Any sufficiently-intelligent entity would do, including quite-physical extraterrestrial beings (lie again if you wish on this point, for my response to that, reread this statement).
It's a fascinating escape route, but exactly what does intelligent design by complex beings (presumably non-magical beings that have to have some sort of origin) solve? The whole driving force behind ID is simply that some things are too complex to come about without intelligence--intelligent life being one of those things. Unless you're positing some sort of magical entity which, through nothing more than special pleading, doesn't have to follow that rule, the argument is just turtles all the way down. What's the point of ID if it doesn't solve the problem it purports to solve?
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Someone who actually understood what empirical evidence was would understand that.
Aside from the fact that it's catchy sounding, I've never understood why people believe that. A statement with no evidence going for it whatsoever is less likely to be true than a randomly selected positive claim. Sure, absence of evidence is not conclusive evidence of absence, but it's certainly an indicator.
Oh and sure, go look up a completely slanted document for proof of what ID really is.
Errr... The Wedge document is basically a strategy document from the organization that helped to take biblical creationism and rebranded it as intelligent design to get it back into the public arena. It's the background of the story in their own words, not some sort of hit piece. If you haven't already, I strongly recommend reading the transcripts of the Kitzmiller trial in Dover. The ID side had every opportunity to defend itself with experts and hours of cross examination, and it's pretty clear how that came out.
I am unfamiliar with the fused chromosome example you've given. It's interesting and I will have to look further into it, and see if the leaders of the ID movement can account for it. It still doesn't explain the mechanism for speciation occuring.
Google "Robertsonian translocation" and you will find what you're looking for.
Tell me how DE is 'disprovable' other than someone coming out of a space ship and saying 'I made you, here is how.'
A rabbit fossil in a precambrian stratum would do nicely. Or if we had noticed that the piles of genetic evidence (like the translocation mentioned above) didn't match up with the fossil and physiological evidence. Please don't mistake "We've tested it and it passed the tests" for "There's no way for it to fail a test."
Conversely, I can give you an example of DE occuring to match your fused chromosome theory. An advanced race (humans) created a new species (genetically engineered crops). There you go.
I've never understood the line of argument that appears to go "Everything complicated must come from something complicated, so I'll posit a complicated entity that didn't need to come from something complicated to fix the problem." Isn't it easier just to assume that the premise "Complex stuff requires complexity to make it" is probably wrong?
Would that be the vast majority of people that study the data, funded by grants they would lose without vowing fealty to evolution, or the vast majority of people that study the data, knowing that any discovery that threatens evolution will cost them tenure?
Let's go back 150 years or so. Nobody believed in evolution. If the whole thing is driven by some giant secular humanist conspiracy, exactly how did it get started? How did the theory make inroads against conventional wisdom and revolutionize biology? Clearly there's something to it other than the massive conspiracy of the Scientific Establishment/Jews/Freemasons/Federal Reserve.
I have to hand it to myself. I've been modded down as "overrated" more times in the past twenty posts than I've been modded down for anything in the previous 800. Somebody out there sure must love me.
Oops, your ignorance is showing, an accurate comparison would be:
Before we get into this, I'm going to guess that your primary source of information on the Federal Reserve system and fiat currency is the Internet. Am I right?
1) A privately-owned corporation that exists to create the most profit for its member banks (which profit enormously from monetary manipulation) with virtually no accountability to the American public.
Speaking of ignorance, are you sure you understand the corporate and management structure of the Fed? The Fed is technically privately owned, but it's not operated for profit and the FOMC is dominated by government appointees. The stock ownership scheme is not the same as a typical private corporation.
As for banks profiting enormously from "money manipulation" the claim just doesn't make sense. They profit from the fact that they're banks and can earn interest on loans. They'd do so whether the currency was inflating or deflating. Of course, if you want to do away with fractional reserve banking we could always just go all the way and start trading big stone wheels back and forth in trucks. The fact is, the Fed rebates most of its interest earnings back to the Treasury and banks get rich because they have a lot of money, not because the Fed is manipulating money for them. Banks do well in just about any monetary scheme you can think of.
