"We've know for decades that simple mutation-and-selection doesn't drive change anywhere near fast enough to account for history. The current theory as I know it as a layman is that occasional periods of rapid change are needed, and no biologist has believed in "Darwinian" evolution for generations."
You've pretty much got most of that wrong. First of all, observed rates of morphological change are many times FASTER than even the fastest transition in the fossil record. The problem isn't that changes happen too fast, it's that there is too much statis. The debate over phyletic gradualism vs. more "jumpy" evolution was indeed resolved a long time ago, but it's hard to find a reason to say that either are especially "Darwinian."
Darwin didn't really have much to say in the debate over phyletic gradualism and punk eek. Darwin never looked at the pace or history of evolution all that much, since he didn't have the detail or sort of information later zoologists had. He spoke about gradualism in terms of the way it was used in geology: small changes accumulating. Thats a description of microevolutionary change. Phyletic gradualism was a macroevolutionary theory about the PACE of change: that it was steady and stable. THAT is what got tossed out.
Gould did not challenge gradualism. He challenged phyletic gradualism. And actually he wasn't really even the big force that made that view obsolete. It was genetics, which discovered that the vast majority of DNA is non-coding, and so actual changes to the coding portions would come in fits and starts rather than at a consistent steady pace.
But of course, creationists and ID theorists never tell you THAT part of the story. Just that Gould supposedly called into question all of evolution and showed that natural selection couldn't be responsible. Which is nonsense.
"To the extent that subsidies impact food prices though, they lower the price to consumers"
Nonsense. You dump money into an industry and you overvalue it. Most of the subsidies don't even lower the cost of production: they are paid to _prevent_ production! They also prevent much cheaper foriegn crops from finding any foothold.
"is that we (as a country) want to be absolutely sure that we have the farmer in place and functioning and able to respond to shifting food production requirements."
So... the market somehow is incapable of reflecting this need on its own? Why shouldn't we want to make absolutely sure we have steel plants in case we need to produce vast fleets of airships to fight aliens or the Chinese? Given that the vast majority of subsidies go to huge corporate farms, and not poor little patriotic farmers growing some sort of imaginary strategic reserve of rice, I remain totally unconvinced.
But as I said, everyone has just as compelling a rationale for their important pork.
"From a local political demographics point of view, you should note that the "red" counties in rural MD are the ones subsidizing the "blue" urban areas (in terms of simple cash flow, a la your red/blue state comment)."
Exurbs of the city don't really count, since they are so city-focused.
"The notion that all rural residents are just a bunch of soft-brained, toothless, Republican-voting, unemployed Appalachian coal miner's daughters on the dole from wise, hard working city dwellers is one of those cultural myth/images that seems to get a surprising amount of traction."
You seem to be the one filled with all these hateful descriptions. I wonder why that is?
"Most dense coastal "blue state" urban populations wouldn't put up with having the huge military facilities that you see across the midwest - but that's many billions of dollars that get "spent" in those areas."
If you put quotes around something, is it then magically no longer locally profitable?
"Probably most due to the overwhelmingly out of balance populations in the two."
Sorry, what? Yes, there are _less_ people in most red states, and they still get more total federal spending (probably in part because Senators are the ultimate porkmasters, and every state gets two of em, regardless of population).
"That, and the fact that because of entanglements with overseas transactions, a lot of subsidies get aimed at farming - which, of all the pork I hate, is the least porky. Our food supply, and the stability of that piece of the economy in our day-to-day lives and subsistence, is strategically vital."
Everyone has an excuse for their brand of pork. Most economists will tell you that this argument is a load of hooey. Keeping the price of food artificially high with government money is not exactly a winner from someone that claims that the government is too big and spends too much.
"And, when I say "red-staters," I'm talking about the person politics of the people I know living in those states. Most of them are the most self-sufficient, accountable, and tax/spending adverse people I know."
So, what, that's 100 people? 200? So that has any relevance to... what now?
Strictly speaking, we have no data at all on the second statement. While we can sort of say that the current "local" universe sprang into being, no one actually knows how or even if the underlying BB event involves a "beginning" of the _universe_ writ large (as in: all that exists). Sloppy terminology confuses laypeople, but past a certain point we just have no idea. String theory actually suggests that there is a minimum size on the universe: that at a certain subatomic level, shrinking smaller is actually the same thing as exapnding larger, preventing anything from getting to a true singularity.
Put shortly, there is no way to separate "begins to exist" from "exist" when it comes to the universe, since the universe includes time. This puts us back in the same trap that the kalaam fudge was supposed to avoid: either all things must have a cause, or some things don't have to, and the universe could be one of those things. Carving a special exception for God to avoid contradicting the very premise that you were trying to use to prove God doesn't fly, since we know as little about the ultimate origins of the universe as we do about any hypothetical God.
I know seriously! This kid apparently missed the memo where creationists decided that instead of calling the BB a heresy, they should now all turn around and declare it solid proof of a Creator. I mean in the current ID movement, the BB is presented as a discovery FOR God (atheists you see, all hoped for a steady state universe), not against.
I think you missed the part of the story where the guy insisting on this uses the word "theory" as if it were a synonym for "opinion" or "groundsless speculation." THAT is what people are objecting to. If someone was just insisting that scientists use the word theory, there would be no story. No one would care.
"Put it up empirically against any other belief system, and you'll conclude, scientifically, that it's better to listen to a bible thumping Christian's take on morality, than an athiest's."
What do you mean put it up "empirically." There's no scientific way to judge moral systems: you still have to make a moral judgement. Personally, I'll take the average atheists' morality off the street over anyone who thinks the Bible is a great guide to morality. At least with the atheist, it's pretty likely that they've actually given the subject a great deal of thought.
"Then go back and look at JFK's platform and campaign promises. They're mostly more "right" than Bush's actions. Lower taxes, smaller budget, etc..."
Back then "lower taxes" meant the pretty reasonable lowering of taxes from an insane 70% marginal rate. The higher taxes that Dems have suggested are far lower than any proposed by Kennedy.
"Yes, both parties love spending tax dollars... but at least the red-staters are at least a little more squeamish about it than their more lefty-socialist counterparts."
Are you sure? Then why does, by and large, far more federal tax money come FROM blue states and go INTO red states? It seems like red states aren't squeamish about spending other people's money. They just don't like to pay for what they spend.
"But despite the "we don't think hunters should be penalized" rhetoric, much of the left that's "in control" (as you put it) of their agenda in that area would see even hunting weapons confiscated."
