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It's really not fair that you associate ID with geocentricism. Actually, there are a good number of scientists who support ID with actual scientific evidence.

Chromosome count mutations are fairly well understood, and are separate from the genetic mutations they're talking about here.

Your argument has been covered at talk.origins (the standard site for checking background on evolutionary "counter"-arguments.)

Please, find the time to have pride in yourself and humility in your opinions: Be proud enough to not express an opinion until you have checked it, and be humble enough to accept that the sum total of people that work in a field, having deep knowledge of it, have a large chance of having thought about the same things as you - and possibly thought better. Then, when you find a case where they haven't, even when you've checked, you can make a real contribution :)

Eivind.

Why is it that the truth is only the truth if it makes someone money.

Uh... not what I said. What I said was that truth (particularly truth about concrete, measurable and tangible things like geology) should have testable consequences. And one prominent test is economic utility. Mainstream geology does . If mainstream geology is totally and fundamentally wrong, how do you explain (in a "SCIENTIFIC" way) that it makes testable predictions and they're right often enough for people to bet on them and make good money? If Flood geology is solidly correct, why doesn't it make those kinds of predictions? Why can't anyone make money from it?

The world's formation by God and the transformation via the Flood are easily seen if you use a truly open SCIENTIFIC mind.

That hasn't been true for a long, long time now.

Why is it that the truth is only the truth if it makes someone money.

Uh... not what I said. What I said was that truth (particularly truth about concrete, measurable and tangible things like geology) should have testable consequences. And one prominent test is economic utility. Mainstream geology does . If mainstream geology is totally and fundamentally wrong, how do you explain (in a "SCIENTIFIC" way) that it makes testable predictions and they're right often enough for people to bet on them and make good money? If Flood geology is solidly correct, why doesn't it make those kinds of predictions? Why can't anyone make money from it?

The world's formation by God and the transformation via the Flood are easily seen if you use a truly open SCIENTIFIC mind.

That hasn't been true for a long, long time now.

The moths in question do not under ordinary circumstances rest on tree trunks, the pictures of the moths on trees that are used in many textbooks are actually staged.

There was a mutation in the gene that results in our ability to synthesise Vitamin C early in the primate days (before most of the primates split off in fact). Gorillas, Chimpanzees, Orang-Utans etc all have this fault gene. Mostly it isn't noticed because the primate family live in Vitamin C rich environments.

There's more about this here...http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc/sec tion2.html#molecular_vestiges

I wasn't talking about your other point about lineages, I was responding to your specific point where you said "You seem to be presuming that people are incredibly stupid. Given that it is common knowledge that there are things like bacteria, mice, earthworms and mosquitoes in existence, it should be fairly clear to anyone that nobody is proposing a theory in which bigger brains are an inevitable outcome. (Maybe you can demonstrate that there are people who do believe this.)"

I demonstrated by refering to a popular reference work that the common understanding of evolution is that things evolve into better versions, and so most people assume that biological evolution means that "bigger brains are an inevitable outcome".

I'm surprised that you should be arguing that this understanding of evolution is anything other than common. It's difficult to find good sources amongst all the pro/anti-creationism sites, but the key term to search for references to this as a common misunderstanding is the "Ladder of Progress" which finds amongst others:
- http://evolution.berkeley.edu/evosite/misconceps/I Bladder.shtml
- http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/evolphil/teleology .html

Interestingly, I read on one site that Darwin refused to use the term evolution because of these implications, preferring "descent with modification" which implied no direction.

"get around". You are talking as if scientists started with a preconceived notion of the history of the universe and are busy cherry picking evidence to fit it, whilst rationalising away inconvenient evidence. ask yourself why would they do this? why would one day, some guy say, "i know, i'll decide the universe is 13billion years old for no particular reason and spend the rest of my life finding reasons to believe this".

the irony is that it is you that is cherry picking evidence to support your preconceived ideas. the reason scientists expect to find the oort cloud is because there is no viable alternative explanation. The explanation that the solar system is only a few thousand years old simply cant be right. This is because of all the other myriad evidence that you simply mustn't have bothered to acquaint yourself with.

You can hop around from one apparently anomaly to the next picking here and there without making yourself aware of the big picture, and compile yourself a nice list of reasons not to accept an old earth/evolution but if you do genuinely want to understand the reality of the situation you HAVE to read more than just creationist "refutations".

Evolution of course does have certain evidences, but by itself doesn't explain many facts of science.

You've got it totally backwards. Evolution explains MANY MANY MANY facts of science, and like every mature well established theory there is a proportionately tinier collection of as yet unexplained anomalies, which serve only a indicators for directions of refinement and progress. If all you do is acquaint yourself with the anomalies, then it's no wonder you have such a skewed perception of the reality of the situation.