2) A group of legislators put into place by you and me who can be held accountable for their actions.
The time between elections is far longer than the time it takes an incompetent government to throw a nation's currency into absolute chaos. These are the same people who thought the Iraq war was the best thing since sliced bread and "Freedom Fries" was actually worth putting on the agenda. It takes just minutes to come up with a list of countries whose economies were hosed thanks to bad monetary policy (and the US during the Great Depression is one of them). Monetary policy isn't an easy thing, and given that the government has very strong incentives to just run the printing presses, I'd rather keep it out of their hands.
Under system #2, between 1800 and 1900 the dollar actually gained value (!), between 1913 and 2007 under system #1, the dollar has lost 95% of its value, a dollar in 1913 is actually worth about 5 cents now.
The history of treasury-issued money is looking pretty good.
Well, no. From 1800 to 1900 we just traded gold. That's why the dollar gained value, and that's not necessarily a good thing (it certainly wasn't for the average guy at the end of the 1800s). If the economy grows and you don't find any gold while it happens, your currency deflates. If you were a farmer who borrowed money from a bank, you got fucked. The rhetoric against the bankers back then with respect to deflating currency was basically the same as the rhetoric now bitching about inflating currency. Given a choice between predictable inflation and unpredictable bouts of inflation and deflation, most people choose predictable inflation. That's one of the main reasons we're not tying our currency to how good our miners are at digging stuff out of the ground anymore.
I know it's easy to assume that money becoming more valuable is necessarily a good thing, but any time the value of your currency shifts relative to what you're doing with it, there are costs associated with it. It's not just a matter of "Yay! My money is worth more!" like some people think it is. Your perspective changes depending on whether you're a borrower or a lender, whether you own a business or work for one, how quickly your wages adjust to changes in average price level, etc. In an ideal world we'd see 0% inflation and price levels would always be completely predictable, but that's just not possible, so the system we've constructed is one that tries to keep the relevant variables controlled as best we can.
The way I see it, the only real way out of this hole is to get governments to issue fiat currency without hiding behind banks to do it, as you said.
So we have two potential choices when it comes to who decides on the amount of fiat currency in circulation:
1) Economists and bankers who work for a non-profit organization and can't appreciably improve their lot in life by manipulating the money supply.
2) Elected officials who can "buy" an election by causing an artificial boom or hide a poorly balanced budget by printing piles of worthless currency.
I'm throwing my lot in with (1). The history of (2) is not a pretty one.
Employers are only doing this so that they can get lower cost labor. The easist way to fix it is to require them to pay equal pay to all workers and not pay someone lower just because they do not have a green card. Also, allow the immigrant the right to sue for this fair wage. To allow it to pass, just grandfather clause the existing workers. That would end this abuse over night because there would be no more reason to game the system anymore.
In theory, they're already supposed to be paying competitive wages for the positions, but anybody who has taken an introductory economics course knows that there's no reason for a marginal worker added to the pool to get the same wage that worker would have before the pool expanded. There is a much simpler solution to this that I think could work (with one major caveat): Auction off the visas. It's completely ridiculous to use a lottery system to ration workers when those workers vary in quality and value. The company that wants to sponsor a visa would have to bid on the visa. It would instantly
From Family Guy:
Guy: Hello I've come to join your town.
Peter: Do you have a degree in anything?
Guy: Well actually yeah I'm a doctor.
Peter: Yeah well I hope you get it. Pick a job. [Guy picks a job out of the hat]
Peter: Woah you got the village idiot! On Tuesdays you get to wave your penis at the traffic.
Handing out visas by lottery and sending home a worker that a company would have paid a fortune to sponsor doesn't make any sense either.
The only problem is that we'd have to think about how government officials may be tempted to change the number of visas to affect revenue. My guess is that the number of visas that produces the highest overall revenue is probably the correct number to issue anyway, but I'm not totally sure.