That's just so disjointed from the reality I know that, well, I don't know what to say. I work in the Democratic party. Most people in the party think that restriction style gun control is a long dead issue, a painful waste of time. The only laws I've seen Dems support have no effect at all on hunting or hunting weapons or even home protection weapons (i.e. barring guns from public schools, trying to rduce unliscenced bulk gun sales, etc.) that are so disant from the scare rhetoric of the NRA that's hard to imagine. Most of the Dems I've worked for have even supported laws protecting the right to hunt and fish on federal land and conserving land specifically for the purpose.
So... threatening us with pain, suffering, death, and eternal damnation is called "respecting our free will"? And failing to create us so that we freely _choose_ to be good is supposedly because that would violate our free will?
Tell us more of your crazy backwardspeak, Bizarro!
You've kind of missed the boat there: it's specifically functional capacity and prior expectation that matter, not present activity. When a doctor temporarily stops a heart for an operation, the person is effectively dead... but not yet brain dead, because they still retain an existing functional capacity, at least for a little while. They also have, like all people, a prior expectation that people will not terminate them when they aren't consciously active. They need to be revived. Killing them when they aren't active is clearly wrong for the above reasons alone.
You just can't compare this to an embryo which has no present functional capacity and has never had any expectations. Embryos are human recipe instructions and a small part of the raw materials. But there is not yet any completed mental functionality, nor has there ever been.
"Another problem with your logic is that humans do not become intelligent enough to deserve rights until well after birth, unless you put the bar so low as many animals have rights. So now, you either are stuck with arresting people for manslaughter when they run over a cat and putting Fido on trial for killing a rabbit, or permitting infanticide."
So now your standard for morality is: "whatever is most convienient!" rather than confronting the implications of reality? Babies really do have the mental capacity of, to pick a somewhat near comparison of apes. And that does imply that either we're giving too much respect to one being, or too little to another. So? Maybe we are.
It wasn't too long ago that people made scoffing statements like you just did about the absurdity of applying principles of equal rights and winding up having to consider the lives of people of other races.
"Then it's widely accepted that stupid (unintelligent) humans are not "persons"."
No, it isn't.
And regardless of what anyone thinks, believing that a clump of cells with no nevous system to speak of is something deserving of legal protection, or calling the destruction of it "murder" has just plain missed the whole point of morality.
"Natural Selection is a purely filtering mechanism. It removes variety. It eliminates organisms which are not a successful fit to a particular environment. It explains why elephants do not live in the sea and whales do not live in the jungle. It has no additive power whatsoever."
Of course it does. If I have a random sequence of letters like sxrlayshydohite, I have something with low information. Taking away particular letters in a non-random way, however, gets me the word slashdot: a sequence with high information content.
So, sorry, but increasing variation plus selection can add information: and in fact this is such a trivial conclusion that no information theorist would even shrug in surprise at hearing it. There's no way around this. Variation constantly diversifies species in regards of their traits. Selection imprints information about the environment onto DNA by non-randomly culling out some directions and not others. It's a ratchet process.
"How specific do you want to get? I am defining information as a sequence of bits (quadranary digits, actually). Do you have a different definition?"
If all you are defining it is as raw bits, then how can you deny that information is constantly being added to the gene? That isn't itself information in any interesting sense, but in terms of just bits, regardless of what they say, this is happening constantly by mutation and higher level recombinations. I thought we were talking about information in terms of meaning: in which case that variation isn't really defined until selection shows which bits mean what in regards to the survival of an individual in a particular place. If I dribble out sand into a pile, you are going to get something random. But if I selectively cull out some areas and not others in a way consistent with some pressure or pattern, we are going to get information.
"You may think its difficult, or that context and happenstance has something to do with it."
It isn't me: information theorists agree that defining what constitutes the information in biology is complicated and prone to inconsistency: no one definition seems to capture what we want, unlike with strict binary codes and the like. But hey: you're the self-appointed expert. Prove them all wrong. Publish your definition and see what sort of response you get.
"To me, bits are bits. A sequence of bits which contains specific serialized information of molecules whose three-dimensional structures interact in ways to produces layers upon layers upon layers of highly ordered behavior: this I call highly complex information."
But now you aren't talking about information defined as bits anymore. You can't switch definitions mid-stream. And I just explained how a chaotic process given a selection pressure can lead to more order. Though I have no doubt that you'll just ignore me again...
"According to the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, entropy never decreases."
Ah, so we can rule out most chemical reactions and phase changes as impossible then? The TOTAL amount of entropy in a closed system never decreases. That doesn't mean, however, that your refrigerator is a miracle.
"I'll say it one more time: chemistry is all about energy state; the information in DNA has nothing to do with energy state."
That's because information is contextual. It only means anything because it relates in some way to its environment. Natural selection is how that information is imprinted onto the steadily changing genetic code.
Look: you must at the very least first concede that natural selection can at least act to preserve information. As mutation randomly alters genes, it sometimes breaks functions in ways that lead to functional failures that then cannot persist to produce offspring. So natural selection maintains particular functions.
However, anything a mutation can undo, it can also do. If an environment starts favoring bigger capacity lungs, and a mutation slightly bigger lungs thus persists better than all others, including the basal type, then we have a change alleles in the gene pool to reflect this. The gene pool now contains the information about lung size, adapting to it thanks to the impact of the environment's pressures on the success of various traits.
"Biological life is not a car. Biological life makes sense within the chemical context of our universe." I was speaking about the universe, and that it makes more sense to believe the universe had a creator than to believe 'poof' it just came into being. It seems like a more reasonable explanation than 'it just exploded, we don't know why.'"
But, "it just exploded, we don't know why" is the honest truth. We don't know why. And it doesn't seem that adding "God did it" really tells us much else.
"I've always been very good at math, I wouldn't miscalculate that badly."
You don't honestly expect me to believe that you sat down and calculated the PETWHAC for each of these events, do you? Yet this is the sort of thing you'd need to know about and figure out to have any good grasp on just how unlikely any particular event really was.
"Certainly some of the things that have happened to me are unlikely enough that they'll never happen to me again. So why did they happen at a critical junction in my life, causing me to say "I get the point God, I'll go down that path, instead of the one I'm on?." Just a few days earlier or a few days later and it wouldn't have had the same effect."
How would you know? How do you know you wouldn't have latched on to some other event as an important message regardless of what happened?
"In some cases had the timing been just a couple hours or even 10 minutes off, it would have been too late. Life would be drastically different for me without those so called 'coincidences'. Actually, truth be told, it would be drastically worse."
How would you know? What happened is what happened. People seeking signs will find them somehow, just as any hand dealt in poker is remarkably improbable, but A hand must be dealt.
