"Then why is the the thoery of evolution being used incresasingly more to say god doesn't exist and creation couldn't possible be true?"
This is the mounting hysertia used to drum up donations to think tanks and right wing groups, but I'm not sure I see any "increasing" anything on the part of biologists or scientists.
"* Some people who claim to understand it still get it wrong"
I would say that this is fundamental to all human acitivity, religion or no. Being capable of error is precisely WHY we need something like the scientific method as our ethic: it's FIRST PRINCIPLE is that we error-prone and cannot take anything for granted.
"* Even when histroy shows it to be the most likley scenario or steps of events, it is still a guess to come to the same conclusions."
If you read what scientists do and discuss and debate, it's pretty darn hard to write off everything they are doing as guessing. Sure, there are always a lot of educated guesses in the start of exploring a new field. But then they get down to testing all the assumptions, putting the evidence through the wringer, and what they come out with is often some pretty darn solidly supported conclusions: as good and as certain as any empiricial knowledge can be. And, more importantly, scientists are always pretty good about laying out what the evidence for this or that claim is, and NOT overstating the certainty of this or that conclusion.
In general, I don't really see how any of your examples really paint science as a religion in any sense. Almost all of them are characteristics of any human social activity or debate. But when you come down to it, science is about as different from religion as any human activity can be. The principles and goals and philosophy is just radically different.
I'm not really sure how this catfish got dragged into things. I think the implication is that most evolution skeptics don't really have a good grasp of the fundamental diversity and flexibility of life on earth: they see everything as static kinds, when the real deal is fluid, multi-talented, and often surprising.
Both macro and micro evolution are well-documented facts, of course, and chances are what you mean by "macro/micro" is something rather different from how biologists use the terms. In biology, there is no real solid divding line: macro is just how we discuss larger conglomerations and trends that come out of micro, much in the same way there is macro/micro economics.
It's funny. Creationists are habitual liars, and their vision of God is of a being who lies on the grandest scale imaginable: who concocted an entire universe full of false and misleading evidence. It's interesting how people project their own failings onto their understanding of God.
Actually, if we insist upon strict monophyletic terminology, then you are a fish, all your uncles are fish, and contrary to all those kindergarden level "cool facts!" nature videos, whales are, in fact, also fish. There is simply no way to draw a family tree that both includes all fish and their descedants but also excludes every tetrapod that every lived.
"Of course it does. If the universe is nothing but a glorified accident, then what one man says is right and wrong is no more legitimate than what another man says is right and wrong."
How is that any different if its planned out in detail? Regardless, the implication that evolution necessitates atheism is simply false. Try making this argument to, well, the MAJORITY of Christians in the world, and you won't get very far.
"One man says murder is wrong. Another man says murder is right. One man says that education is to be praised. Another man says that genocide is to be praised. Everything is relative. Nothing has inherent value."
You are as confused about morality as everything else. Either things have inherent value, or they don't. No state of affairs, whether evolution is true or false, can change whether or not things have inherent value or not. Even the existence or non-existence of God wouldn't affect it (would the existence or non-existence of God, or the opinion of God, somehow magically make rape okay? I don't see how it would: how would that affect anything?). So the whole issue is completely moot.
"And if your answer is "there is no absolutes" then you are right back into moral relativism, where anything can be right and wrong."
I'm not a moral relatavist, but, amusingly, you don't even seem to know what it is, because that's not what moral relativism is.
"You certainly do. You credit the creation with the power of the Creator, you deny the Creator, and put your own test tubes, calculators, and fuzzy-headed scientists in place of God and His Word as the authority on how life began, and the meaning to life; and you organize the living of your life accordingly. That is about as literal a definition of worship as there is."
Not in the slightest. I don't worship creation, and you making up a fantasy-land verison of what you think I must believe and think doesn't make it so. You might be thinking of Tolland-esque panatheism. THEY worship creation. But then, I don't think you know who they are or what they believe either.
"The truth is God's Word. The Almighty left that for us, not me. I'm just communicating His words, not mine. "
Seriously, your arguments are so stupid that I'm beginning to think you are just a troll having fun by pretending to be a creationist. Your belief that you know what the truth is is still that: a belief that you possess the correct and true knowledge. No amount of waffling about how its ultimately Gods truth allows you to weasel out of that. At some point, YOU have to be part of the chain, and you have to be believe that you have a direct line to the absolute truth (of course, many other people from other religions make the same exact claim!).
"To adopt any theory that claims evolution as a process, one has to presuppose the origin."
What origin? The only thing evolution takes for granted is the FACT that there was simple life on earth at some point. From the perspective of evolutionary theory, it doesn't matter where it came from. It could just as easily have come from the works of God.
"If God created the universe supernaturally in a fully mature state, then all dating methods and views that the Earth is a billion years old goes right out the window."
If God created the universe three seconds ago in a fully mature state, then all criminals should be released from prison, since they didn't actually do any of the things they were in there for. Don't you see how dumb an argument that is? And the universe isn't just "supernaturally mature." It bears, at every level, a record of actual historical events and ages, SPECIFIC ages and events. All of which would have to be deliberate and intentional fabrications.
So, I guess that makes sense. You are a demonstrable serial lair. So of course you would envision that God is a liar on a grand scale.
"Likewise, there's another God-given account -- the Bible, which squares with true science."
Bad news for ya, but beer and liquor taste like crap too. Well, more specifically, piss. The people who claim to like the taste are, let's be honest, lying.
"In your evolutionary world, where there is no basis for right or wrong, where nothing has any inherent value, and there is no purpose to life, other than survival of the fittest, why does what I say bother you so much?"
How is it that you manage to include ridiculous falsehoods in every sentance you write? The fact of evolution has no bearing at all on a basis for right and wrong. Is is not ought.
Why does does what you say bother me? Because much of it is simply false or based on your own misconceptions about a great many things. Falsehoods need to be challenged.
"And the Bible speaks clearly about those who worship the creation rather than the Creator, and professing themselves to be wise, their foolish hearts are darkened"
How do you know that this doesn't apply to you, instead of me? I don't "worship" creation. And I don't profess myself to be "wise" Only one of us is here claiming absolute knowledge of "THE" incontrovertible truth: and it's YOU!
"Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Osama bin Laden, are model citizens according to evolutionary philosophy"
You seem to be under the misapprehension that there is anything called "evolutionary philosophy." While I suppose one could invent one, I'm not sure what the point of it would be. In any case, you are simply attacking a straw man of your own invention. If that makes you feel better, have it. But it doesn't have anything to do with either myself or evolution or science.