Besides time-space and matter-energy, the universe, especially living things, contain vast amounts of information. Information has never been demonstrated to arise from any combination of the above. Information is non-physical and distinct from the physical universe. There is NO other known source of information besides a mind or intelligence. Information interacts with the physical, in order to control physical entities, but is itself not subject to the constraints of physical quantities. Evolution falsely asserts that matter and energy give rise to information. This has never been demonstrated. The laws of physics are information and had to exist before time-space matter-energy did.

That is just a stream of gobbledegook. Do you even know what you are talking about? Where did you get this junk from? It's like saying there's no such thing as electricity because electrons have natural rhythm are made of cheese. It's just a mixture of gibberish and falsehoods. Don't you want to understand your own arguments?

Evolution is a reasonable way of interpreting many of these interactions. It is however insufficient by itself to account for all of the observations we make about the physical universe.

Well it isn't supposed to. It's supposed to account for the observations within its scope. You can't expect an explanation of biology to explain what causes gravity can you? That's what the theory of gravity and all the other theories are for. I assume you are making the standard creationist misrepresentation of calling the entire development of the universe "evolution" when at the same time, everyone else is talking purely about the common descent of all life on earth, thus muddying the issue and allowing you to lump in unresolved issues in other scientific disciplines with the handful of anomalies that constitute your entire understanding of biological evolution.

I notice that you haven't addressed any of the points in my previous post. All you've done is completely ignored everything i've said and hopped over to the next trinket on your store-bought charm bracelet of "damning refutations" thus totally proving my point.

Hmm, I didn't notice this when you posted it, but maybe you'll still see my reply...

Yes, basically I accepted microevolution but not macroevolution. My objection wasn't so much irreducible complexity, though (at least, not by around college age when I'd thought things through more) -- in fact, long before I changed my mind I was pretty disturbed by "creation science" or "intelligent design" or whatever the latest name is, since it was clear to me that the leaders of these movements were being completely unscientific, and were duping a lot of people who didn't know any better by fraudulently claiming authority they didn't have. (I was creationist myself, but didn't claim it was "science" -- it was just what I believed had happened.)

Primarily, I think my error was lack of knowledge, though I'm sure you could point to many logical fallacies that supported the main error -- but my central objection was that evolution is not falsifiable. There were various other smaller issues that I objected to, but less emphatically: no one had ever been able to justify for me the central premise of carbon dating, for example (they still haven't, actually, but having passed the main hurdle of falsifiability I'm willing to largely accept that "on faith").

I think the actual catalyst for changing my mind was probably 29+ Evidences for Macroevolution, which is a wonderful site -- it's completely (and, I think, deliberately) non-hostile towards religion in general and creationists in particular, it just clearly states the central evidence for common descent. It gave a lot of evidence, especially the wonderful results from genetic analysis, that I had never heard of before, and that really didn't mesh with my "evolution isn't falsifiable" claims up to that point. If there was an 'aha' moment it came from this site, though it still took a while for me to think things over.

A big thing feeding this whole conflict is that many of the leaders on both sides have completely ascientific agendas. A huge hangup for most creationists is, quite obviously, that they can't reconcile evolution with their understanding of Christianity or the Bible or what have you. Now, most major Christian groups have worked past this (both the [last few] Pope[s] and the Archbishop of Canterbury have explicitly said not just that there's nothing wrong with evolution, but that it is probably substantially true... I don't know if other large denominations have stated it as explicitly, but for the most part they think evolution is fine). In fact, religious objections to evolution are mostly a phenomenon of American fundamentalists and evangelicals, and other closely allied groups. Having been raised evangelical, though, I wasn't even aware that most (global) Christians didn't think the same way.

A huge issue here is: what many creationists need to hear, in order to be more open-minded and objective about the debate, is "Evolution doesn't need to conflict with your faith. You can believe in God and the Bible and still believe in evolution." They might not believe this, at least not the first few times they hear it, but this is a hugely important message to get across. Having come out of this culture, I can assure you that if these people are forced to choose between their faith (which for many of them is the defining aspect of their life) and evolution, there is no choice there. They'd be throwing out their faith, alienating themselves from their friends and their culture and their upbringing, removing the meaning from their lives, and all they'd get in return is abstract agreement with some scientists they'll probably never meet, and many of whom probably still think they're stupid anyway. But of course, all of these things are by no means necessary consequences of belief in evolution.

On the flip side, though, this assurance they need, that belief in evolution need not invalidate their entire lives, is exactly what many advocates of evol

Fred Hoyle of the British Academy of Science and mathematician Chandra Wickramasinghe decided to calculate the probability of life coming into existence anywhere in the universe. Their results? Utterly impossible.

Evolutionary theory does not address how life itself came about. Abiogenesis is a distinctly different field. But even so, life exists--we know that already. It's a bit odd to posit that something that has already happened is impossible. We may not know the agency (Hoyle was a fan of panspermia, for example) but that life exists indicates that life can come into existence.