"If there is no God, trusting him has sure had a strong positive impact in my life, not bad for a figment of my imagination. In the face of everything that's happened to me, the arguments people like you put forward seem awfully weak."
Ok, but I'm not trying to convince you out of your belief. If you find those things shape a meaningful core of belief for you, that's great. But if you want to offer them as evidence for other people to consider, then I'm afraid the standards of evidence become a lot more critical.
"How _hedonism_ a good motivation to believe anything? If there exists a God who would destroy or damn or let be destroyed a person because they didn't play some elaborate head game or try to force their beliefs one way or another because someone threatened them, then I'm not sure I'd care for such a tyrant anyway. Any human being that acted like that and demanded it of other people would rightly be condemned as a bigot." I don't claim to understand or to know on what grounds God may or may not grant eternal life. But let's look at it this way. If you're a father you'll understand better, but imagine your son died to save a person. This person spends his whole life, despite the selfless actions of your son, disrespecting and ignoring both yourself and your son. Now this person gets kicked out of his house, and comes knocking on your door wanting to stay with you. What would you say? I'd say go to hell. We may well be individuals who screwed up badly in heaven, and God certainly has no obligation to let any of us back into his house. How he would make that decision we don't know, we have only the Bible to go on, which is clearly written by mortals, and so is pretty badly flawed."
All of this is certainly an interesting story, but I can't see how it has much relevance to the situation people find themselves in. First of all, the "son dying for" doesn't even make any sense: how are people supposed to take an alleged sacrifice that may or may not have happened at some distant point in history that makes no sense and was immediately undone anyway as a good reason for anything? It's so far far outside the experience of any normal course of life that it's hardly fair for God to expect anyone to be able
"Trying again, my point is that Evolution is a theory, it is not necessarily true, and like many theories, I think even it's strongest supporters would be surprised if it exactly described how it really is. Again I'm not saying it isn't true either."
Again: "theory" is not a measure of truth. That's confusing the everyday usage of the word with the technical usage in science. It is as empirically certain as anything can be. Which is always subject to contradiction by further evidence. But you need to supply that evidence in order to critique it. In any case, it doesn't make much sense to single out evolution for special treatment in science or evidence. It's as certain and as proven as anything can be. That's just as good as it gets.
"On A side note, it's a lot easier to believe miracles that happen to you. I've lost count of the number of large and small things that happen in my life that just plain old defy the odds and seeming randomness of the universe. I could go into detail, but without having walked in my shoes you'll just discount it all anyway."
If I could discount it, then chances are they didn't really defy the odds all that much. Human beings are demonstrably terrible at calculating the odds or finding meanings in coincidences. But all of this is irrelevant. You believe in God, that's great, it's just all beside the point. Science is of a limited scope precisely because it seeks to describe our common external reality, not our subjective feelings.
"'Poof' is about the best science can ever offer us, but the notion that someone brought the universe into being make more sense."
This is getting into philosophy, not science, but I'd have to say that no, it doesn't. It certainly appeals to the very human need to find a psyche behind every event, but in terms of explanation "God did it" explains nothing, and worse, now brings in a whole nother entity that demands even MORE explanation.
"It's not logical to look at a car and think 'poof, it just happened' so why is it logical to look at the universe and say 'poof it just happened' when it is clearly more fantastic than a humble car. It's not testable, but it's a lot easier to believe."
Biological life is not a car. Biological life makes sense within the chemical context of our universe.
"Likewise it's equally arrogant to close your mind 100% to God and say he doesn't exist."
I'm not particularly closeminded about it: I'm an agnostic non-believer. There are many emotional reasons one might want to believe that there is a benevolent God and an afterlife. There are also many reasons why I wish I could believe I was a world famous rock star. But my desires aren't guides to truth. Evidence is necessary.
"ray to God, and humbly explain that you are open to the possibility that he is real. And pray that if he is, that he show himself to you (don't tie his hands by telling him how), and then, still keeping your rational self aside, try and have a little faith, that if he is real he will answer your prayer. And then see what happens. Just try this experiment every night for a week, or a few months even."
I already know what will happen (I used to be a believer). If you make yourself believe that something is true, then surprise surprise, you will be more likely to believe it. Belief is an acquired mental habit, like most thoughts. If you imagine that someone is real and talk to them in your mind, it will help you antropomorphize things. You may well even come up with the other side of the conversation in your head. Unfortunately, subjective execises like this demonstrate little more than that the mind is mallable to practice.
"You owe it to yourself, because if you are wrong about God, you're only gambling on your eternal life."
How _hedonism_ a good motivation to believe anything? If there exists a God who would destroy or damn or let be destroyed a person because they didn't play some elaborate head game or try to force their beliefs one way or another because
A person is told that they are mistaken. They actually take the time to look up the evidence to check. They realize that they are mistaken. They admit it and actually thank the person who pointed it out for informing them.
That's exactly why I love science and the influence it has on the way people think and conduct arguments. Can you even imagine more honest and honorable behavior than the above in a discussion?
"But if I'm not mistaken, these timelines were created with carbon dating, which has been shown to yield inaccurate results. "
Well, you are mistaken, sorry. Carbon dating is only used for very recent events. For longer term events there are much more robust methods that actually include their own means of self-checking their results: read up on isochron analysis.
Carbon dating can indeed have some pitfalls. But scientists know how to correct for them, and by and large, we can make the results more and more accurate. There are any number of ways to check the dates to make sure they are plausible and in line with all other evidence.
At the very least, you have to admit that Christianity basically hijacked Judiasm and totally altered the reading of its religious tradition: even to reordering the chronological order of key Scriptures and making up insane stories about Jesus riding on TWO donkeys to fit what they thought was a prophecy but was, in actuality, their own poor translation of a text that didn't even refer to Jesus.
We can get fossil evidence of soft tissue and even some evidence of tissue types as well. While we can't get DNA from fossil evidence, we can do any number of comparative genetic studies on modern life that allow us to track back timing and piece together insights on the "original text." Unexpectedly clever solutions to seemingly impossible questions are something you can never quite rule out.:)
When creationism lost its bid to get taught in the Supreme Court, the major proponents looked at the decision and started thinking about how they could get around it.
ID then suddenly appeared: many of the exact same people were supporting it, but they had carefully crafted their language so as to leave out explicitly religious claims and most testible claims altogether. Unfortunately, they totally sucked at this ruse. First of all, the changeover was often so blatant that a creationist text like Pandas and People was re-issued with "God" replaced by "Intelligent Designer": the goofy creationist anti-evolution arguments were largely left intact, exactly the same as before. It was often so pathetic as to involve them having to change the names of their organizations to hide their purpose.
