note that your only example thus far of an actual random mutation has been degenerative. And yes, people who die from this don't reproduce much afterwards.

"How about cystic fibrosis? If "sick things don't reproduce well", cystic fibrosis should have been history long before modern medicine got around to diagnosing it."

????

So you are saying that natural selection doesn't work?

"Try looking up "ribosomal RNA sequencing" sometime, since you say you're big on scientific papers."

rRNA sequencing conflicts with the morphological data in many cases.

"How could life arise from non-life? The Wiki entry on "origin of life" has a good summary of the theories on how that could happen. As well as the experimental proof behind them."

Yes, there's many theories. But the "proof"s simply aren't there. Try checking out:

Chance and Necessity Do Not Explain the Origin of Life

Origin of life on earth and Shannon's theory of communication.

You also have the problem that before DNA-editting enzymes, the error rate would be too high to support life, but the enzymes are encoded by DNA.

Also there's the little problem that, before enzymes, the reaction rate would be way too slow to do anything of interest before being totally destroyed.

You also seem to be misunderstanding the idea of Intelligent Design (and even creationism). First of all, ID is compatible with (but does not require) common descent. Neither creationism nor intelligent design require a designer to be continually tinkering throughout natural history. The point is that the processes in the cell are ultimately _telic_ processes. They are informational processes, guided by the information that was originally coded. The Darwinian idea is that information can generate itself. Demski has handily refuted such idea using basic math (any search space involving more than 500 bits to achieve the next fitness level is basically impossible).

The quintessential ID hypothesis is probably Davison's Prescribed Evolutionary Hypothesis (previously called the Semi-Meiotic Theory) which says that phylogeny follows a semi-directed path just like ontogeny does.

The quintessential Creationary hypothesis is probably Todd Wood's Altruistic Genetic Element hypothesis.

Also, if you're interested, two good examinations of neo-Darwinism are:

A Biochemical Mechanism for Nonrandom Mutations and Evolution

and

"Unfortunately, seven-day-Creationists have corrupted the term worse than the words "communist" and "hacker" combined."

Except the term was initially used as a drop-in replacement for creationism in the 1989 book "Pandas and People," lately of fame in the Dover Intelligent Design scandal. Here's a review by the Geoscience Research Institute, a young-earth creationist group, from 1992. Notice in the review that "creationism" and "intelligent design" are used more or less interchangeably. Or you can read a 1989 review from the National Center for Science Education that finds the same thing. ID wasn't taken over by creationists. It was founded by them.

"The embryo drawings are discredited in the scientific world and any textbook which still has them decades later is a discredit to their ability to stay current, not an indication that evolution is false."

I didn't say it was an indication that evolution was false. I said it was a perpetuation of a secular myth. Just as you don't want religious myths being perpetuated by the school system, I don't see any reason why secular myths should likewise be perpetuated. Yet much of the teaching of evolution is more indoctrination of secular mythology than in actual science.

"Though similar kinds of changes have been observed on many occasions (which for some reason the creationists don't tell us) it is true that the methodology behind the peppered moths findings was flawed."

Actually, creationists believe in faster diversification than evolutionists. Creationists believe that the original "created kinds" were roughly at the family level of taxonomy, at least for vertebrates. This is confirmed with breeding evidence, for which creationist groups have been building the hybrid database for research along these lines.

The difference is that creationists believe that the change process in animals are (a) a designed mechanism, and (b) limitted. Think of genetic algorithms -- while they are able to vary quite significantly, each is ultimately restricted to the constraints of their programming.

For one creationist hypothesis of how this change mechanism occurs, see this paper. He fleshes out more specifics in later papers. Todd Wood, the author of the paper, is part of the team that sequenced the rice genome, and, while not an authority, is well-published secularly. Also see Chris Ashcraft's review of genetic recombination and variability.

"An intelligent designer would create intelligent designs, with each feature designed perfectly to fit its intended purpose."

This is assuming a perfect creation. Evolution is full of metaphysical assumptions, but pretends its not. See Darwin's God: Evolution and the Problem of Evil. His main point is that the biggest problem of evolution is not its metaphysics, but its denial of its metaphysics.

Anyway, let's look at some flaws in your assumptions:

1) God would make each creature perfect. In fact, God specifically said he made some creatures persue folly by design.
2) Each creature currently is as it was created. Would not a good engineer make a creature adaptable?
3) Each creatures is as perfect as was originally made. But Biblically, all creation was affected by the fall.

It sounds like your arguments are from Gould. Gould was a great writer and an excellent thinker, but he failed to see (or even possibly know about) how the fall would affect biology. Understanding the Pattern of Life has a great chapters on both biodiversity and biological imperfection. While it probably isn't enough to convince a skeptic, it would probably be useful for skeptics to at least understand the creationist perspective.