"And the Texas scientist given the award of "Distinguished Texas Scientist" for his proposition that 90% of the world's population be exterminated via the intentional spread of airborne ebola for the sake of saving the environment is another model evolutionist."
Another lie. He never advocated that it happen. He in fact WARNED that it would happen. I don't happen to agree with his particular brand of alarmism, but at least I argue against views like his on the merits rather than simply lying about what he believes or has said.
It's truly sad that you really think you have any sort of grasp of the history of paleontology. Everything you cite is either a flat out lie, or a minor footnote in the history of hominid fossils. and the tragedy is that you are either trolling, or you really don't know it.
"Fair enough. The one thing we know for sure is that the truth will be known."
That's your opinion. In MY opinion, in order to learn truth, you have to get up out of your easy chair and go and search for it. Sitting around pontificating and maybe even dying isn't good enough.
"I just hope you are confident enough to bet your eternity on it. Keep in mind the father of your beloved theory (Darwin), by his own admission, didn't even completely believe his theory, and admitted his motive was seeking an alternative to God. That's where your "incontroveritble" beliefs began."
Does your church pay you three fitty every time you make up some laughable lie for the faith? We don't need to wait until we die to know that you spit out one goofy falsehood after another: we can all see it right now!
Darwin wasn't seeking an alternative to God. He was a Christian. Origin specifically credits the Creator as the source of life. Later in his life he became an agnostic of sorts, but he was never an atheist. I'm not sure what you mean by "didn't completely believe" but as far as I know, Darwin never renounced his theory. He did pretty quickly admit that he got the basic mechanism of heredity wrong, and it was wrong. But that's not the same thing, and I doubt you even know what I'm talking about there anyway.
Of course, what Darwin believed or didn't believe is a matter of historical interest, but not of scientific consequence. The only thing that matters to science is the evidence.
"No need to debate. Everyone will come face to face with the truth, regardless of what anyone says, and regardless of what anyone believes."
Again, in your opinion. Me, I think I'll put some effort into exploring what is and isn't true instead of just sitting around making stuff up.
"Posted again (forgot the line breaks the first time):"
Repeating the EXACT same thing TWICE, doesn't work either, sorry.:)
"The Bible precludes any possibility of evolution."
If you read it that way, I guess. But then the Bible is clearly pretty wrong, on the evidence. If you take the Bible as true over and above the evidence, then you are contradicting yourself, because before you seemed to be claiming that there was empirical evidence showing the bible to be good history. You can't have it both ways.
"Reality doesn't change because someone believes it, though that's exactly the philosophy which underpins evolution."
Nope, exactly the opposite in fact. Evolution, like all empirical science, assumes that the basic laws and functions and processes of physics and chemistry and so forth work the same in the past as they do today.
"There's the evolutionary account. There's the Biblical account. There are those who are consistent in their beliefs by believing one or the other. There are those who are completely confused and self-contradictory by trying to claim they believe in both."
I don't see the self-contradiction there, but whatever. Evolution, however, still isn't a "belief." It's an empirical conclusion.
"Absolutely nothing existed. Then something existed. That is clearly outside of the laws of the universe."
First of all, the scenario you describe is by no means the most accurate description of the start of the universe. Second of all, no it wouldnt really, but that requires an understanding of physics and thermodynamics. But thirdly, and most importantly, evolution has nothing to do with the start of the universe. It doesn't even come into play that we know of for several billion years "later."
"Making any assertion whatsoever on the origin of life is at its root, a religious belief."
What, and simply claiming that it is makes it so? Why? How? Your previous line of logic, that the origin of life has something to do with the start of the universe has already failed as, well, silly. Now you seem to be talking about at least the origin of life, which is on the right track, but still wrong. Evolution is not a theory of life's origins. That's a different branch of explanation (though still solidly within the realm of science, not faith).
"I will agree about how solid and incontrovertible the evidence for common descent is. Plants, animals, and humans all bearing descendants "after their kind"."
Ah yes, "kinds." A term with no solid specific definition, which you will re-define completely at the drop of a hat. Tell me, are camels and llamas the same kind, or different? Are false killer whales the same kind, or different kinds? Define "kind" if you can: should be amusing.
Common descent, as you may or may not know, refers to the common origins of all life. Humans are apes, which are simians, which are primates, which are placental mammals, which are amniotes, which are tetrapods, which are vertebrates, which are eukaryotes, and so on.
"The answer has always been 100% consistent with the Biblical account of creation, yet scientists will pull bone out of 50 feet of rock and claim it as the grand explanation for everything."
If that's the limit of your understanding of how science works, then no wonder you are so incredulous. I suggest that you learn more about what is actually known and done.
"They'll claim the Grand Canyon is geologic evidence for millions of years of erosion, when Mt St. Helens shows similar features which developed in a matter of minutes."
Except that they aren't at all similar (good grief: the GC is 100,000 times larger than St. Helens, and the "canyon" elements radically and identifiably different since they were formed in radically different ways). And the fact that you are willing to claim that they are only demonstrates your willingness to, knowingly or not, repeat falsehoods in service to your belief.
"Belief in evolution is a rejection of the Biblical account of creation. And regardless, any belief on origins is a religious belief -- it doesn't matter whether your belief is God, dirt, or gas, the foundation is an article of faith, not a scientific fact. "
Saying it over and over doesn't make it true, sorry. I'm sorry that YOU feel you have no option other than faith in this or faith in that, but that's simply not the case for everyone. The rest of us will continue to go by what the evidence is.
"There's nothing scientifically provable about origins. The root matter and cause is by definition outside the laws of the universe. "
Nothing about evolution is outside of the laws of the universe. In fact, the entire history of life takes place within the universe. If there is a root matter and cause external to the universe then that indeed is not something relevant to science. But things like the history of life on earth is well within the everyday purview of evidence and fact.
"The issue of origins, and subsequent world view people adopt is based on an individual's desire (or lack thereof) to be responsible to a God which demands moral accountability. It has absolutely nothing to do with science. That's the big dust cloud people use to assuage their conscience."
I don't think you have any sort of coherent arugment. It's been three posts now, and you still haven't presented anything other than these sort of meaingless, empty assertions which you can't back up. You haven't even tried to back up your claim that Lucy was a fraud.
I'm sorry you feel this way, but your feelings and nasty accusations don't change the way scientific evidence works, or how solid and incontroverible the evidence for common descent is.