...also attempted to calculate the probability that life sprang into existence spontaneously. His results? Utter impossible.

Again, life exists, so I'd temper the "utter impossible" assessments. Considering that we, along with the men whose assessments you're trumpeting, don't know exactly how life came about, I'd take their calculations with an ounce of salt. You might be overestimating how impossible something is when it's actually just improbable. Shuffle one deck of cards, and the probability of coming out with any particular arrangement is one over a 68-digit number. Two decks of cards? One over a 166-digit number. It is trivially easy to do things at your dining-room table that are mind-staggeringly improbable. That's the problem with trying to assess the probability of something that already happened--it may have been improbable, but now it's a fait accompli, so it no longer makes sense to say it's impossible.

Stephen J. Gould, one of the greatest defenders of evolution, was also troubled by issues that he saw within evolution. As a result, he came up with the theory of punctuated equilibrium. He postulated that there were sudden leaps in evolution that left no transitional forms.

This is false, and is a deliberate mischaracterization by creationists of what Gould wrote. I'm sorry you were duped by this, but you might want to do an internet search for creationism and quote-mining. Here is a good link where you can read what Gould actually thought about those transitional fossils that you've been told he thought didn't exist. Again, I'm sorry you were lied to. It's hard enough to have a conversation about this complex of a subject without some creationist authors basically lying about what some scientist did or didn't say.

Take for example the eye.

I'd love to, primarily because it's one of the most frequently explained examples of how complex structures can evolve piece by piece. Wikipedia has a good article on the subject, and if you search around there are others. I've read good explanations by Dawkins, and others. Even PBS has a decent article. Basically any light-sensetive cell would give an organism an advantage over his competitors, and over time any further advantages would accrue as they develop. You are underestimating the power of accumulated changes.

Another stake in the heart of evolution is the absence of transitional forms.

There are many articles covering transitional fossils. They are real, we have thousands of them, and they can be easily viewe

I read a book called Darwin's Black Box, which I found extremely compelling. He posts some very devastating evidence against gradualistic evolution, which I have never heard really answered.

Maybe you're not looking hard enough.

genetic algorithms. I might like to explore that a bit. Any idea where I could start?

Excellent.
And actually I really should have thought to answer that question in my post. If I'm gonna suggest people go look at something, I should point where :)

Wikipedia has a very good article on Genetic algorithms. Aside from an overview of the subject, it lists 24 reference books plus links to 21 websites on it.

A Google search on the exact phrase "introduction to genetic algorithms". Over a hundred thousand hits.... and that's just pages specifically on introduction to genetic algorithms.

I'd like to add in another particularly interesting link here - the Talk Origins FAQ on Genetic algorithms. It doesn't teach how to program them, but it does give an overview and has extensive discussion on them in relation to biological evolution, it raises and addresses the various arguments anti-evolutionists attempt to use to claim that digital genetic algorithms don't really work or that they some how "cheat" or that the huge success and amazing creative power of digital genetic algorithms for some reason or another do not reflect and support evolution in biology. However I think one of the best parts there is a great list of incredibly impressive examples of real world application and success of genetic algorithms, such as a checkers playing genetic algorithm that achieved expert play level. There was another example that even blew me away... a genetic algorithm where the individuals only has 250 bits of DNA, and which proceeded to create and encode 625 bits worth of genes to simultaneously solve multiple problems. Yes - 625 bits worth of valuable useful new information encoded in 250 bits. It sounds impossible, but actually humans and other species often do the same trick. You do it by overlapping the genes in the DNA, sometimes even encoding one gene forwards in the DNA and another gene reading in the backwards direction across the exact same DNA. That is exactly the sort of insanely impossible problem that evolution excels at. For all of the programmers reading this, imagine trying to write software that did one thing when you executed the code forwards, but which ran a completely different program and solved a completely different problem when you reversed the bytes ran the code in the opposite direction. It's an insanely complex problem that you just cannot intelligently design it... but evolutionary algorithms don't worry about designing things. They do a random search for pieces that just happen to be better (or less worse) than the other random crap, and then stepwise stitching together pieces that get you closer to a solution and random tweaks that just happen to get you closer to a solution. You get can crazy complex solutions that don't follow any logic or reason, they just simply happen to work. Each generation you get crazy random garbage that just happens to work better than the last generation's crazy random garbage. For some problems you can analyze the evolved solution and see clearly how it works and be amazed at the genius simplicity, and for other problems you may evolve an absolutely incomprehensible scramble of disconnected illogical gobbly-gook with the inexplicable property that it simply happens to work. It can come up with an antenna with kinks and angels pointing in all sorts or chaotic random directions with absolutely no reason or logic to the random tangle of twisted metal pointing all over the place... and that evolved antenna will simply have the inexplicable property that it "just happens to work" incredibly efficiently at sending and receiving certain frequencies and certain polarizations of radio in specific directions or in specific ranges of directions or in all directions - whatever the natural selection rule was that's what

"not entirely true. we can hypothesize from the fossil record and we can prove micro-evolution (ie intraspecies evolution) Science has never observed and thus has never PROVEN the existence of a species jump as would be required to prove the theory of Macro-evolution..."