Government, by definition, cannot create wealth; it can only transfer or destroy wealth.
That's a bizarre position. If a government taxes its people to pay for an interstate highway system and uses local material and labor to produce that system, it has transferred money from one set of hands to another and produced a substantial tangible asset in the process. It's no different than if the free market had done it except in that it may be less efficient, depending on your definition of efficiency.
The Americas [wikipedia.org] are two continents, not a country. Everyone living in North and South America is an "American".
How many Brazilians, when asked about their regional identity, refer to themselves as Americans? The problem you're trying to solve by inventing a ridiculous sounding word is a non-issue.
Thank you for pointing this out. The idea that the dollar should always be strong relative to every other country's currency may sound good if you don't think about it, but it's really not any more sensible than claiming that the the price of walking shoes should always be higher than the price of running shoes. The reality is that the dollar will (and should) fluctuate to reflect the relative supply and demand of goods across borders. On one hand, people complain about the Chinese throwing our trade balance out of whack or Indian engineers coming over here to earn a living, and on the other hand they bitch when the dollar falls as if the two situations were unrelated.
Our standard of living has outstripped the rest of the world by far more than we can justify these days, and it's only a matter of time before a lot of economic variables return to equilibrium. People debate over whether we should try desperately to shore up the dollar or whether we should close our borders to foreign workers in some sort of protectionist scheme to "protect" the locals. The fact of the matter is that if the rest of the world isn't buying what we're making, corrections are going to be made. We can be protectionists and let the correction take the form of a long period of stagnation relative to the rest of the world, or we can go the total free trade route and let the correction take the form of us buying cheap imports and cheap foreign labor until the price of foreign goods is high enough that we start buying locally. Pick your poison. Either way, we're just paying the piper for the fact that we're living better than we can justify with the work that we put out.
I ask you this... *How* is Bush directly responsible for the death of thousands? How about the Congress that authorized the war? How about the top brass who decide the strategies and battle plans?
Quite right. What has the Commander in Chief have to do with military operations anyway?
You have to remember, we're talking about people who, for the most part, come from severely impoverished nations, most of which are dictatorships. Locking someone like that up for a few years in Gitmo isn't nearly as traumatic for them as it would be for, say, you or me.
You'd be surprised at how many poor people have spouses and children they're fond of seeing.
Besides, if their lives are ruined, it doesn't directly affect my own. If the government wastes money and resources on something that is ultimately futile, that does.
And for the second time in this discussion, I have to say that I'm still at a total loss as to why so many people think it's OK to blow up buildings full of Americans. We're such delightful neighbors.
As a percentage of GDP, the overall debt of Bush is low relative to the rest of the world. Borrowing a few hundred billion dollars to try and take over potentially the largest oil reserve in the world is a pretty pragmatic bet for a nation whose GDP approaches 15 trillion a year. In other words, from a dollars and cents perspective, the Iraq war was a pretty good bet with no real consequence if we lose. If only the leaders now were to start gambling with their heads and not their hearts, we'd be outta there by now, having taken our roll of the dice and come up snake eyes.
It's totally unclear to me why we Americans are often the focus of such hatred abroad. We're such good neighbors.
Democrats haven't even tried to keep the promises that they were elected in Nov 2006. They promised to end the war, and didn't. They promised to clean up earmarks, and they won't. Bottom line is, all you liberals that flocked to Democrats like zombies do to living brains have been had just as much as we conservatives were that ate the public line of the RNC.
And if they keep it up, I'll be voting against the incumbent again. It's true that the Democrats aren't doing enough to clean up the mess. That doesn't mean that it didn't make sense to boot the guys who were making the mess to begin with.
There's also a lot of room to drive your little company under with a short losing streak. There's always a risk/reward trade off, and I doubt that many people who live on $0.30 an hour feel comfortable going the high risk route. You need a certain amount of capital to take on a high-risk investment, even if you know that you'll come out slightly ahead in the long run.