"You must mean how everyone is this thread (and the scientists in this article) certainly must have read the Bible (which is a historical record), and all of the supporting archaeological, geographical, historical, cultural, and literary evidence for the authenticity of the Bible"
Some may have, some may not have. I'm not sure what it has to do with anything. Plenty of religious people are just fine with what science has to say about the history of life on Earth, including all of Catholicism.
I'm not sure why you would cite "archaeological, geographical... etc." evidence as a sign of anything if you don't think such things are good science anyway.
"Science, which is merely observation limited by the confines of 3D time/space and the laws of our universe, cannot logically deliver any comment on the existence of God."
Did I or the article or anything else comment on the existense of God? No. Soooooo: I guess you have a pretty giant chip on your shoulder then. Too bad you can't trick me into knocking it off!:)
"Any belief about origins, is exactly that: a belief."
I don't know what you mean about "origins." We're talking about physical, everyday facts like the evolution of life on earth, including the evolution of homo sapiens. That's science, not a belief system.
"but it doesn't change the fact that at the core of *any* view of origins is belief, not science."
Sorry, but this schoolyard "I am rubber, you are glue" stuff doesn't work on me. It's science. Lucy isn't a fraud. Human beings are apes. Get over it.
No. I think news articles should summarize the basic ideas. If you are interested in the specifics, read the actual papers and learn the actual science. Then you wouldn't be running around saying stupid things like "Lucy was a fraud."
Chromosome counts increase AND decrease, that they do so and why they do so is not some huge mystery. For instance, humans have a fused chromosome which is pretty obviously two chromosomes fused together, given that they have degraded telomeres sitting smack in the middle of the chromosome, and are otherwise reconizeably the two chromosomes that chimps have, fused together.
How is simple slips and screwups in how chromosomes build and separate themselves, same as with most other kinds of mutation. There's nothing particularly complicated about how it happens or that it happens. My example of Robertsonian translocation is simply an example of how chromosomes can end up splitting and refusing and duplicating in different ways. They are also an example of how differences in chromosome numbers do not necessarily prevent successful and viable reproduction.
Primates actually have fairly stable chromosome numbers. Modern rodents, however, are much more flexible. Mice species, for instance, show all sorts of evidence for their chromosome numbers varying quite wildly over their recent history, even within recent recorded speciation events.
"* When they say they found fossils of eight individual primitive hominids, what exactly did they find? How complete are the fossils in terms of percentage?"
You should just read the article. It gives answers that are far more robust and interesting than just percentages.
"Would you explain to me how an anthropologist can classify a whole animal and infer its evolutionary stage, given a few small pieces of bone fragments?'
Sure. It's because of the nested, branching heirarchy of life, with each line having a unique stock of features that are unique past certain branchings (since the genetic material of animals is not passed laterally: only down through reproduction). Animals are all remarkably similar in a gross overview, and all quite distinctively different in the fine details. And from these distinctive, otherwise unique traits branch out more variations, and then variations from those variations, and so on... but what makes each original grouping distinct usually remains distinct. For instance, humans are still primates. We're still Haplorhini (the scientific version of the slightly more confusing word "monkeys"), because we have twin pectoral mammae, binocular vision, pendulous penises, and a whole other host of traits that distinguish Haplorhini from all other primates. We have developed quite a lot, but any alien xenobiologist that looked at a human being would still instantly recognize the distinctive features that distinguish us as, for instance, mammals. That's what paleontologists are doing with these fossils, just on a smaller scale.
It's often asked how just a tooth can be known to be an ape tooth. Well, it's because no other known form of life has a molar like an ape molar. It's distinctive: a Y shape with five radiating grooves. All apes have such a molar, and only apes have such a molar. As it so happens, if you are unsure what such a molar looks like from my limited description, there is an easy solution: look at your molars in a mirror. That's what an ape molar looks like.
The same is true for all sorts of different traits, and particular COLLECTIONS of certain traits make things even more identifiable. For instance, no other creatures but apes have the very particular shoulder structure that apes have. Put together a shoulder and a molar and a particular skull shape and some distinctive traces of muscle attachments and.... hopefuly you get the picture.
Of course, if it were only teeth or fragments, that would be one thing. But all these confirmations, are pieced together from tons of evidence and the testing of weak assumptions or inferences. It's a pretty good guess that if you think there is some seemingly unjustified inference being made, you are just unaware of previous knowledge being worked off of or tests that were done to rule out certain alternatives. If you listen to conferences on these subjects, that's mostly what scientists spend their time doing: grilling each other on as yet untested alternative explanations, demanding justification for this or that. Scientists are remarkably hostile to each other's work, and very competative in terms of trying to catch the errors or weak assumptions of competitors.
"Perhaps I am ignorant, but I've never heard of any explanation of how a new species acquires an extra pair of chromosomes..."
Good grief. There are PEOPLE walking around RIGHT NOW that have different numbers of chromosomes than you do (unless you are unknowingly one of them!) And Robertsonian translocations are so common that one out of every 900 people has one.
As another poster noted: yes the plants are still coca. And, in fact, their descendants always will be, just as we are still mammals, still primates, still apes, etc.
To understand how we know these things, you have to understand both cladistics and general morphology, as well as a lot of how bones form, how various diseases that affect bones work, how fossilization works, and so on. Suffice to say, none of these people are just running around making wild guesses about something being a different species.
Shaq and mini-me may be the same species, and mini-me even has some significant developmental differences. But in terms of morphology, they are still very much identifiable as homo sapien sapien, and no paleontologist would confuse them as different species (though its not beyond the bounds of possibility that, in a few thousands of years, they couldn't become separate species!). That's because they look for some very distinctive shapes and ratios and so forth that distinguish uniquely homo sapien sapien skulls from other apes and hominids. Again, you should really look into how all this is done.
"How do you know that Australopithecus evolved into modern man and that that line didn't die out?"
It's certainly possible that this, in fact, IS what happened! But remember: what we're looking at is a family tree. Even if Australopithecus turned out not to be a direct ancestor, it's still close enough on the interesting branch of the tree to tell us most of what we need to know about that particular branching.
Almost every fossil can be characterized as transitional, in that it has features unique to both a prior line and a other features now unique to a later line.
What you are thinking of is probably the more dramatic transitions from, say, water to land. The early tetrapods are a pretty clear example of this. They have features characteristic of both tetrapods (four limbed land animals) and the ancestral line of lobed-fin fishes.