Entirely true. Speciation has been observed in the lab and in the wild many times. A quick glance at pubmed will quickly turn up many articles showing speciation events.

Second, we don't prove theories in science, we disprove them. It's been over 150 years and nobody's done so much as put a dent in evolution, but the evidence in support keeps piling up.

Third, there is no known barrier between microevolution and macroevolution. In nature what constitutes a species is not always clear, so neither is where microevolution ends and macroevolution begins.

That, my friend, is a can of worms. There are a great many problems with carbon dating in particular. I'll leave it up to the scholarly of you to look it up, but isn't the 'benchmark' for carbon dating, carbon dating itself?

When you ask a lab to date an object, why does the form ask you what age you 'think the object is', isn't this technique solely based on the speed of light never changing?

Isn't the actual range of carbon dating only a few thousand years due to our ability to measure after a few half lives, yet we use it for millions of years...

Wasn't there a case where the carbon dating of an animal's bones showed that it was many magnitudes of age older than the very hair found by the animal (I think it was a tiger, IIRC). Doesn't carbon dating yield results in opposition of something around 94% of other dating techniques?

Anyone sufficiently versed arguing can convince you of most anything. To be honest, I don't have any of the answers, and I don't pretend to.

Poor form to reply to myself but whatever.

I've been reading the TalkOrigins site and its actually quite excellent. Check it out if you're interested in evolution/creationism.

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-age-of-earth.h tml

'Look, instead of talking about how evolution MUST be true just CREATE LIFE IN THE LAB and that will fix it.'

http://www.gnxp.com/MT2/archives/002541.html

Here is some interesting reading.

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/evolution-fact.htm l

'Only 51% of physical scientists believe in any form of Darwinian evolution.'

Great. Thats a fine useless number. Now how many believe in more modern views of evolution? 99% or so I would suppose and rest are a few fundementalist crackpots.

I believe that the next big popular "theory" will be the space seed theory.

While your post is somewhat confusing, you make a couple of good points.
1) Never accept things blindly
2) Don't accept a theory simply because the scientist is popular.

However, I don't understand what you are arguing for in the rest of your post. What is your point?

Also, I did a fairly quick google search to find some articles providing evidence of a young earth, but I didn't find ANYTHING convincing. The only decent article I found has been thoroughly discredited by another scientist. Heres the link.

What is this evidence of a young earth?

Heaven and Earth were great giants, and Heaven lay upon the Earth so that their children were crowded between them, and the children and their mother were unhappy in the darkness. The boldest of the sons led his brothers in cutting up Heaven into many pieces. From his skull they made the firmament. His spilling blood caused a great flood which killed all humans except a single pair, who were saved in a ship made by a beneficent Titan. The waters settled in hollows to become the oceans. The son who led in the mutilation of Heaven was a Titan and became their king, but the Titans and gods hated each other, and the king titan was driven from his throne by his son, who was born a god. That Titan at last went to the land of the departed. The Titan who built the ship, whom some consider to be the same as the king Titan, went there also. [Sproul, pp. 172-173]

What I am thinking of is tracking mutations in DNA to show who descends from what, and approximately when. Then show that various groups of critters determined to have a common ancestor look like they have resulted from mutations from a parent genome (as opposed to a common designer) Basically, that would mean that these genomes result from a bunch of random mutations of the parent genome, including some that have no benefit (= not designed) such that they are properly dispersed in the right proportions, and proportional to mutation rate the amount of time since common ancestry. With the mapping of genomes going on as it is, this should be possible soon if not already.

"Does this mean that whatever happens to organisms/populations is an evolutionary process?"

If it's inheritable, yes.

Next question?

Oh, all that stuff about diversification of life, speciation, macroevolution, microevolution, whatever? Yes, that's in there too. It's just fine to select only a subset of biological change which is "interesting" in a particular scientific discussion (say, focussing on change that amounts to speciation, ignoring intraspecific change (microevolution)), but it doesn't change the reality that if it is genetic change from generation to generation, yes, it is an "evolutionary process", even if that change is quite small and effectively random without any significant selection effects.

People don't seem to have a problem understanding that gravity can be as "small" as an apple dropping to the ground or as "big" as the Sun and Earth pulling on each other to cause the Earth to orbit annually, so what's the problem understanding that the evolutionary process also spans vast scales, from small changes to large changes?

The only people that try to define away part of the evolutionary process as some kind of "real evolution", excluding the rest, are people who don't like the idea of certain scales of evolution, kind of as if people could accept "microgravitation" but not "macrogravitation".