Then there's the famous wedge document of the DI, which basically says that this whole movement aims to find a way to get "religious" science into schools and try and make mainsteam scientists look like bullies.
Then there's the fact that major ID figures say one thing to a public or secular audience, and another to religious audiences who they are often trying to troll money out of. Suddenly, ID becomes about Christian renewal, or finding the Logos of God in nature, etc. etc. And these guys have admitted that the ID for life on earth can't be anything other than something supernatural.
"Intelligent Design rests on the hypothesis that design artifacts can be scientifically identified as such and differentiated from artifacts that are the result of random natural processes. Maybe this hypothesis is true, maybe it is false. But it has nothing to do with creationism."
Here is where you really go off the trolley tracks. First of all, scientists were already doing this without the help of people like Dembski. Second of all, the reason they CAN do it is because there is a context to do it in. We know what the designers we are looking for were like: what tools they used, what was characteristic of their processes, etc. The ID movement, however, proposes to basically destroy any and all context: it's all design! If that's so, then there's nothing to compare anything to. Worse, since the designer is so vague, there's nothing characteristic to look for. The whole thing is just one begged question about whether or not natural processes can produce complexity. That's NOT how normal "design detection" works. That's how a tricksy philosophical game tries to get the supernatural admitted into science.
THAT is why most people think the modern ID movement is just creationism in sheeps clothing. At the Dover trial, the judge noted that no one could even define what ID was: most of the school board members seemed to think it was something that basically amounted to creationism. Most politicians pushing ID, in fact, are not only formerly open creationists, but they don't even get that ID means you are supposed to be coy about it.
That's not to say that there aren't philosophical arguments about intelligent design to be made that are distinct from creationism. It's just that the modern ID movement is simply not composed of those arguments alone. It's a PR movement.
"Let's be truthful here. Evolution is a theory, not a fact."
Lets be honest here: anyone who says things like this hasn't taken the time to figure out the most basic ways in which scientists use words like "theory" and "fact." Theories are not contrasted with facts in science. Theories explain facts using other facts. The best measure of a theory is whether it is consistent with all currently available evidence in every way we can think to test it. Because evolution currently passes these tests, it is accepted as good science.
"Clearly species not only adapt but it follows logically that such adaptations over time can lead to new species. What is a species anyway but a arbitrary classification by us?"
Indeed: this is an important insight. The concept of species is a sloppy term used for our convienience. The reality of nature is much more complicated, blurred, and inconsistent with simple categories.
"This does not mean that it is logical for a soup of non-living organic molecules to become a human with trillions of cells, each cell a complex organism functioning together, each doing it's part in the whole."
You're conflating 4 billion years of contingency down into a single sentence. Of course that is going to sound bizarre: no more bizarre than trying to sum up human history in a few words. For the "soup" part of it we are no longer discussing evolution, but rather chemistry.
"I'm not saying it's impossible, but by no means is it the only possible explanation, and you deceive yourself if you think otherwise."
If you have an alternative, then please present it. But in order for it to be scientific, it needs to be both testible AND fit all the facts. I've never heard of an alternative that does both.
"And even if that's the way it happened, I would like to point out that this universe had a beginning some 13 billion years ago, where an enormous explosion of energy far in excess of all the mass of all the matter in the universe multiplied by the speed of light squared brought everything we know into being."
Actually, the energy cannot be in excess of the mass and energy currently in the universe. When we calculate the total energy of the universe, in fact, it works out to about... zero.
"This is not a cyclical event, because it has both a beginning, and if the universe keeps expanding (as science tells us it seems to be) it will have a cold, dark end. I think that the idea that God provided that initial matter and that initial energy along with the very fundamental 'code' of this universe itself (which we as scientists are only reverse-engineering) is far more plausible than your theory that it "just happened"."
Your explanation of God is neither testible, nor does it explain anything more than it "just happened" (poof! is not an explanation of anything). So science is indifferent to it. That's not the same thing as saying it's wrong. It's just that it's not particularly interesting because its among the nearly infinate number of untestable propositions.
"So before you make a fool out of yourself by mocking what you do not understand, and get carried away in your own importance and puff up with pride, just remember we're just mammals on one tiny little dust ball in a galaxy of hundreds of billions of stars, amongst hundreds of billions of galaxies each with hundreds of billions of stars. Don't EVER think that you are even close to understanding it all!"
Who is more humble: the person who examines evidence and tries to best work out the way things work from this evidence through long hard study and makes provisional statements that are always subject to the evidence, and always presented in great detail so that anyone may examine the logic and argument themselves so as to challenge it if they have a better idea?
Or the person who declares they have magic superknowledge of the very core and purpose of all reality, subject to no ones criticisms or checking?
"One day, hopefully not too soon, you'll find this
The answer to this can be found in a history book about the development of the scientific method and the liberal enlightenment.
"Evolution is just a theory."
If you read that history book, you'd know that there is no such thing in science as "just a theory." But then, you've probably been told that a million times, and refuse to understand it.
"It has never been proven, evolutionary scientists have been trying for over 100 years. They have yet to proven that it has happened. There are no hard facts!'
Anyone could make the same false claim about anything. There are countless hard facts. It's only BECAUSE of the extremely robust evidence that scientists take evolution seriously.
"Where is the missing link?"
That term is outdated. No one is looking for "the" missing link to anything.
"There are no tranistional life forms to be found living or fossilized on the planet."
There are countless transitional forms, by which we mean creatures that have blends of traits previously unique to different classes of modern life. We have fossils with both land mammal and whale traits. Fossils with dinosaur and bird traits. And so on. And we even have atavisms: snakes born with legs, dolphins born with legs, humans born with tails, etc.
"Until it is, proven it's every Evolutionists "belief" that it has occurred and is occurring today, by faith. Just as I cannot see with my eyes, the very being of God, it is my belief that He exists, I believe by faith."
Science doesn't work like that. It uses evidence and inference: chains of reasoning. If the reasoning isn't sound, then it gets tossed. If the evidence doesn't support a theory, then the theory gets tossed. That's how it works.
Actually, this is no longer the prevailing idea. It seems that close to the origin of life, it's likely that genetic material and all sorts of structures were traded around quite freely. It's quite possible that life arose separately in terms of protein structures several times, and the life we see today is a blend of these sorts of previously limited complexes. DNA may well be a much later development once this morass of melding calmed down.
"As always the devil is in the detail. To get from one species to another (as currently determined by a pair of genetic pools) requires a viable path. Not just stepping stones but a real, viable path. For every protein, every gene, every process that is needed to support life."