If you really don't think the age of the earth is well supported I'm just not sure what to say. Virtually every element of geological fact confirms not just the old age of the Earth, but the same particular geologic ages. I mean, the separation of South America from Africa couldn't have taken less than 100 million years. And we can even date (in several different cross-confirming ways) the upwelling of rocks on either side of the trench that marks the split. And this is just one tiny provincial example of the same convergence of evidence we find when we look at just about anything in the world. It all converges on the same set of facts: an earth billions of years old. What more could anyone possibly present at this point if the best kind of evidence (convergence evidence) imaginable isn't enough to convince you?
Sorry, but "Lucy" is not a fraud. Creationist Tom Willis made this accusation way back in 1987, but it turned out that hsi criticisms weren't only wrong, they were built on an almost comical misunderstanding of a completely different case.
At this point, we've found many Australopithecus fossils, so it's not even clear what this "fraud" screaming is supposed to prove anyway. And now that wikipedia exists, I don't expect this kind of hand waving will work much longer.... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australopithecus_afar ensis
"There's no discussion of how this fossil was dated to be 4 million years old. The scientists conclude that "the surrounding area indicated the specimens were forest dwellers"."
Lol. You really think that the sum total of what's in academic papers are in a quick news article announcing the find?
You seem to be under the impression that "law" is something a theory is promoted to. That's simply not the case. Theory is the best something gets in science, or rather, a theory that fits all available evidence is the best you can get ("laws" refer not to explanations, but observed regularities that seem to hold universally).
In many ways, evolution is more certain than Gravity. For instance, the phylogenetic tree is known to far far more decimal points than the constant G.
2000 years takes us nowhere near far enough to claim that the text is some sort of unaltered missive. Yes, we have copies from 2000 years ago. But we also have more recent copies, and we also have older copies, and the overall conclusion is that the text changed a lot. In fact, it's pretty solidly supported at this point that the Genesis story is cobbled together out of two separate creation myths. In fact, we even know these myths.
Before Moses, people spoke of seven _generations_ of gods who created the earth, the sixth having the bright idea to create a servant (man) whom would allow the seventh generation to rest while man continued working. Other cultures spoke of the gods creating man and woman together. Others spoke of the creation of Adamah, a man made of red clay, a golem creature. And so on.
"If it was possible for the Torah to be transcribed for 2000 years perfectly, who's to say it hasn't been transcribed perfectly since it was written?"
I would argue that the fact of evolution was not all that well known, and certainly not well accepted in Darwin's day. It wasn't anywhere near as well supported, adn the fossil record in Darwin's day was almost non-existent compared to what is available today (Darwin, in fact, never imagined that it would be as rich as it has turned out to be, and so didn't really base his theory on drawing too many detailed conclusions from fossil evidence).
Today, his writings certainly seem like just a sketch, but for the day they were really quite exceptional. He got the mechanism of heredity famously wrong, but the overall vista still holds up remarkably wlel today, with most of the detail now flushed out.
"Those things that I pointed out were not considered jokes, and were considered big finds that "proved" Evolution was real."
I'm afraid that if you actually read the real history of these finds, you'll find that you are wrong. The proof of evolution does not rest on any one single fossil, and all your examples are rather minor footnotes in the history of evolutionary biology, not "THE" anything. Only one major hominid fossil fraud ever lasted for more than a few years, and that was in part because no one was studying it because it wasn't very interesting.
Now, for years, journalists have been aggrandizing this or that fossil find as THE proof, but biology doesn't work like that. Again, there are THOUSANDS of key, hominid fossils known, all of which form a coherent picture and pattern of hominid evolution.
"he problem is that everything they find some human with a deformity, that it is the "missing link"."
There are all sorts of different morphological methods to distinguish deformity from normal, healthy adulthood, many based on understanding of what different deformities exist today and what sort of bones evidence they leave and what all sorts of different growth speeds and so forth do to tissues and thus end up in fossils.
But one of the easiest to understand without getting a forensics degree is the sheer unlikihood of finding ONLY a certain type of fossil in a certain place at a certain time, ALL of which have the same charactersitics. You can claim that they are all "deformities"... but then why do we ONLY find fossils of that sort at that time in that place and NEVER any "normal" individuals? And why do the "deformities" happen to all fit together in a particular sequence over time? I realize that this "deformity" thing is the last excuse that creationists can come up with in the face of the fossil evidence, but it doesn't hold up to anything more than a minute of reflection.
"Post one specific finding that proves evolution from the past that you base your belief in please."
Ok. I pick the twin (or triple, depending on how you look at it) nested heirarchies of all biological life that ever existed. That is, of all the currently living animals and fossilized species of which we are aware, they all fit into the exact same cladistic tree of branching ancestry no matter what method we use to compare them. For instance, we can determine the relationships of various species genetically in much the same way we do paternity tests. This creates a family tree. Or, we can use fossil and geological evidence to create a family tree based on inferred relationships in time and place. The two trees we build from these two different methods are identical. We can also build a tree based on just looking at morphological characteristics alone (though this might fold into the fossil evidence depending on how you look at it).
Again, all those trees are identical. Do you see the significance of that?
And that finding is even more startling when you consider all the different ways that the tree COULD be. For instance, even if you consider just 29 major taxanomic groups, there are already more than 10 to the 27th ways to arrange these groups into a nested tree. And yet, whether we measure yb morphology, genetics, or fossil/geological methods, we always get the same one, single tree. Even if you claim that one or another of these methods was somehow in error, that still wouldn't explain why they give the SAME answer. When things are in error, their results are not coordinated: the values they give are random, or off by different amounts. Instead, they are all the same. Only the truth of the implication can really explain that convergence, meaning that each of these methods allows us to check the accuracy of the others in an extremely robust manner.
Dolo's law is based on an understanding of how evolution works, and ID is based mostly on ignorance. Dolo's Law is a basic rule of thumb that is based on the vanishingly small probability that a random walk will return to the starting place once the dimensions of change multiply. A 1d random walk has an almost 100% chance of returning to the starting point, a 2d walk almost as likely, but with a 3d walk it becomes fairly unlikely, and by the time you hit 4d, extremely unlikely. Since every evolutionary trait is its own dimension, so to speak, Dolo's Law is based on solid math.
ID, on the other hand, is based on ridiculously lousy math and poorly defined criteria. The "unlikihood" calculations used by most ID theorists are so bad that you don't have to know anything about biology to know that the math is screwy.
Slashdot Mirror
"Then why is the the thoery of evolution being used incresasingly more to say god doesn't exist and creation couldn't possible be true?"