Other people have ably commented about Popper's statements, but I can see what you mean. It does make you wonder a bit if evolution could be falsified if it encompasses, effectively, any kind of inheritable biological change. On the other had, it's kind of like gravity in that respect. It's pretty hard to negate the existence of gravity. It's there. The issue is analogous. Inheritable biological change *happens*. It is as undeniable as gravity. What the real issue is, if you are talking about falsifiability in Popper's sense, is if the specific mechanism proposed to explain the observations is falsifiable. And in the case of both evolutionary theory and gravitational theory, yes, it is, which is why scientists continue to perform tests on both (e.g., gravity probe b, and the prediction that fossils from the fish->tetrapod transition might occur in rocks of the right age in the Canadian Arctic, which resulted in the discovery of Tiktaalik, or all the molecular phylogenetic evidence that tests the earlier predictions of relationships between organisms based on their morphology and evolutionary theory).

So, while you're right that there is grounds for some resemblance to Popper's original comments about evolutionary theory, it doesn't hold up. Uncoincidentally, he changed his mind on the issue.

Well, yes and no. Check out talk-origins summary of the issue, which is better than anything I could write:

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/macroevolution.htm l

Do you have proof / have you seen any example what-so-ever of a mutation being beneficial to any species?

Also, what ever happened to all those hundreds of thousands of (not faked) fossilised transitional species which evolution was supposed to produce?And yet, you tell me you can't even find one (which hasn't been faked by radical darwinists)?!

So where's this half-fish, half-mammal, crocodile-like creature which you talk about?
You know, the crocodile which has fins, and half-developed legs?

"Your message reminds me of the Popper's objection to evolution: it is impossible to disprove it since whichever way organisms turn out is fine from the evolutionary standpoint. He concluded then that evolution is not a scientific theory according to his definition."

Popper recanted this and admitted that he misunderstood the concept.

It hasn't even stopped in the last century.

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-speciation.htm l

Actually--and i will split hairs here to make a fine point--there is evidence of alternate species, but there is no evidence that they have come or gone. The "coming and going" part is a theory that passes Science's threshhold of reasonable doubt, and is accepted omn that basis. But it would be prudent to note that this is where Science begins to diverge from other disciplines, and that, ultimately, it is based on opinion, not evidence.

Actually--and i will split hairs here to make a fine point--there is evidence of alternate species, but there is no evidence that they have come or gone. The "coming and going" part is a theory that passes Science's threshhold of reasonable doubt, and is accepted omn that basis. But it would be prudent to note that this is where Science begins to diverge from other disciplines, and that, ultimately, it is based on opinion, not evidence.

You can see modifications of existing genetic information in an organism, but there haven't been ANY observable (seen in a lab, or in present day) mutations where brand new genetic information has been added to an organism.

Um... yeah, there has. Moreover, it's obvious - almost any mutation will add information in an information-theoretic sense to an organism.

Now, you're trying to imply that "improvements" in some sense haven't been observed. And that's false, too. There are plenty of examples of bacteria that evolve both antibiotic resistance and compensatory mutations that allow them to compete just fine when they aren't under pressure from antibiotics.

This isn't a trivial point. Mutations that have the effect of producing antibiotic resistance have been happening since long before there were antibiotics. But much of the time they weren't advantageous and thus never achieved much frequency. Meanwhile, mutations that could compensate for any disadvantages of the resistance genes were happening, too, but (a) the compensation would generally be a disadvantage without the resistance gene, and (b) since both types of mutations are quite uncommon, rarely (if ever) would the twain meet in the same bacterium.

But, under massive environmental pressure, antibiotic-resistance genes have become practically mandatory in certain environments - environments that are otherwise attractive, like weakened people. So in some populations practically all the individuals have resistance genes... and these resistant strains are now competing internally. Now the frequency of resistant genes are common enough that, when a compensatory mutation arises, it's very likely be paired with the resistance, unlike a century ago.

Now you've got a bacterium with (at least) two mutations, one that confers resistance, and another that lets it compete even when the antibiotic isn't around, with non-resistant strains. A powerful and otherwise unlikely advantage, but one that's predicted by evolutionary theory... and sadly we're seeing it actually happening now.

It's already been done in the Dover case. See the judges ruling (pdf document) starting with Section D. on page 10. Or, if you prefer a non-pdf format, see this link at TalkOrigins which is the conclusion of the judge regarding ID.

Granted, the American Taliban won't stop their efforts at imposing their religious views on everyone else despite this and other rulings, but at least they can't claim that their ideas have already been ruled as religious, and not scientific, in nature.