Most people also don't understand that both creationists and evolutionists believe in evolution, the main difference being that creationists believe in a polyphyletic tree, and that biodiversity was built-in while evolutionists think that it was not built in.

here's a good reason why from the Creationist point of view things must be "static"

the bible says NOTHING that a wiseman goat-herder would/could have known 2,000 years ago

nothing about biology, germs

maybe you haven't noticed, but the account of creation in the bible LITERALLY/UNEQUIVOCALLY does NOT expound on any long time-scale,

Just what is it that you think evolutionary biologists do???

Um... Last I remember reeding there was a lot of fruit-fly breading. But in a sense nearly all biology, especially cellular biology, has a big influence on our understanding of evolution. And err, what kind of biologists use stem cells in their research again? (Note: I'm not saying stem cell research has crossed a line at this point, merely that it would be irresponsible not to spend some time figuring out where the line should go. Like it or not evolutionists as the keepers of the "origins myth" have some responsibility in this matter.)

And yes, boundaries are mostly a side issue, but the point is scientists, and their apologists, appear to have a big problem with boundaries at times. (Partly evidenced by this portion of our discussion)

I'll rephrase: "Intelligent Design "Theory" and Creationism are ideas concerning the origins and evolution of life that have no explanatory power, no predictive power, and offer no testable, falsifiable hypotheses. These ideas do not expand our knowledge.

Saying that ID as proposed by Behe is not a useful theory is one thing (and I more or less agree, though I think the community at large has been hostile and defensive rather than helpful in this matter). Claiming it is impossible to ever create any useful theory including creationist or intelligent design ideas is quite another. If you're claiming the latter, I can hardly agree. I think this "hard" definition of Naturalism also rules out a lot of interesting chaos principles and notions of hard randomness.

nor offer us insight into how Reality works.

I'm sure you're not claiming to have a full grasp on that capitalized word there...

If you have information with counters my assertions concerning ID "Theory", I'd dearly love to see it. Honestly.

I'm sure I've got nothing on Behe's ID you haven't read before, as you say it is mostly an attempt to tear down another theory rather than being a theory in its own right. I'm further sure you've read enough Phillip Johnson to understand why tough questions about Naturalism and evolution might be important.

However, there is research like this, which happens to be conducted by the church I grew up in (though I'm no longer a member). I'd expect these folks to be derided in many secular circles as fools, but I don't believe that gives them any less right to ask questions than you or I. Any criticism should come from the quality of their ideas and work, not from whether the term "Bible" shows up somewhere on their website...

Creationism (or 'intelligent design', if you prefer) is unfalsifiable in part because it relies on an omnipotent creator who is used to explain every scientific question.

Why can't creationists be honest and say, "Evolution is the best scientific theory of how life evolved, but I believe in creation because I believe in God, something science takes no stand on"?

The Center for the Understanding of Origins is an interdisciplinary Center at Kansas State University. The center aims to foster bold and scholarly interdisciplinary research addressing issues of origins, especially the origin of the physical Universe, of the Earth, of Life, of intelligence, and of language.

The Center comprises permanent faculty from the departments of Biology, English, Entomology, History, Geology, Philosophy, and Physics. The Center's faculty are involved in developing general education courses and honors seminars for undergraduates, and a graduate certificate program in the study of origins. The Center sponsors both academic and public speakers, with the aim of transforming the discussion of important origins subjects such as evolution from one of hostile arguments between "experts" and "special interests" to informed debate among citizens.

You should have asked them to explain the Canyon layers that are basically fossilized wind-blown sand dunes.

Or the layers with [land] animal tracks.

You should have asked them to explain the Canyon layers that are basically fossilized wind-blown sand dunes.

Or the layers with [land] animal tracks.

Austin answers the footprints and dunes here.

There is a much more detailed treatement of the Coconino footprints here.

Read about Tapeats in a bit more detail here

You will no doubt notice that all of these giant oysters, found many km up in the Andes, died closed.

And so on. Reams of answers, only a Google away. How so, since the mast majority of researchers in this world hew to the materialist/naturalist worldview constantly hammered into them by school, television, even comics? How are so few - and such ill-equipped - opponents able to uncover so much that speaks of a short and violent history for our planet, if its history is truly long and meandering?

Personally, I was a little disappointed that you got moderated into the dirt even though your material is all pretty much standard and imaginitive. You did at least put some effort into putting those obsolete ideas across.

Nevertheless, it's bedtime for me. Do your own searching. Sayonarah!

don't scientists ever learn?