Indeed. And molecular biologists have spent plenty of time working out exactly what those paths, both in specific and in general, are. Interestingly enough, living systems are a lot more plastic than most people give them credit for. Heck, there are 6 major types of human aorta morphology, all of which work about as well as the others. And the way this stuff grows is fasincatingly NOT like a strict blueprint, but rather like a recipe in which different ingredients can affect the outcome but don't necessarily turn the whole thing to mush right away.
"The conventional dogma is that this occurs through a multiplicity of small changes (we have observed such small changes in real experiments - I have seen such data from my own lab), each of which gradually moves the population (genetic drift). The problem is that whilst this is a cosy theory, there is little remenant of this."
I'm not sure what you mean by this. There is plenty of remnant of this. Not only do we have the rare examples of diatoms and snail shells showing that these changes, while they may not move at a steady pace, do generally happen gradually, but we have plenty of molecular evidence that the divergences we see happened because of natural selection and lots of mutation, both of which are characteristic processes that leave very specific marks where they've done their work.
"We should now have more species than at any time ever,"
Er, ??? Why? Are you doubting that countless species go extinct, sometimes in massive numbers? Although, it must be said: it seems like we do have one of the most diverse set of species in the history of the earth around today. We're currently in the process of killing off a good portion of it, but the globe is crawling with life in every corner, and again: species are more morphologicaly diverse than almost ever before that I can think of.
"and species should not be distinct but a continuum (if we take the slow steady mountain climb approach advocated by the likes of Dawkins)."
Not if some die out, which they very often do. But as a matter of fact we do have many continuums as well: ring species, the way hybridization has all sorts of varying levels instead of a bright line, etc.
"This is not something that makes sense but is very nice for putting very long timescales on things. Burst evolution, where dramatic environmental changes radically alter the genetic pressure on organisms whilst providing the circumstances to allow genetic change can be observed experimentally but, being unpredictable, throws all the happy 'slow steady climb' molecular clocks out of the window."
You don't know much about how molecular clocks work if you think that they don't have ways to compensate for differences in evolutionary change. Of course, you probably _definately_ don't understand how they work if you think they primarily measure rates of evolutionary change, when in fact they measure the fairly constant rates of mutation in particular sorts of non-coding sections of genetic material, controlled to detect error and changes via statistical methods.
"There are also distinct problems with establishing mechanisms for major events - evolution of sex, evolution of DNA duplication, evolution of completely novel genes etc."
The evolution of novel genes is so well documented that it's absurd to include on this list. The other two are indeed very hot questions in biology, but the problems are largely that we don't have enough evidence to determine which of many many different possibilities were the one actual mechanism. That's not at all the same thing as having a problem seeing how they could have happened at ALL. An inability to know where certain comets were in the distant past does not const
Slashdot Mirror
"We've know for decades that simple mutation-and-selection doesn't drive change anywhere near fast enough to account for history. The current theory as I know it as a layman is that occasional periods of rapid change are needed, and no biologist has believed in "Darwinian" evolution for generations."
You've pretty much got most of that wrong. First of all, observed rates of morphological change are many times FASTER than even the fastest transition in the fossil record. The problem isn't that changes happen too fast, it's that there is too much statis. The debate over phyletic gradualism vs. more "jumpy" evolution was indeed resolved a long time ago, but it's hard to find a reason to say that either are especially "Darwinian."
Darwin didn't really have much to say in the debate over phyletic gradualism and punk eek. Darwin never looked at the pace or history of evolution all that much, since he didn't have the detail or sort of information later zoologists had. He spoke about gradualism in terms of the way it was used in geology: small changes accumulating. Thats a description of microevolutionary change. Phyletic gradualism was a macroevolutionary theory about the PACE of change: that it was steady and stable. THAT is what got tossed out.
Gould did not challenge gradualism. He challenged phyletic gradualism. And actually he wasn't really even the big force that made that view obsolete. It was genetics, which discovered that the vast majority of DNA is non-coding, and so actual changes to the coding portions would come in fits and starts rather than at a consistent steady pace.
But of course, creationists and ID theorists never tell you THAT part of the story. Just that Gould supposedly called into question all of evolution and showed that natural selection couldn't be responsible. Which is nonsense.
"I do not like or want subsidies"
You sure spend a lot of time defending them!
"To the extent that subsidies impact food prices though, they lower the price to consumers"
Nonsense. You dump money into an industry and you overvalue it. Most of the subsidies don't even lower the cost of production: they are paid to _prevent_ production! They also prevent much cheaper foriegn crops from finding any foothold.
"is that we (as a country) want to be absolutely sure that we have the farmer in place and functioning and able to respond to shifting food production requirements."
So... the market somehow is incapable of reflecting this need on its own? Why shouldn't we want to make absolutely sure we have steel plants in case we need to produce vast fleets of airships to fight aliens or the Chinese? Given that the vast majority of subsidies go to huge corporate farms, and not poor little patriotic farmers growing some sort of imaginary strategic reserve of rice, I remain totally unconvinced.
But as I said, everyone has just as compelling a rationale for their important pork.
"From a local political demographics point of view, you should note that the "red" counties in rural MD are the ones subsidizing the "blue" urban areas (in terms of simple cash flow, a la your red/blue state comment)."
Exurbs of the city don't really count, since they are so city-focused.
"The notion that all rural residents are just a bunch of soft-brained, toothless, Republican-voting, unemployed Appalachian coal miner's daughters on the dole from wise, hard working city dwellers is one of those cultural myth/images that seems to get a surprising amount of traction."
You seem to be the one filled with all these hateful descriptions. I wonder why that is?
"Most dense coastal "blue state" urban populations wouldn't put up with having the huge military facilities that you see across the midwest - but that's many billions of dollars that get "spent" in those areas."
If you put quotes around something, is it then magically no longer locally profitable?
"Probably most due to the overwhelmingly out of balance populations in the two."
Sorry, what? Yes, there are _less_ people in most red states, and they still get more total federal spending (probably in part because Senators are the ultimate porkmasters, and every state gets two of em, regardless of population).
"That, and the fact that because of entanglements with overseas transactions, a lot of subsidies get aimed at farming - which, of all the pork I hate, is the least porky. Our food supply, and the stability of that piece of the economy in our day-to-day lives and subsistence, is strategically vital."
Everyone has an excuse for their brand of pork. Most economists will tell you that this argument is a load of hooey. Keeping the price of food artificially high with government money is not exactly a winner from someone that claims that the government is too big and spends too much.