This is the mounting hysertia used to drum up donations to think tanks and right wing groups, but I'm not sure I see any "increasing" anything on the part of biologists or scientists.
"* Some people who claim to understand it still get it wrong"
I would say that this is fundamental to all human acitivity, religion or no. Being capable of error is precisely WHY we need something like the scientific method as our ethic: it's FIRST PRINCIPLE is that we error-prone and cannot take anything for granted.
"* Even when histroy shows it to be the most likley scenario or steps of events, it is still a guess to come to the same conclusions."
If you read what scientists do and discuss and debate, it's pretty darn hard to write off everything they are doing as guessing. Sure, there are always a lot of educated guesses in the start of exploring a new field. But then they get down to testing all the assumptions, putting the evidence through the wringer, and what they come out with is often some pretty darn solidly supported conclusions: as good and as certain as any empiricial knowledge can be. And, more importantly, scientists are always pretty good about laying out what the evidence for this or that claim is, and NOT overstating the certainty of this or that conclusion.
In general, I don't really see how any of your examples really paint science as a religion in any sense. Almost all of them are characteristics of any human social activity or debate. But when you come down to it, science is about as different from religion as any human activity can be. The principles and goals and philosophy is just radically different.
I'm not really sure how this catfish got dragged into things. I think the implication is that most evolution skeptics don't really have a good grasp of the fundamental diversity and flexibility of life on earth: they see everything as static kinds, when the real deal is fluid, multi-talented, and often surprising.
Both macro and micro evolution are well-documented facts, of course, and chances are what you mean by "macro/micro" is something rather different from how biologists use the terms. In biology, there is no real solid divding line: macro is just how we discuss larger conglomerations and trends that come out of micro, much in the same way there is macro/micro economics.
It's funny. Creationists are habitual liars, and their vision of God is of a being who lies on the grandest scale imaginable: who concocted an entire universe full of false and misleading evidence. It's interesting how people project their own failings onto their understanding of God.
Actually, if we insist upon strict monophyletic terminology, then you are a fish, all your uncles are fish, and contrary to all those kindergarden level "cool facts!" nature videos, whales are, in fact, also fish. There is simply no way to draw a family tree that both includes all fish and their descedants but also excludes every tetrapod that every lived.
"Of course it does. If the universe is nothing but a glorified accident, then what one man says is right and wrong is no more legitimate than what another man says is right and wrong."
How is that any different if its planned out in detail? Regardless, the implication that evolution necessitates atheism is simply false. Try making this argument to, well, the MAJORITY of Christians in the world, and you won't get very far.
"One man says murder is wrong. Another man says murder is right. One man says that education is to be praised. Another man says that genocide is to be praised. Everything is relative. Nothing has inherent value."
You are as confused about morality as everything else. Either things have inherent value, or they don't. No state of affairs, whether evolution is true or false, can change whether or not things have inherent value or not. Even the existence or non-existence of God wouldn't affect it (would the existence or non-existence of God, or the opinion of God, somehow magically make rape okay? I don't see how it would: how would that affect anything?). So the whole issue is completely moot.
"And if your answer is "there is no absolutes" then you are right back into moral relativism, where anything can be right and wrong."
I'm not a moral relatavist, but, amusingly, you don't even seem to know what it is, because that's not what moral relativism is.
"You certainly do. You credit the creation with the power of the Creator, you deny the Creator, and put your own test tubes, calculators, and fuzzy-headed scientists in place of God and His Word as the authority on how life began, and the meaning to life; and you organize the living of your life accordingly. That is about as literal a definition of worship as there is."
Not in the slightest. I don't worship creation, and you making up a fantasy-land verison of what you think I must believe and think doesn't make it so. You might be thinking of Tolland-esque panatheism. THEY worship creation. But then, I don't think you know who they are or what they believe either.
"The truth is God's Word. The Almighty left that for us, not me. I'm just communicating His words, not mine. "
Seriously, your arguments are so stupid that I'm beginning to think you are just a troll having fun by pretending to be a creationist. Your belief that you know what the truth is is still that: a belief that you possess the correct and true knowledge. No amount of waffling about how its ultimately Gods truth allows you to weasel out of that. At some point, YOU have to be part of the chain, and you have to be believe that you have a direct line to the absolute truth (of course, many other people from other religions make the same exact claim!).
"To adopt any theory that claims evolution as a process, one has to presuppose the origin."
What origin? The only thing evolution takes for granted is the FACT that there was simple life on earth at some point. From the perspective of evolutionary theory, it doesn't matter where it came from. It could just as easily have come from the works of God.
"If God created the universe supernaturally in a fully mature state, then all dating methods and views that the Earth is a billion years old goes right out the window."
If God created the universe three seconds ago in a fully mature state, then all criminals should be released from prison, since they didn't actually do any of the things they were in there for. Don't you see how dumb an argument that is? And the universe isn't just "supernaturally mature." It bears, at every level, a record of actual historical events and ages, SPECIFIC ages and events. All of which would have to be deliberate and intentional fabrications.
So, I guess that makes sense. You are a demonstrable serial lair. So of course you would envision that God is a liar on a grand scale.
"Likewise, there's another God-given account -- the Bible, which squares with true science."
Either the Bible doesn't re
No. Is it urinated directly out of a Belgian Trappist?
Bad news for ya, but beer and liquor taste like crap too. Well, more specifically, piss. The people who claim to like the taste are, let's be honest, lying.
"In your evolutionary world, where there is no basis for right or wrong, where nothing has any inherent value, and there is no purpose to life, other than survival of the fittest, why does what I say bother you so much?"
How is it that you manage to include ridiculous falsehoods in every sentance you write? The fact of evolution has no bearing at all on a basis for right and wrong. Is is not ought.
Why does does what you say bother me? Because much of it is simply false or based on your own misconceptions about a great many things. Falsehoods need to be challenged.
"And the Bible speaks clearly about those who worship the creation rather than the Creator, and professing themselves to be wise, their foolish hearts are darkened"
How do you know that this doesn't apply to you, instead of me? I don't "worship" creation. And I don't profess myself to be "wise" Only one of us is here claiming absolute knowledge of "THE" incontrovertible truth: and it's YOU!
"Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Osama bin Laden, are model citizens according to evolutionary philosophy"
You seem to be under the misapprehension that there is anything called "evolutionary philosophy." While I suppose one could invent one, I'm not sure what the point of it would be. In any case, you are simply attacking a straw man of your own invention. If that makes you feel better, have it. But it doesn't have anything to do with either myself or evolution or science.