This inconvenience I'm talking about is her using a condom or making the guy use a condom, or, God forbid, her waiting to have sex until she's in a stable relationship that can handle a third party.
You seem to think that birth control is 100% successful and that anybody who gets an abortion would rather go through an expensive and uncomfortable medical procedure than pop a pill every day. Those don't sound like particularly sensible assumptions.
You mean the wealthy lobbyist who has, in past elections, driven a red pickup truck that he rented in order to shore up populist credentials? I have a hard time believing that any of the candidates are authentic, at least in the sense that they're not simply pretending to understand the plight of the common man. It never ceases to amaze me that the media will present one or two candidates as "rich and out of touch" when the fact is none of them are "genuine common men" and haven't been since Founding Fathers. None of them actually clears brush at his ranch or drives a red pickup truck or likes to mow his own lawn. It's all theater, and amazingly, even the political pundits go along with it. I certainly don't begrudge the fact that our candidates are all wealthy "elites" who live comfortable lives. There's no reason to think that having a white collar job and being good at it means that you can't understand the human condition. I am, however, offended when the media tries to call out one or two of them for being rich and "out of touch" while others successfully play dress up to convince us that they're just like everybody else.
As for who is "genuine" I would have to give Ron Paul the nod (even though I don't particularly want his policies enacted) simply because he clearly knows that he has no chance at getting the nomination so he says what he really thinks. When everybody else was dumping on him for pointing out that maybe our foreign policy was agitating some people abroad, all I could think was that he was the only viable leader on that stage, and it's too bad he's also a bit crazy.
It should also be noted that we're talking about saltwater. Not so great for most terrestrial plants (or organisms in general).
It's true that terrestrial plants can last quite a long time underwater (depending on the type), but definitely not forever, and definitely not if the water is the wrong salinity. A worldwide flood is guaranteed to send quite a lot of species into extinction.
Aww..that's so cute, a Ron Paul fan lashing out because Rudy OWNED his sorry ass last month.
Yes, just like in Internet debate, there's nothing more impressive in a Presidential debate than responding to a well thought out critique with, "You're stupid!" Rudy is such a manly man.
I'd like to propose a horn honking tax. A really high one. You get a certain number of seconds per year for free for safety reasons and after that you pay for it. Big time. That way, we can shift a portion of the tax burden over to extremely unlikeable individuals.
So you're making an argument for the right to have a car? I like Slashdot, apparently I should have a free car, free entertainment, free software, and free internet access, all paid from the pockets of the rich. Sign me up!
No, he's arguing that the tax would be regressive and that would be bad.
I see no issue with this. Except when I look for answers I see people with just as many credentials making counter claims.
Be careful about looking at it that way. One of the most common problems in deciding what "the experts" say is looking at two opposing papers written by well qualified individuals and assuming that the experts simply agree to disagree in a 50/50 ratio. The vital piece of information that may be missing is that one paper has every other expert behind it and the other is simply that one guy. In geology, the question of the age of Earth and whether or not a catastrophic worldwide flood occurred is one of those issues. There are a handful of professionals advocating the position, and of that handful, practically all of them have clear religious motivations to take the position. It certainly doesn't mean that they're wrong, but it does make one wonder, Why are there so few, and why are there practically none who we're 100% certain aren't simply agreeing for theological reasons?
Now before I link to this, I am going to admit to my prejudice on the subject before we get into this. I am of the belief in the"bubble evolution theory". For some reasons it isn't covered on the Internet very well. I think this might be the insistence of Darwin's evolution and the fighting between creationist explanations totally dominating the scene. This was actually something presented to us back in 1970 something when I was in high school as one of the many ways life was suggested to have begun. Of course back then, they presented several theories held by science and didn't claim anything as fact or false. I think that is exactly how the subject should be taught today regardless of any consensus or vote on the more correct science.