"And, when I say "red-staters," I'm talking about the person politics of the people I know living in those states. Most of them are the most self-sufficient, accountable, and tax/spending adverse people I know."
So, what, that's 100 people? 200? So that has any relevance to... what now?
Strictly speaking, we have no data at all on the second statement. While we can sort of say that the current "local" universe sprang into being, no one actually knows how or even if the underlying BB event involves a "beginning" of the _universe_ writ large (as in: all that exists). Sloppy terminology confuses laypeople, but past a certain point we just have no idea. String theory actually suggests that there is a minimum size on the universe: that at a certain subatomic level, shrinking smaller is actually the same thing as exapnding larger, preventing anything from getting to a true singularity.
Put shortly, there is no way to separate "begins to exist" from "exist" when it comes to the universe, since the universe includes time. This puts us back in the same trap that the kalaam fudge was supposed to avoid: either all things must have a cause, or some things don't have to, and the universe could be one of those things. Carving a special exception for God to avoid contradicting the very premise that you were trying to use to prove God doesn't fly, since we know as little about the ultimate origins of the universe as we do about any hypothetical God.
I know seriously! This kid apparently missed the memo where creationists decided that instead of calling the BB a heresy, they should now all turn around and declare it solid proof of a Creator. I mean in the current ID movement, the BB is presented as a discovery FOR God (atheists you see, all hoped for a steady state universe), not against.
I think you missed the part of the story where the guy insisting on this uses the word "theory" as if it were a synonym for "opinion" or "groundsless speculation." THAT is what people are objecting to. If someone was just insisting that scientists use the word theory, there would be no story. No one would care.
"Put it up empirically against any other belief system, and you'll conclude, scientifically, that it's better to listen to a bible thumping Christian's take on morality, than an athiest's."
What do you mean put it up "empirically." There's no scientific way to judge moral systems: you still have to make a moral judgement. Personally, I'll take the average atheists' morality off the street over anyone who thinks the Bible is a great guide to morality. At least with the atheist, it's pretty likely that they've actually given the subject a great deal of thought.
"Then go back and look at JFK's platform and campaign promises. They're mostly more "right" than Bush's actions. Lower taxes, smaller budget, etc..."
Back then "lower taxes" meant the pretty reasonable lowering of taxes from an insane 70% marginal rate. The higher taxes that Dems have suggested are far lower than any proposed by Kennedy.
"Yes, both parties love spending tax dollars... but at least the red-staters are at least a little more squeamish about it than their more lefty-socialist counterparts."
Are you sure? Then why does, by and large, far more federal tax money come FROM blue states and go INTO red states? It seems like red states aren't squeamish about spending other people's money. They just don't like to pay for what they spend.
"But despite the "we don't think hunters should be penalized" rhetoric, much of the left that's "in control" (as you put it) of their agenda in that area would see even hunting weapons confiscated."
That's just so disjointed from the reality I know that, well, I don't know what to say. I work in the Democratic party. Most people in the party think that restriction style gun control is a long dead issue, a painful waste of time. The only laws I've seen Dems support have no effect at all on hunting or hunting weapons or even home protection weapons (i.e. barring guns from public schools, trying to rduce unliscenced bulk gun sales, etc.) that are so disant from the scare rhetoric of the NRA that's hard to imagine. Most of the Dems I've worked for have even supported laws protecting the right to hunt and fish on federal land and conserving land specifically for the purpose.
So... threatening us with pain, suffering, death, and eternal damnation is called "respecting our free will"? And failing to create us so that we freely _choose_ to be good is supposedly because that would violate our free will?
Tell us more of your crazy backwardspeak, Bizarro!
You've kind of missed the boat there: it's specifically functional capacity and prior expectation that matter, not present activity. When a doctor temporarily stops a heart for an operation, the person is effectively dead... but not yet brain dead, because they still retain an existing functional capacity, at least for a little while. They also have, like all people, a prior expectation that people will not terminate them when they aren't consciously active. They need to be revived. Killing them when they aren't active is clearly wrong for the above reasons alone.
You just can't compare this to an embryo which has no present functional capacity and has never had any expectations. Embryos are human recipe instructions and a small part of the raw materials. But there is not yet any completed mental functionality, nor has there ever been.
"Another problem with your logic is that humans do not become intelligent enough to deserve rights until well after birth, unless you put the bar so low as many animals have rights. So now, you either are stuck with arresting people for manslaughter when they run over a cat and putting Fido on trial for killing a rabbit, or permitting infanticide."
So now your standard for morality is: "whatever is most convienient!" rather than confronting the implications of reality? Babies really do have the mental capacity of, to pick a somewhat near comparison of apes. And that does imply that either we're giving too much respect to one being, or too little to another. So? Maybe we are.
It wasn't too long ago that people made scoffing statements like you just did about the absurdity of applying principles of equal rights and winding up having to consider the lives of people of other races.
"Then it's widely accepted that stupid (unintelligent) humans are not "persons"."
No, it isn't.
And regardless of what anyone thinks, believing that a clump of cells with no nevous system to speak of is something deserving of legal protection, or calling the destruction of it "murder" has just plain missed the whole point of morality.
"Natural Selection is a purely filtering mechanism. It removes variety. It eliminates organisms which are not a successful fit to a particular environment. It explains why elephants do not live in the sea and whales do not live in the jungle. It has no additive power whatsoever."
Of course it does. If I have a random sequence of letters like sxrlayshydohite, I have something with low information. Taking away particular letters in a non-random way, however, gets me the word slashdot: a sequence with high information content.
So, sorry, but increasing variation plus selection can add information: and in fact this is such a trivial conclusion that no information theorist would even shrug in surprise at hearing it. There's no way around this. Variation constantly diversifies species in regards of their traits. Selection imprints information about the environment onto DNA by non-randomly culling out some directions and not others. It's a ratchet process.
"How specific do you want to get? I am defining information as a sequence of bits (quadranary digits, actually). Do you have a different definition?"
If all you are defining it is as raw bits, then how can you deny that information is constantly being added to the gene? That isn't itself information in any interesting sense, but in terms of just bits, regardless of what they say, this is happening constantly by mutation and higher level recombinations. I thought we were talking about information in terms of meaning: in which case that variation isn't really defined until selection shows which bits mean what in regards to the survival of an individual in a particular place. If I dribble out sand into a pile, you are going to get something random. But if I selectively cull out some areas and not others in a way consistent with some pressure or pattern, we are going to get information.
"You may think its difficult, or that context and happenstance has something to do with it."