...either through ingnorance or willful deceit. Refutations of your comments can be found here:

http://talkorigins.org/faqs/dating.html
http://talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-age-of-earth.html# creacrit
http://talkorigins.org/faqs/isochron-dating.html

Judging by your post, I doubt clear scientific explanations of why you are wrong will sway you, but hopefully others will not be confused or misled by your claims (for which you fail to cite any sources).

Note that with a little research, all of the talkorigins info can be verified via independent sources. One of the nice things about science and the scientific method is that one can repeat experiments in order to better understand the results, or attempt to disprove them.

...either through ingnorance or willful deceit. Refutations of your comments can be found here:

http://talkorigins.org/faqs/dating.html
http://talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-age-of-earth.html# creacrit
http://talkorigins.org/faqs/isochron-dating.html

Judging by your post, I doubt clear scientific explanations of why you are wrong will sway you, but hopefully others will not be confused or misled by your claims (for which you fail to cite any sources).

Note that with a little research, all of the talkorigins info can be verified via independent sources. One of the nice things about science and the scientific method is that one can repeat experiments in order to better understand the results, or attempt to disprove them.

...either through ingnorance or willful deceit. Refutations of your comments can be found here:

http://talkorigins.org/faqs/dating.html
http://talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-age-of-earth.html# creacrit
http://talkorigins.org/faqs/isochron-dating.html

Judging by your post, I doubt clear scientific explanations of why you are wrong will sway you, but hopefully others will not be confused or misled by your claims (for which you fail to cite any sources).

Note that with a little research, all of the talkorigins info can be verified via independent sources. One of the nice things about science and the scientific method is that one can repeat experiments in order to better understand the results, or attempt to disprove them.

"Ice cores don't actually indicate that, unless you mean the theory that perturbations in the Earth's orbit around the Sun affect the sunlight it receives.

Regardless, it's still a specious argument. There are many things that have had more influence on the climate than humans have. But that doesn't mean that the climate change caused by humans is of negligible impact on on human societies."

Wrong, flat wrong.

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/icecores.html

There are tons of direct evidence to relate solar activity in deep time to climate change using ice core data....data which was collected before we got here.

I would also like to point out, that I do not think it is coincidence that the earth is warming during a time when scientists are describing some of the most intense flare ups of solar activity since indirect/direct measurement began of space weather in the past 80 years.

Point out just one study everyone agrees that man has changed the climate. You can't find one, in the scientific literature. All of the studies I have seen make extremely large assumptions about cause and effect, and no one has been able to model these effects to produce the changes we see in the earths climate at the moment.

Like I said before, these so called "scientists" advocating climate change by man, can't even design a weather model that predicts or acccurate describes any future weather pattern we see on a daily basis without weather sat info.

I would also like to point out, that we have very little understanding about ocean volcanic events. In the next couple of decades we will be deploying sats that will be able to monitor COMPLETE volcanic activity under the oceans. Which besides Solar activity I think there is plenty of evidence in the fossil record and today, to suggest volcanism is playing a role in the earths warming as well and is the second major factor in climate change.

Not running your car, or cows farting or Al Gore saying cows farting is an inconvienent truth.

For the record, Al Gore is an idiot and should stick to politics and leave science alone.

"That is, again, a specious argument; predicting the weather is a very different problem from predicting the climate. Furthermore, why do you bring up being unable to predict the weather without satellites and such? Of course you can't predict much if you have no data. But in the real world, we do have data.

You are also comparing apples and oranges; you point out observational evidence of species extinction, and then turn around and compare it to predictive power in the future. Of course prediction is harder than observation. Try comparing observational evidence of species extinction to observational evidence of man's past and present influence on the climate."

Let me get this straight. You are claiming that predicting small weather patterns, or localized weather phenomina, has no correlation and is of no help in predicting large scale climate change?

You must have studied logic at a American Univerisity.

I am not comparing Apples to Oranges. There is a clear solar cycle pattern, every 10-12 years that directly corresponds with climate change.

http://www.intellicast.com/DrDewpoint/Library/1186 /

If you think human civilization can match the power output of a star to change a planets surface temp your just as brain dead as our "pretend to be climate advocate" Al Gore.
(Did I mention the guy is a moron and could care less about the environment? Check out the car he drives and the 12,000 square foot mansion he lives in! Just the plane trips he takes to his book signings is probably killing all of us.)

"The fact that the Earth has been warmer and colder in the past has nothing to do with whether climate change is good for us as a species.

All that being said, I agree that biodiversity and other envir

One thing I've noticed in this debate is that "give me irrefutable proof" is code language for "I'm not listening nyah nyah nyah nyah!"

Let's face it, there is only one way that humans causing global warming could be proven irrefutably, and that's if God comes down from the heavens and personally tells all of us exactly what is going on in detail. Until then, we're going to just have to make do with the same technique that scientists have been using (with an astounding level of success, I might add) for thousands of years - educated guessing.