"And the Texas scientist given the award of "Distinguished Texas Scientist" for his proposition that 90% of the world's population be exterminated via the intentional spread of airborne ebola for the sake of saving the environment is another model evolutionist."
Another lie. He never advocated that it happen. He in fact WARNED that it would happen. I don't happen to agree with his particular brand of alarmism, but at least I argue against views like his on the merits rather than simply lying about what he believes or has said.
It's truly sad that you really think you have any sort of grasp of the history of paleontology. Everything you cite is either a flat out lie, or a minor footnote in the history of hominid fossils. and the tragedy is that you are either trolling, or you really don't know it.
"Fair enough. The one thing we know for sure is that the truth will be known."
That's your opinion. In MY opinion, in order to learn truth, you have to get up out of your easy chair and go and search for it. Sitting around pontificating and maybe even dying isn't good enough.
"I just hope you are confident enough to bet your eternity on it. Keep in mind the father of your beloved theory (Darwin), by his own admission, didn't even completely believe his theory, and admitted his motive was seeking an alternative to God. That's where your "incontroveritble" beliefs began."
Does your church pay you three fitty every time you make up some laughable lie for the faith? We don't need to wait until we die to know that you spit out one goofy falsehood after another: we can all see it right now!
Darwin wasn't seeking an alternative to God. He was a Christian. Origin specifically credits the Creator as the source of life. Later in his life he became an agnostic of sorts, but he was never an atheist. I'm not sure what you mean by "didn't completely believe" but as far as I know, Darwin never renounced his theory. He did pretty quickly admit that he got the basic mechanism of heredity wrong, and it was wrong. But that's not the same thing, and I doubt you even know what I'm talking about there anyway.
Of course, what Darwin believed or didn't believe is a matter of historical interest, but not of scientific consequence. The only thing that matters to science is the evidence.
"No need to debate. Everyone will come face to face with the truth, regardless of what anyone says, and regardless of what anyone believes."
Again, in your opinion. Me, I think I'll put some effort into exploring what is and isn't true instead of just sitting around making stuff up.
"Posted again (forgot the line breaks the first time):"
:)
Repeating the EXACT same thing TWICE, doesn't work either, sorry.
"The Bible precludes any possibility of evolution."
If you read it that way, I guess. But then the Bible is clearly pretty wrong, on the evidence. If you take the Bible as true over and above the evidence, then you are contradicting yourself, because before you seemed to be claiming that there was empirical evidence showing the bible to be good history. You can't have it both ways.
"Reality doesn't change because someone believes it, though that's exactly the philosophy which underpins evolution."
Nope, exactly the opposite in fact. Evolution, like all empirical science, assumes that the basic laws and functions and processes of physics and chemistry and so forth work the same in the past as they do today.
"There's the evolutionary account. There's the Biblical account. There are those who are consistent in their beliefs by believing one or the other. There are those who are completely confused and self-contradictory by trying to claim they believe in both."
I don't see the self-contradiction there, but whatever. Evolution, however, still isn't a "belief." It's an empirical conclusion.
"Absolutely nothing existed. Then something existed. That is clearly outside of the laws of the universe."
First of all, the scenario you describe is by no means the most accurate description of the start of the universe. Second of all, no it wouldnt really, but that requires an understanding of physics and thermodynamics. But thirdly, and most importantly, evolution has nothing to do with the start of the universe. It doesn't even come into play that we know of for several billion years "later."
"Making any assertion whatsoever on the origin of life is at its root, a religious belief."
What, and simply claiming that it is makes it so? Why? How? Your previous line of logic, that the origin of life has something to do with the start of the universe has already failed as, well, silly. Now you seem to be talking about at least the origin of life, which is on the right track, but still wrong. Evolution is not a theory of life's origins. That's a different branch of explanation (though still solidly within the realm of science, not faith).
"I will agree about how solid and incontrovertible the evidence for common descent is. Plants, animals, and humans all bearing descendants "after their kind"."
Ah yes, "kinds." A term with no solid specific definition, which you will re-define completely at the drop of a hat. Tell me, are camels and llamas the same kind, or different? Are false killer whales the same kind, or different kinds? Define "kind" if you can: should be amusing.
Common descent, as you may or may not know, refers to the common origins of all life. Humans are apes, which are simians, which are primates, which are placental mammals, which are amniotes, which are tetrapods, which are vertebrates, which are eukaryotes, and so on.
"The answer has always been 100% consistent with the Biblical account of creation, yet scientists will pull bone out of 50 feet of rock and claim it as the grand explanation for everything."
If that's the limit of your understanding of how science works, then no wonder you are so incredulous. I suggest that you learn more about what is actually known and done.
"They'll claim the Grand Canyon is geologic evidence for millions of years of erosion, when Mt St. Helens shows similar features which developed in a matter of minutes."
Except that they aren't at all similar (good grief: the GC is 100,000 times larger than St. Helens, and the "canyon" elements radically and identifiably different since they were formed in radically different ways). And the fact that you are willing to claim that they are only demonstrates your willingness to, knowingly or not, repeat falsehoods in service to your belief.
"We won't agree here on wha
"Belief in evolution is a rejection of the Biblical account of creation. And regardless, any belief on origins is a religious belief -- it doesn't matter whether your belief is God, dirt, or gas, the foundation is an article of faith, not a scientific fact. "
Saying it over and over doesn't make it true, sorry. I'm sorry that YOU feel you have no option other than faith in this or faith in that, but that's simply not the case for everyone. The rest of us will continue to go by what the evidence is.
"There's nothing scientifically provable about origins. The root matter and cause is by definition outside the laws of the universe. "
Nothing about evolution is outside of the laws of the universe. In fact, the entire history of life takes place within the universe. If there is a root matter and cause external to the universe then that indeed is not something relevant to science. But things like the history of life on earth is well within the everyday purview of evidence and fact.
"The issue of origins, and subsequent world view people adopt is based on an individual's desire (or lack thereof) to be responsible to a God which demands moral accountability. It has absolutely nothing to do with science. That's the big dust cloud people use to assuage their conscience."
I don't think you have any sort of coherent arugment. It's been three posts now, and you still haven't presented anything other than these sort of meaingless, empty assertions which you can't back up. You haven't even tried to back up your claim that Lucy was a fraud.
I'm sorry you feel this way, but your feelings and nasty accusations don't change the way scientific evidence works, or how solid and incontroverible the evidence for common descent is.