There's an important distinction to be made here. You reference the "bubble" theory, which is actually one of many working hypotheses on the origin of life. It doesn't really have much to do with Darwin's theory (except in that it explains the origins of the organisms that lead to the diversity that Darwin explained). It's common for people to conflate abiogenesis and evolution (especially when trying to cast doubt on evolutionary theory--What better way than to tie it directly to something that we don't have any solid answers to?), but evolutionary theory stands on its own regardless of how the original life forms came to be. Also, I think that if you ask just about any researcher in the topic, the answer to how the first life forms came about is generally, "We don't know" just as you were taught in high school. The questions of common descent and natural selection are considered far more settled. As it stands, children are still generally being taught the best science available. I doubt that you'll find many school teachers who are advocating one particular theory of abiogenesis, though.
now first, in order to show an evolutionary path, they are assuming something is related because of how close it is to similar animals (weasels, panda and bears). The two other theories that I know if, state they aren't related at all outside the genetic makeup that was needed for life to be possible. The other is the "god done it theory" or creation. So it does nothing to rule either of those out but is used to show a common ancestor and the closeness of them.
I think that you're missing the point of the paper. The claim they're countering is that so-called macroevolution is not a falsifiable theory. They're pointing to several tests that could have (but didn't) show common descent to be incorrect. The fact that it passed those tests doesn't mean that alternate explanations are necessarily wrong. For example, if they had tested genetic markers of humans and chimpanzees and found them to be irreconcilably different, that would be a devastating blow for the theory of evolution. As it stands, there doesn't really appear to be any genetic evidence that falsifies evolu
Maybe because some people aren't as interested in groupthink games as you seem to be. Sometimes reality isn't as convenient as "someone quick hide any inconvenient questions." Mind you, the question _can_ be stupid, but "someone quick mod it down" isn't a panacea either.
I'd agree with you if not for the fact that simply following international news over the past few years knows that this is not just an isolated "bigfoot walking away from a shaky camera" photo but rather a photo of exactly what you'd expect to see given what we've been observing for years over there. Anybody who knows anything about the region has been watching the situation get worse and worse in slow motion while our brave liberating leaders talk about how we need to start thinking about forming a committee to discus the ramifications of writing a proposal to do something about it.
Sure, it's fun to play philosopher and ask what the meaning of one photo is in the absence of all other evidence. We could also spend some time discussing whether or not Sudan actually exists. The bottom line is that the "context" you're talking about is quite well known and the fact that you're not familiar with it doesn't make it any less there.
Slashdot Mirror
A rabbit fossil in a precambrian stratum would do nicely. Or if we had noticed that the piles of genetic evidence (like the translocation mentioned above) didn't match up with the fossil and physiological evidence. Please don't mistake "We've tested it and it passed the tests" for "There's no way for it to fail a test."
I've never understood the line of argument that appears to go "Everything complicated must come from something complicated, so I'll posit a complicated entity that didn't need to come from something complicated to fix the problem." Isn't it easier just to assume that the premise "Complex stuff requires complexity to make it" is probably wrong?
I have to hand it to myself. I've been modded down as "overrated" more times in the past twenty posts than I've been modded down for anything in the previous 800. Somebody out there sure must love me.
Speaking of ignorance, are you sure you understand the corporate and management structure of the Fed? The Fed is technically privately owned, but it's not operated for profit and the FOMC is dominated by government appointees. The stock ownership scheme is not the same as a typical private corporation.
As for banks profiting enormously from "money manipulation" the claim just doesn't make sense. They profit from the fact that they're banks and can earn interest on loans. They'd do so whether the currency was inflating or deflating. Of course, if you want to do away with fractional reserve banking we could always just go all the way and start trading big stone wheels back and forth in trucks. The fact is, the Fed rebates most of its interest earnings back to the Treasury and banks get rich because they have a lot of money, not because the Fed is manipulating money for them. Banks do well in just about any monetary scheme you can think of.
