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Researchers Show How Cellular Complexity Can Evolve
ananyo writes with an excerpt from a Nature news release: "By bringing long-dead proteins back to life, researchers have worked out the process by which evolution added a component to a cellular machine. ... In a paper published in Nature, researchers recreated an 'ancestral' version of a cellular machine called the V-ATPase proton pump, which channels protons across membranes and is vital for keeping cell compartments at the right acidity. Part of this machine is a ring of six proteins that threads through the membrane. Animals and most other eukaryotes have a ring composed of two types of protein component; fungi are alone in having a ring with three. The researchers used computational methods to work backwards and find the most likely sequences of these proteins hundreds of millions of years ago. The team inserted the DNA into yeast and found that just two mutations can turn the simple 2-protein ring into the more complex 3-protein ring."
This is just an example why you can't really 'argue' with a creationist. Anything you come up with, they can make a magic-fairy-dust argument that it's because God wanted it that way.
It isn't science.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
I'm fine with people saying evolution is the method, with a deity being the driving force. The issue is when they say that god created everything from nothing in six days around 6,000 years ago and any evidence to the contrary was put here by the devil to lure us away from the truth.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
Pat Robertson: "Science perverting resurrection is an abomination, and God's wrath will strike us most likely in the form of a random earthquake or hurricane or tornado sometime within the 12 months."
I'd add the /sarcasm tag just to show I'm just making fun of him, but I actually think my prediction of what will show up on YouTube from him next is pretty accurate.
I8-D
Nonsense. Most models are wrong. They're still enormously useful compared to something that's more wrong. Newtonian mechanics is wrong, but it was -- and still is -- very useful for the overwhelming majority of situations.
It is very wrong to say the earth is flat. There are many, many ways of demonstrating its wrongness and assuming the earth is flat will lead you to wildly incorrect conclusions for many problems.
It is less wrong to say the earth is a sphere. However, it's harder to demonstrate that it's wrong, and you can do many useful calculations assuming a sphere for simplicity.
It's also wrong, but not very much, to say the earth is a slightly squashed sphere. It requires very careful measurement to demonstrate this, and it's such an accurate approximation to make that it's rare to see someone actually model the earth's correct shape.
It isn't science.
No, it isn't. It's philosophy, and it shouldn't be in a science story, but somehow the athiests on this board insist on bringing it up anyway.
Logic won't convince a a religious person that there's no god any more than you can convince me that my computer doesn't exist, but no argument can sway anyone into believing, either. The religious person has percieved his god, so he doesn't need faith to believe any more than I need faith to know that this computer is real (although I could be locked in a rubber room dreaming this nonexixtant computer up). The athiest needs faith.
The only logical position is agnosticism. It's a pointless argument, why do you guys keep insisting on the argument? It['s tedious and tiresome and I wish you'd stop. It's completely offtopic.
Free Martian Whores!
The athiest needs faith.
Technically, no, he does not. There are gnostic and agnostic atheists, just as there are gnostic and agnostic theists.
A gnostic atheist "knows" there is no god(s), an agnostic atheist does not believe in the existence of a god(s), but will claim they cannot know for certain.
Admitting the lack of certain knowledge -and- the lack of a belief in what are essentially unsubstantiated rumors don't require much faith in anything other than one's own powers of observation.
semantics are everything!
Is it functionally different than the "Are You Living In a Computer Simulation?" argument? Is that rationally unsupportable?