Might I also add that scientists are quite good at it, while the people who cling to things like "irrefutable proof" as a crutch for their own intellectual inflexibility continue believing that germs are caused by evil spirits and we were all poofed into existence a couple thousand years ago by some guy with a white beard. Always in the face of insurmountable piles of evidence to the contrary, I might add - but, of course, none of it is irrefutable, because some crackpot can always dream up a half-baked counter-theory like c-decay. (And, I might add, if you're looking for irrefutable, c-decay is much more irrefutable than more generally-accepted cosmological theories in that it's unfalsifiable.)

In other words, the great scientists never worked with irrefutable proof. The worked with Occam's Razor.

>"The idea is that basically, instead of species evolving slowly over time into new species, speciation can occur rapidly (on a geological time scale) and then the new species will remain relatively stable until the next quick burst of change."

That is a good summary. Your other comments are rather off the mark, particularly the idea that there is no advantage to a "half-fin half-leg" and so on. Given that you don't have a background in biology, that's understandable. A good explaination of the theory is here at the talk.origins newsgroup site. A less techinical one is here at the Wikipedia site.

polonium-218 radiohalos in granite found around the world

I'll bet you don't realize this, but that's been debunked.

obTalkorigins link: http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/po-halos/

Astronomers use doppler shifts to determine distances.

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/astronomy/distance .html#redshifts

We have observed new species evolving. And evolution certainly can be disproved; it makes plenty of concrete predictions.

If the universe is flat or open like a bedsheet, then it is infinite in extent, and has always been infinite in extent, or at least larger than we can see. As time passes, we have to look further away (or further back in time) to see the beginning. If the universe is closed like a balloon, then we still have to look further and further away, but we may end up looking back at our own position, just further back in time. A good, semi-technical discussion of the big bang can be found at http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/astronomy/bigbang. html

hi CrazedWalrus,
I must say, your response is very coherent for somebody with a baby at 04:15 AM :). And I think you have thought more about these things than many other people. I cannot poke holes in the coherency but i do disagree with you at several vital points.
I too feel some things are not explained, to be specific, science has provided some nice details on how our brains work, but no full explanation of why we are conscious. But neither does the explanation of the soul and God give a full explanation: it only adds a mystery. I want to be convinced that that added mystery is really necessary as well as likely.

"...it's difficult for the scientific mind to consider the possibility of a being that is outside the normal cause and effect of the universe. "
I was brought up as a christian, though in a very liberal church (http://www.remonstranten.org/introduction/index.h tml). So in my life i first learned about what the bible says, and science had the disadvantage of having to try to change what was already put in my mind. Especially the very reductionistic views failed to change my mind, like the Selfish Gene theory, and I remember being very angry about a science class poster claiming that being in love was nothing more than chemistry (literally). It makes life seem so cold, mechanical. It does not add to a happy and meaningful life. So my formerly believing brain took some time to turn into the cynical wannabe-rational bastard i am now.

"At first glance, Occam's Razor implies that this is just too much of a leap, and that there must be a more simple explanation. Try as I might, though, I can't bring myself to believe that. Spontaneous biogenesis caused by random cosmic chemicals that all happened to be in the right place at the right time, for me, is as much a leap of faith as creation."

There's no way we can ever find out what really happened to start life on earth, but I can live with that. There are several proposals that sound plausible to me, and cosmic chemicals are not necessary, but hey, how many of these enter our atmosphere in a century? Loads.
The external force you propose, on the contrary, can be falsified nor proven AND adds nothing to the explanation of life, it just adds another mystery.

"The odds against such a thing happening seem to me to be insurmountable."

The first reproducable precursor of life, theoretically, only had to happen once. One tiny cluster of molecules that could somehow replicate. Once it was there it could reproduce and thus spread and evolve. Maybe it looked totally different than what we now know as the most primitive life-forms. Others have written better about this than I can, see http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/abioprob/abioprob. html#Intro
See, once the basis was there, there it was, and as you accept natural selection, the only thing you were missing is some plausible starting point.
So I want to turn the odds around. What you call 'being there at the right time and in the right place' only had to happen at one time at one place. Give a huge ocean full of likely starting material during many million years, and make a calculation of the chance it does NOT happen at least once!

"Given that, I actually read Occam's Razor the other way: something I don't know about must have caused it on purpose."
I think that is exactly what i oppose to, that's what made people propose a homunculus.
Solving a mystery by proposing a black box does not solve the mystery, it only adds to it.

""God is in the probabilities". In other words, I see the universe as being a set of rules that God has defined and decided to work with. If you've done that, you can't just go sticking your hands in there and shove things around -- it upsets the balance of things. Rather, you give it a bit of a nudge in just the right places to make things go the way you want them to."

The part of a balanced situati

I just enjoy how overly-serious people treat evolution theories, based on basically no evidence.