"You must mean how everyone is this thread (and the scientists in this article) certainly must have read the Bible (which is a historical record), and all of the supporting archaeological, geographical, historical, cultural, and literary evidence for the authenticity of the Bible"
:)
Some may have, some may not have. I'm not sure what it has to do with anything. Plenty of religious people are just fine with what science has to say about the history of life on Earth, including all of Catholicism.
I'm not sure why you would cite "archaeological, geographical... etc." evidence as a sign of anything if you don't think such things are good science anyway.
"Science, which is merely observation limited by the confines of 3D time/space and the laws of our universe, cannot logically deliver any comment on the existence of God."
Did I or the article or anything else comment on the existense of God? No. Soooooo: I guess you have a pretty giant chip on your shoulder then. Too bad you can't trick me into knocking it off!
"Any belief about origins, is exactly that: a belief."
I don't know what you mean about "origins." We're talking about physical, everyday facts like the evolution of life on earth, including the evolution of homo sapiens. That's science, not a belief system.
"but it doesn't change the fact that at the core of *any* view of origins is belief, not science."
Sorry, but this schoolyard "I am rubber, you are glue" stuff doesn't work on me. It's science. Lucy isn't a fraud. Human beings are apes. Get over it.
No. I think news articles should summarize the basic ideas. If you are interested in the specifics, read the actual papers and learn the actual science. Then you wouldn't be running around saying stupid things like "Lucy was a fraud."
"You missed the question. "
You missed the implication.
Chromosome counts increase AND decrease, that they do so and why they do so is not some huge mystery. For instance, humans have a fused chromosome which is pretty obviously two chromosomes fused together, given that they have degraded telomeres sitting smack in the middle of the chromosome, and are otherwise reconizeably the two chromosomes that chimps have, fused together.
How is simple slips and screwups in how chromosomes build and separate themselves, same as with most other kinds of mutation. There's nothing particularly complicated about how it happens or that it happens. My example of Robertsonian translocation is simply an example of how chromosomes can end up splitting and refusing and duplicating in different ways. They are also an example of how differences in chromosome numbers do not necessarily prevent successful and viable reproduction.
Primates actually have fairly stable chromosome numbers. Modern rodents, however, are much more flexible. Mice species, for instance, show all sorts of evidence for their chromosome numbers varying quite wildly over their recent history, even within recent recorded speciation events.
"* When they say they found fossils of eight individual primitive hominids, what exactly did they find? How complete are the fossils in terms of percentage?"
u ll/nature04629.html
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v440/n7086/f
You should just read the article. It gives answers that are far more robust and interesting than just percentages.
"Would you explain to me how an anthropologist can classify a whole animal and infer its evolutionary stage, given a few small pieces of bone fragments?'
Sure. It's because of the nested, branching heirarchy of life, with each line having a unique stock of features that are unique past certain branchings (since the genetic material of animals is not passed laterally: only down through reproduction). Animals are all remarkably similar in a gross overview, and all quite distinctively different in the fine details. And from these distinctive, otherwise unique traits branch out more variations, and then variations from those variations, and so on... but what makes each original grouping distinct usually remains distinct. For instance, humans are still primates. We're still Haplorhini (the scientific version of the slightly more confusing word "monkeys"), because we have twin pectoral mammae, binocular vision, pendulous penises, and a whole other host of traits that distinguish Haplorhini from all other primates. We have developed quite a lot, but any alien xenobiologist that looked at a human being would still instantly recognize the distinctive features that distinguish us as, for instance, mammals. That's what paleontologists are doing with these fossils, just on a smaller scale.
It's often asked how just a tooth can be known to be an ape tooth. Well, it's because no other known form of life has a molar like an ape molar. It's distinctive: a Y shape with five radiating grooves. All apes have such a molar, and only apes have such a molar. As it so happens, if you are unsure what such a molar looks like from my limited description, there is an easy solution: look at your molars in a mirror. That's what an ape molar looks like.
The same is true for all sorts of different traits, and particular COLLECTIONS of certain traits make things even more identifiable. For instance, no other creatures but apes have the very particular shoulder structure that apes have. Put together a shoulder and a molar and a particular skull shape and some distinctive traces of muscle attachments and.... hopefuly you get the picture.
Of course, if it were only teeth or fragments, that would be one thing. But all these confirmations, are pieced together from tons of evidence and the testing of weak assumptions or inferences. It's a pretty good guess that if you think there is some seemingly unjustified inference being made, you are just unaware of previous knowledge being worked off of or tests that were done to rule out certain alternatives. If you listen to conferences on these subjects, that's mostly what scientists spend their time doing: grilling each other on as yet untested alternative explanations, demanding justification for this or that. Scientists are remarkably hostile to each other's work, and very competative in terms of trying to catch the errors or weak assumptions of competitors.
"Perhaps I am ignorant, but I've never heard of any explanation of how a new species acquires an extra pair of chromosomes..."
Good grief. There are PEOPLE walking around RIGHT NOW that have different numbers of chromosomes than you do (unless you are unknowingly one of them!) And Robertsonian translocations are so common that one out of every 900 people has one.
As another poster noted: yes the plants are still coca. And, in fact, their descendants always will be, just as we are still mammals, still primates, still apes, etc.
To understand how we know these things, you have to understand both cladistics and general morphology, as well as a lot of how bones form, how various diseases that affect bones work, how fossilization works, and so on. Suffice to say, none of these people are just running around making wild guesses about something being a different species.
Shaq and mini-me may be the same species, and mini-me even has some significant developmental differences. But in terms of morphology, they are still very much identifiable as homo sapien sapien, and no paleontologist would confuse them as different species (though its not beyond the bounds of possibility that, in a few thousands of years, they couldn't become separate species!). That's because they look for some very distinctive shapes and ratios and so forth that distinguish uniquely homo sapien sapien skulls from other apes and hominids. Again, you should really look into how all this is done.
"How do you know that Australopithecus evolved into modern man and that that line didn't die out?"
It's certainly possible that this, in fact, IS what happened! But remember: what we're looking at is a family tree. Even if Australopithecus turned out not to be a direct ancestor, it's still close enough on the interesting branch of the tree to tell us most of what we need to know about that particular branching.
Almost every fossil can be characterized as transitional, in that it has features unique to both a prior line and a other features now unique to a later line.
What you are thinking of is probably the more dramatic transitions from, say, water to land. The early tetrapods are a pretty clear example of this. They have features characteristic of both tetrapods (four limbed land animals) and the ancestral line of lobed-fin fishes.