It isn't me: information theorists agree that defining what constitutes the information in biology is complicated and prone to inconsistency: no one definition seems to capture what we want, unlike with strict binary codes and the like. But hey: you're the self-appointed expert. Prove them all wrong. Publish your definition and see what sort of response you get.
"To me, bits are bits. A sequence of bits which contains specific serialized information of molecules whose three-dimensional structures interact in ways to produces layers upon layers upon layers of highly ordered behavior: this I call highly complex information."
But now you aren't talking about information defined as bits anymore. You can't switch definitions mid-stream. And I just explained how a chaotic process given a selection pressure can lead to more order. Though I have no doubt that you'll just ignore me again...
"According to the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, entropy never decreases."
Ah, so we can rule out most chemical reactions and phase changes as impossible then? The TOTAL amount of entropy in a closed system never decreases. That doesn't mean, however, that your refrigerator is a miracle.
"I'll say it one more time: chemistry is all about energy state; the information in DNA has nothing to do with energy state."
That's because information is contextual. It only means anything because it relates in some way to its environment. Natural selection is how that information is imprinted onto the steadily changing genetic code.
Look: you must at the very least first concede that natural selection can at least act to preserve information. As mutation randomly alters genes, it sometimes breaks functions in ways that lead to functional failures that then cannot persist to produce offspring. So natural selection maintains particular functions.
However, anything a mutation can undo, it can also do. If an environment starts favoring bigger capacity lungs, and a mutation slightly bigger lungs thus persists better than all others, including the basal type, then we have a change alleles in the gene pool to reflect this. The gene pool now contains the information about lung size, adapting to it thanks to the impact of the environment's pressures on the success of various traits.
"Biological life is not a car. Biological life makes sense within the chemical context of our universe." I was speaking about the universe, and that it makes more sense to believe the universe had a creator than to believe 'poof' it just came into being. It seems like a more reasonable explanation than 'it just exploded, we don't know why.'"
But, "it just exploded, we don't know why" is the honest truth. We don't know why. And it doesn't seem that adding "God did it" really tells us much else.
"I've always been very good at math, I wouldn't miscalculate that badly."
You don't honestly expect me to believe that you sat down and calculated the PETWHAC for each of these events, do you? Yet this is the sort of thing you'd need to know about and figure out to have any good grasp on just how unlikely any particular event really was.
"Certainly some of the things that have happened to me are unlikely enough that they'll never happen to me again. So why did they happen at a critical junction in my life, causing me to say "I get the point God, I'll go down that path, instead of the one I'm on?." Just a few days earlier or a few days later and it wouldn't have had the same effect."
How would you know? How do you know you wouldn't have latched on to some other event as an important message regardless of what happened?
"In some cases had the timing been just a couple hours or even 10 minutes off, it would have been too late. Life would be drastically different for me without those so called 'coincidences'. Actually, truth be told, it would be drastically worse."
How would you know? What happened is what happened. People seeking signs will find them somehow, just as any hand dealt in poker is remarkably improbable, but A hand must be dealt.
"If there is no God, trusting him has sure had a strong positive impact in my life, not bad for a figment of my imagination. In the face of everything that's happened to me, the arguments people like you put forward seem awfully weak."
Ok, but I'm not trying to convince you out of your belief. If you find those things shape a meaningful core of belief for you, that's great. But if you want to offer them as evidence for other people to consider, then I'm afraid the standards of evidence become a lot more critical.
"How _hedonism_ a good motivation to believe anything? If there exists a God who would destroy or damn or let be destroyed a person because they didn't play some elaborate head game or try to force their beliefs one way or another because someone threatened them, then I'm not sure I'd care for such a tyrant anyway. Any human being that acted like that and demanded it of other people would rightly be condemned as a bigot." I don't claim to understand or to know on what grounds God may or may not grant eternal life. But let's look at it this way. If you're a father you'll understand better, but imagine your son died to save a person. This person spends his whole life, despite the selfless actions of your son, disrespecting and ignoring both yourself and your son. Now this person gets kicked out of his house, and comes knocking on your door wanting to stay with you. What would you say? I'd say go to hell. We may well be individuals who screwed up badly in heaven, and God certainly has no obligation to let any of us back into his house. How he would make that decision we don't know, we have only the Bible to go on, which is clearly written by mortals, and so is pretty badly flawed."
All of this is certainly an interesting story, but I can't see how it has much relevance to the situation people find themselves in. First of all, the "son dying for" doesn't even make any sense: how are people supposed to take an alleged sacrifice that may or may not have happened at some distant point in history that makes no sense and was immediately undone anyway as a good reason for anything? It's so far far outside the experience of any normal course of life that it's hardly fair for God to expect anyone to be able
"Trying again, my point is that Evolution is a theory, it is not necessarily true, and like many theories, I think even it's strongest supporters would be surprised if it exactly described how it really is. Again I'm not saying it isn't true either."
Again: "theory" is not a measure of truth. That's confusing the everyday usage of the word with the technical usage in science. It is as empirically certain as anything can be. Which is always subject to contradiction by further evidence. But you need to supply that evidence in order to critique it. In any case, it doesn't make much sense to single out evolution for special treatment in science or evidence. It's as certain and as proven as anything can be. That's just as good as it gets.
"On A side note, it's a lot easier to believe miracles that happen to you. I've lost count of the number of large and small things that happen in my life that just plain old defy the odds and seeming randomness of the universe. I could go into detail, but without having walked in my shoes you'll just discount it all anyway."
If I could discount it, then chances are they didn't really defy the odds all that much. Human beings are demonstrably terrible at calculating the odds or finding meanings in coincidences. But all of this is irrelevant. You believe in God, that's great, it's just all beside the point. Science is of a limited scope precisely because it seeks to describe our common external reality, not our subjective feelings.
"'Poof' is about the best science can ever offer us, but the notion that someone brought the universe into being make more sense."
This is getting into philosophy, not science, but I'd have to say that no, it doesn't. It certainly appeals to the very human need to find a psyche behind every event, but in terms of explanation "God did it" explains nothing, and worse, now brings in a whole nother entity that demands even MORE explanation.
"It's not logical to look at a car and think 'poof, it just happened' so why is it logical to look at the universe and say 'poof it just happened' when it is clearly more fantastic than a humble car. It's not testable, but it's a lot easier to believe."
Biological life is not a car. Biological life makes sense within the chemical context of our universe.
"Likewise it's equally arrogant to close your mind 100% to God and say he doesn't exist."
I'm not particularly closeminded about it: I'm an agnostic non-believer. There are many emotional reasons one might want to believe that there is a benevolent God and an afterlife. There are also many reasons why I wish I could believe I was a world famous rock star. But my desires aren't guides to truth. Evidence is necessary.