29+ Evidences for Macroevolution

Please don't be offended, but your post clearly shows you have a child like understanding of science. You are unwittingly commiting a fallacy of equivocation. From wikipedia:

"In common usage, people often use the word theory to signify a conjecture, an opinion, or a speculation. In this usage, a theory is not necessarily based on facts; in other words, it is not required to be consistent with true descriptions of reality. True descriptions of reality are more reflectively understood as statements that would be true independently of what people think about them.

In science, a theory is a proposed description, explanation, or model of the manner of interaction of a set of natural phenomena, capable of predicting future occurrences or observations of the same kind, and capable of being tested through experiment or otherwise falsified through empirical observation. It follows from this that for scientists "theory" and "fact" do not necessarily stand in opposition. For example, it is a fact that an apple dropped on earth has been observed to fall towards the center of the planet, and the theory which explains why the apple behaves so is the current theory of gravitation."

So for something to attain the status of scientfic theory it must have been tested rigorously, be able to make predictions and be observable. Theory is as close to "truth" as you can get in science. Hypothesis is a closer analog to the common usage of theory.

Also if you are interested you read why evolution is a fact and a theory

Rev Cat

Adaption has been observed before. Not speciation.

Speciatian has been observed also

Also, you said that "Only the most boneheaded of creationist would disagree with adaption...". Are you unaware that the vast majority of creationists -- at least those who are vocal on the subject -- would, in fact, satisfy that criteria of 'bone-headedness'?

You seem to have gotten somewhat bogged down in definitions of exactly what the scientific method entails. I think this is a losing strategy, because it's frankly a bit complicated, it's counterintuitive that you can never really be absolutely certain of anything, and epistomology is boring.

You might want to say that common descent is accepted to the same level of confidence as, say, universal gravitation (not "things fall down", but rather, "the force that makes the planets orbit the sun is the same as that which makes an apple fall"), or the germ theory of disease, or special relativity, or plate tectonics. If your creationist is claiming that we can't really know evolution is true, he's right, but then, we can't really know any of those things as well; they're just the best theory we have right now.

Also, a good source you may be interested in is talk.origins's Index to Creationist Claims, which has explanations about some of your creationist's points. (See CB901 "macroevolution has never been observed", and CB902 "macroevolution is distinct from microevolution", for starters.)

Evolution doesn't even qualify to be a theory, at least not if you follow the Scientific Method. The creation of new species through evolution has never been observed

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-speciation.htm l
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/speciation.html

Try again.

Evolution doesn't even qualify to be a theory, at least not if you follow the Scientific Method. The creation of new species through evolution has never been observed

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-speciation.htm l
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/speciation.html

Try again.

(1) I never claimed that you need BOTH of principles to qualify your theory as scientific.

If by "priciples" you mean empirical and analytical verification, you are correct; neither is needed for a scientific theory. Only falsification is a required element to mark a theory as scientific, at least according to the generally accepted definition.

A scientific theory can be verifiable, but once it has been verified, it ceases to be a theory and becomes fact. Accordingly, few theories are directly verifiable; they are merely educated guesses that fit the evidence provided.

This supports only the theory that life existed at that time.

Your point being? As I said before, science works through falsification; the disproof of theories. If life didn't exist at that time, then it would imply that complex lifeforms were created in a very short time period. Since evolution predicts that changes to species are slow, the lack of fossils would count as evidence against evolution, correct?

So Darwin's prediction stems from his theory on the origin of species. His theory said life evolves slowly and gradually over long periods of time, therefore Cambrian life must have evolved slowly from earlier life, therefore there must have been life in the Precambrian era, therefore there should be evidence of that life, therefore there should be fossils in Precambrian rock. A chain of logic based upon his initial theory, ending in a prediction that ultimately proved to be correct.

I do not know what you mean by macroscopic, I mean observed speciation: species A with N chromosomes having capable of only exlusively sexual procreation between two different specimen of that species converting to a species B with M chromosomes being capable of procreation independent of species A.

There are numerous examples of observed speciation, mostly in species with short lifespans, such as insects, but a few in larger species such as birds and mice. Talk Origins, the website referenced by the Slashdot article, lists examples of observed speciation.

Why is it my problem (or people who share my view, I am not the only one) but not of the rest of the world?

You need to make your views more clear. If you say, "Evolution is unscientific", without explaining that your definition of "unscientific" differs from the norm, there's bound to be misunderstandings. For instance, if I defined "feline" as an eight-limbed invertebrate, then I could assert that a large proportion of felines were poisonous. But unless I explained first that I had a rather unusual definition of the word "feline", misunderstandings would inevitably arise.

Your argument appears to be not so much that long-term evolution is unscientific, more that you disagree with the generally accepted definition of science. But unless you explain this, people aren't going to know that the basic axioms you're basing your arguments on are different from theirs.

I'm sure there's already a name for your rather restrictive and utilitarian view of science. Perhaps you should look it up?