If you really don't think the age of the earth is well supported I'm just not sure what to say. Virtually every element of geological fact confirms not just the old age of the Earth, but the same particular geologic ages. I mean, the separation of South America from Africa couldn't have taken less than 100 million years. And we can even date (in several different cross-confirming ways) the upwelling of rocks on either side of the trench that marks the split. And this is just one tiny provincial example of the same convergence of evidence we find when we look at just about anything in the world. It all converges on the same set of facts: an earth billions of years old. What more could anyone possibly present at this point if the best kind of evidence (convergence evidence) imaginable isn't enough to convince you?
Sorry, but "Lucy" is not a fraud. Creationist Tom Willis made this accusation way back in 1987, but it turned out that hsi criticisms weren't only wrong, they were built on an almost comical misunderstanding of a completely different case.
r ensis
At this point, we've found many Australopithecus fossils, so it's not even clear what this "fraud" screaming is supposed to prove anyway. And now that wikipedia exists, I don't expect this kind of hand waving will work much longer....
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australopithecus_afa
"There's no discussion of how this fossil was dated to be 4 million years old. The scientists conclude that "the surrounding area indicated the specimens were forest dwellers"."
Lol. You really think that the sum total of what's in academic papers are in a quick news article announcing the find?
You seem to be under the impression that "law" is something a theory is promoted to. That's simply not the case. Theory is the best something gets in science, or rather, a theory that fits all available evidence is the best you can get ("laws" refer not to explanations, but observed regularities that seem to hold universally).
In many ways, evolution is more certain than Gravity. For instance, the phylogenetic tree is known to far far more decimal points than the constant G.
2000 years takes us nowhere near far enough to claim that the text is some sort of unaltered missive. Yes, we have copies from 2000 years ago. But we also have more recent copies, and we also have older copies, and the overall conclusion is that the text changed a lot. In fact, it's pretty solidly supported at this point that the Genesis story is cobbled together out of two separate creation myths. In fact, we even know these myths.
Before Moses, people spoke of seven _generations_ of gods who created the earth, the sixth having the bright idea to create a servant (man) whom would allow the seventh generation to rest while man continued working. Other cultures spoke of the gods creating man and woman together. Others spoke of the creation of Adamah, a man made of red clay, a golem creature. And so on.
"If it was possible for the Torah to be transcribed for 2000 years perfectly, who's to say it hasn't been transcribed perfectly since it was written?"
Modern scholarship and an analysis of the text.
I would argue that the fact of evolution was not all that well known, and certainly not well accepted in Darwin's day. It wasn't anywhere near as well supported, adn the fossil record in Darwin's day was almost non-existent compared to what is available today (Darwin, in fact, never imagined that it would be as rich as it has turned out to be, and so didn't really base his theory on drawing too many detailed conclusions from fossil evidence).
Today, his writings certainly seem like just a sketch, but for the day they were really quite exceptional. He got the mechanism of heredity famously wrong, but the overall vista still holds up remarkably wlel today, with most of the detail now flushed out.
"Those things that I pointed out were not considered jokes, and were considered big finds that "proved" Evolution was real."
I'm afraid that if you actually read the real history of these finds, you'll find that you are wrong. The proof of evolution does not rest on any one single fossil, and all your examples are rather minor footnotes in the history of evolutionary biology, not "THE" anything. Only one major hominid fossil fraud ever lasted for more than a few years, and that was in part because no one was studying it because it wasn't very interesting.
Now, for years, journalists have been aggrandizing this or that fossil find as THE proof, but biology doesn't work like that. Again, there are THOUSANDS of key, hominid fossils known, all of which form a coherent picture and pattern of hominid evolution.
"he problem is that everything they find some human with a deformity, that it is the "missing link"."
There are all sorts of different morphological methods to distinguish deformity from normal, healthy adulthood, many based on understanding of what different deformities exist today and what sort of bones evidence they leave and what all sorts of different growth speeds and so forth do to tissues and thus end up in fossils.
But one of the easiest to understand without getting a forensics degree is the sheer unlikihood of finding ONLY a certain type of fossil in a certain place at a certain time, ALL of which have the same charactersitics. You can claim that they are all "deformities"... but then why do we ONLY find fossils of that sort at that time in that place and NEVER any "normal" individuals? And why do the "deformities" happen to all fit together in a particular sequence over time? I realize that this "deformity" thing is the last excuse that creationists can come up with in the face of the fossil evidence, but it doesn't hold up to anything more than a minute of reflection.
"Post one specific finding that proves evolution from the past that you base your belief in please."
Ok. I pick the twin (or triple, depending on how you look at it) nested heirarchies of all biological life that ever existed. That is, of all the currently living animals and fossilized species of which we are aware, they all fit into the exact same cladistic tree of branching ancestry no matter what method we use to compare them. For instance, we can determine the relationships of various species genetically in much the same way we do paternity tests. This creates a family tree. Or, we can use fossil and geological evidence to create a family tree based on inferred relationships in time and place. The two trees we build from these two different methods are identical. We can also build a tree based on just looking at morphological characteristics alone (though this might fold into the fossil evidence depending on how you look at it).
Again, all those trees are identical. Do you see the significance of that?
And that finding is even more startling when you consider all the different ways that the tree COULD be. For instance, even if you consider just 29 major taxanomic groups, there are already more than 10 to the 27th ways to arrange these groups into a nested tree. And yet, whether we measure yb morphology, genetics, or fossil/geological methods, we always get the same one, single tree. Even if you claim that one or another of these methods was somehow in error, that still wouldn't explain why they give the SAME answer. When things are in error, their results are not coordinated: the values they give are random, or off by different amounts. Instead, they are all the same. Only the truth of the implication can really explain that convergence, meaning that each of these methods allows us to check the accuracy of the others in an extremely robust manner.
No, they are not the same at all.
Dolo's law is based on an understanding of how evolution works, and ID is based mostly on ignorance. Dolo's Law is a basic rule of thumb that is based on the vanishingly small probability that a random walk will return to the starting place once the dimensions of change multiply. A 1d random walk has an almost 100% chance of returning to the starting point, a 2d walk almost as likely, but with a 3d walk it becomes fairly unlikely, and by the time you hit 4d, extremely unlikely. Since every evolutionary trait is its own dimension, so to speak, Dolo's Law is based on solid math.
ID, on the other hand, is based on ridiculously lousy math and poorly defined criteria. The "unlikihood" calculations used by most ID theorists are so bad that you don't have to know anything about biology to know that the math is screwy.