The time between elections is far longer than the time it takes an incompetent government to throw a nation's currency into absolute chaos. These are the same people who thought the Iraq war was the best thing since sliced bread and "Freedom Fries" was actually worth putting on the agenda. It takes just minutes to come up with a list of countries whose economies were hosed thanks to bad monetary policy (and the US during the Great Depression is one of them). Monetary policy isn't an easy thing, and given that the government has very strong incentives to just run the printing presses, I'd rather keep it out of their hands.
Well, no. From 1800 to 1900 we just traded gold. That's why the dollar gained value, and that's not necessarily a good thing (it certainly wasn't for the average guy at the end of the 1800s). If the economy grows and you don't find any gold while it happens, your currency deflates. If you were a farmer who borrowed money from a bank, you got fucked. The rhetoric against the bankers back then with respect to deflating currency was basically the same as the rhetoric now bitching about inflating currency. Given a choice between predictable inflation and unpredictable bouts of inflation and deflation, most people choose predictable inflation. That's one of the main reasons we're not tying our currency to how good our miners are at digging stuff out of the ground anymore.
I know it's easy to assume that money becoming more valuable is necessarily a good thing, but any time the value of your currency shifts relative to what you're doing with it, there are costs associated with it. It's not just a matter of "Yay! My money is worth more!" like some people think it is. Your perspective changes depending on whether you're a borrower or a lender, whether you own a business or work for one, how quickly your wages adjust to changes in average price level, etc. In an ideal world we'd see 0% inflation and price levels would always be completely predictable, but that's just not possible, so the system we've constructed is one that tries to keep the relevant variables controlled as best we can.
1) Economists and bankers who work for a non-profit organization and can't appreciably improve their lot in life by manipulating the money supply.
2) Elected officials who can "buy" an election by causing an artificial boom or hide a poorly balanced budget by printing piles of worthless currency.
I'm throwing my lot in with (1). The history of (2) is not a pretty one.
From Family Guy:
Guy: Hello I've come to join your town.
Peter: Do you have a degree in anything?
Guy: Well actually yeah I'm a doctor.
Peter: Yeah well I hope you get it. Pick a job.
[Guy picks a job out of the hat]
Peter: Woah you got the village idiot! On Tuesdays you get to wave your penis at the traffic.
Handing out visas by lottery and sending home a worker that a company would have paid a fortune to sponsor doesn't make any sense either.
The only problem is that we'd have to think about how government officials may be tempted to change the number of visas to affect revenue. My guess is that the number of visas that produces the highest overall revenue is probably the correct number to issue anyway, but I'm not totally sure.
Thank you for pointing this out. The idea that the dollar should always be strong relative to every other country's currency may sound good if you don't think about it, but it's really not any more sensible than claiming that the the price of walking shoes should always be higher than the price of running shoes. The reality is that the dollar will (and should) fluctuate to reflect the relative supply and demand of goods across borders. On one hand, people complain about the Chinese throwing our trade balance out of whack or Indian engineers coming over here to earn a living, and on the other hand they bitch when the dollar falls as if the two situations were unrelated.
Our standard of living has outstripped the rest of the world by far more than we can justify these days, and it's only a matter of time before a lot of economic variables return to equilibrium. People debate over whether we should try desperately to shore up the dollar or whether we should close our borders to foreign workers in some sort of protectionist scheme to "protect" the locals. The fact of the matter is that if the rest of the world isn't buying what we're making, corrections are going to be made. We can be protectionists and let the correction take the form of a long period of stagnation relative to the rest of the world, or we can go the total free trade route and let the correction take the form of us buying cheap imports and cheap foreign labor until the price of foreign goods is high enough that we start buying locally. Pick your poison. Either way, we're just paying the piper for the fact that we're living better than we can justify with the work that we put out.
There's also a lot of room to drive your little company under with a short losing streak. There's always a risk/reward trade off, and I doubt that many people who live on $0.30 an hour feel comfortable going the high risk route. You need a certain amount of capital to take on a high-risk investment, even if you know that you'll come out slightly ahead in the long run.
You mean the wealthy lobbyist who has, in past elections, driven a red pickup truck that he rented in order to shore up populist credentials? I have a hard time believing that any of the candidates are authentic, at least in the sense that they're not simply pretending to understand the plight of the common man. It never ceases to amaze me that the media will present one or two candidates as "rich and out of touch" when the fact is none of them are "genuine common men" and haven't been since Founding Fathers. None of them actually clears brush at his ranch or drives a red pickup truck or likes to mow his own lawn. It's all theater, and amazingly, even the political pundits go along with it. I certainly don't begrudge the fact that our candidates are all wealthy "elites" who live comfortable lives. There's no reason to think that having a white collar job and being good at it means that you can't understand the human condition. I am, however, offended when the media tries to call out one or two of them for being rich and "out of touch" while others successfully play dress up to convince us that they're just like everybody else.
As for who is "genuine" I would have to give Ron Paul the nod (even though I don't particularly want his policies enacted) simply because he clearly knows that he has no chance at getting the nomination so he says what he really thinks. When everybody else was dumping on him for pointing out that maybe our foreign policy was agitating some people abroad, all I could think was that he was the only viable leader on that stage, and it's too bad he's also a bit crazy.
It should also be noted that we're talking about saltwater. Not so great for most terrestrial plants (or organisms in general).
It's true that terrestrial plants can last quite a long time underwater (depending on the type), but definitely not forever, and definitely not if the water is the wrong salinity. A worldwide flood is guaranteed to send quite a lot of species into extinction.
I'd like to propose a horn honking tax. A really high one. You get a certain number of seconds per year for free for safety reasons and after that you pay for it. Big time. That way, we can shift a portion of the tax burden over to extremely unlikeable individuals.
Be careful about looking at it that way. One of the most common problems in deciding what "the experts" say is looking at two opposing papers written by well qualified individuals and assuming that the experts simply agree to disagree in a 50/50 ratio. The vital piece of information that may be missing is that one paper has every other expert behind it and the other is simply that one guy. In geology, the question of the age of Earth and whether or not a catastrophic worldwide flood occurred is one of those issues. There are a handful of professionals advocating the position, and of that handful, practically all of them have clear religious motivations to take the position. It certainly doesn't mean that they're wrong, but it does make one wonder, Why are there so few, and why are there practically none who we're 100% certain aren't simply agreeing for theological reasons?
There's an important distinction to be made here. You reference the "bubble" theory, which is actually one of many working hypotheses on the origin of life. It doesn't really have much to do with Darwin's theory (except in that it explains the origins of the organisms that lead to the diversity that Darwin explained). It's common for people to conflate abiogenesis and evolution (especially when trying to cast doubt on evolutionary theory--What better way than to tie it directly to something that we don't have any solid answers to?), but evolutionary theory stands on its own regardless of how the original life forms came to be. Also, I think that if you ask just about any researcher in the topic, the answer to how the first life forms came about is generally, "We don't know" just as you were taught in high school. The questions of common descent and natural selection are considered far more settled. As it stands, children are still generally being taught the best science available. I doubt that you'll find many school teachers who are advocating one particular theory of abiogenesis, though.
I think that you're missing the point of the paper. The claim they're countering is that so-called macroevolution is not a falsifiable theory. They're pointing to several tests that could have (but didn't) show common descent to be incorrect. The fact that it passed those tests doesn't mean that alternate explanations are necessarily wrong. For example, if they had tested genetic markers of humans and chimpanzees and found them to be irreconcilably different, that would be a devastating blow for the theory of evolution. As it stands, there doesn't really appear to be any genetic evidence that falsifies evolu
Sure, it's fun to play philosopher and ask what the meaning of one photo is in the absence of all other evidence. We could also spend some time discussing whether or not Sudan actually exists. The bottom line is that the "context" you're talking about is quite well known and the fact that you're not familiar with it doesn't make it any less there.