"ray to God, and humbly explain that you are open to the possibility that he is real. And pray that if he is, that he show himself to you (don't tie his hands by telling him how), and then, still keeping your rational self aside, try and have a little faith, that if he is real he will answer your prayer. And then see what happens. Just try this experiment every night for a week, or a few months even."
I already know what will happen (I used to be a believer). If you make yourself believe that something is true, then surprise surprise, you will be more likely to believe it. Belief is an acquired mental habit, like most thoughts. If you imagine that someone is real and talk to them in your mind, it will help you antropomorphize things. You may well even come up with the other side of the conversation in your head. Unfortunately, subjective execises like this demonstrate little more than that the mind is mallable to practice.
"You owe it to yourself, because if you are wrong about God, you're only gambling on your eternal life."
How _hedonism_ a good motivation to believe anything? If there exists a God who would destroy or damn or let be destroyed a person because they didn't play some elaborate head game or try to force their beliefs one way or another because
A person is told that they are mistaken. They actually take the time to look up the evidence to check. They realize that they are mistaken. They admit it and actually thank the person who pointed it out for informing them.
That's exactly why I love science and the influence it has on the way people think and conduct arguments. Can you even imagine more honest and honorable behavior than the above in a discussion?
"But if I'm not mistaken, these timelines were created with carbon dating, which has been shown to yield inaccurate results. "
Well, you are mistaken, sorry. Carbon dating is only used for very recent events. For longer term events there are much more robust methods that actually include their own means of self-checking their results: read up on isochron analysis.
Carbon dating can indeed have some pitfalls. But scientists know how to correct for them, and by and large, we can make the results more and more accurate. There are any number of ways to check the dates to make sure they are plausible and in line with all other evidence.
At the very least, you have to admit that Christianity basically hijacked Judiasm and totally altered the reading of its religious tradition: even to reordering the chronological order of key Scriptures and making up insane stories about Jesus riding on TWO donkeys to fit what they thought was a prophecy but was, in actuality, their own poor translation of a text that didn't even refer to Jesus.
We can get fossil evidence of soft tissue and even some evidence of tissue types as well. While we can't get DNA from fossil evidence, we can do any number of comparative genetic studies on modern life that allow us to track back timing and piece together insights on the "original text." Unexpectedly clever solutions to seemingly impossible questions are something you can never quite rule out. :)
Maybe the comparisons are made because...
When creationism lost its bid to get taught in the Supreme Court, the major proponents looked at the decision and started thinking about how they could get around it.
ID then suddenly appeared: many of the exact same people were supporting it, but they had carefully crafted their language so as to leave out explicitly religious claims and most testible claims altogether. Unfortunately, they totally sucked at this ruse. First of all, the changeover was often so blatant that a creationist text like Pandas and People was re-issued with "God" replaced by "Intelligent Designer": the goofy creationist anti-evolution arguments were largely left intact, exactly the same as before. It was often so pathetic as to involve them having to change the names of their organizations to hide their purpose.
Then there's the famous wedge document of the DI, which basically says that this whole movement aims to find a way to get "religious" science into schools and try and make mainsteam scientists look like bullies.
Then there's the fact that major ID figures say one thing to a public or secular audience, and another to religious audiences who they are often trying to troll money out of. Suddenly, ID becomes about Christian renewal, or finding the Logos of God in nature, etc. etc. And these guys have admitted that the ID for life on earth can't be anything other than something supernatural.
"Intelligent Design rests on the hypothesis that design artifacts can be scientifically identified as such and differentiated from artifacts that are the result of random natural processes. Maybe this hypothesis is true, maybe it is false. But it has nothing to do with creationism."
Here is where you really go off the trolley tracks. First of all, scientists were already doing this without the help of people like Dembski. Second of all, the reason they CAN do it is because there is a context to do it in. We know what the designers we are looking for were like: what tools they used, what was characteristic of their processes, etc. The ID movement, however, proposes to basically destroy any and all context: it's all design! If that's so, then there's nothing to compare anything to. Worse, since the designer is so vague, there's nothing characteristic to look for. The whole thing is just one begged question about whether or not natural processes can produce complexity. That's NOT how normal "design detection" works. That's how a tricksy philosophical game tries to get the supernatural admitted into science.
THAT is why most people think the modern ID movement is just creationism in sheeps clothing. At the Dover trial, the judge noted that no one could even define what ID was: most of the school board members seemed to think it was something that basically amounted to creationism. Most politicians pushing ID, in fact, are not only formerly open creationists, but they don't even get that ID means you are supposed to be coy about it.
That's not to say that there aren't philosophical arguments about intelligent design to be made that are distinct from creationism. It's just that the modern ID movement is simply not composed of those arguments alone. It's a PR movement.
"Let's be truthful here. Evolution is a theory, not a fact."
Lets be honest here: anyone who says things like this hasn't taken the time to figure out the most basic ways in which scientists use words like "theory" and "fact." Theories are not contrasted with facts in science. Theories explain facts using other facts. The best measure of a theory is whether it is consistent with all currently available evidence in every way we can think to test it. Because evolution currently passes these tests, it is accepted as good science.
"Clearly species not only adapt but it follows logically that such adaptations over time can lead to new species. What is a species anyway but a arbitrary classification by us?"
Indeed: this is an important insight. The concept of species is a sloppy term used for our convienience. The reality of nature is much more complicated, blurred, and inconsistent with simple categories.
"This does not mean that it is logical for a soup of non-living organic molecules to become a human with trillions of cells, each cell a complex organism functioning together, each doing it's part in the whole."
You're conflating 4 billion years of contingency down into a single sentence. Of course that is going to sound bizarre: no more bizarre than trying to sum up human history in a few words. For the "soup" part of it we are no longer discussing evolution, but rather chemistry.
"I'm not saying it's impossible, but by no means is it the only possible explanation, and you deceive yourself if you think otherwise."
If you have an alternative, then please present it. But in order for it to be scientific, it needs to be both testible AND fit all the facts. I've never heard of an alternative that does both.
"And even if that's the way it happened, I would like to point out that this universe had a beginning some 13 billion years ago, where an enormous explosion of energy far in excess of all the mass of all the matter in the universe multiplied by the speed of light squared brought everything we know into being."
Actually, the energy cannot be in excess of the mass and energy currently in the universe. When we calculate the total energy of the universe, in fact, it works out to about... zero.
"This is not a cyclical event, because it has both a beginning, and if the universe keeps expanding (as science tells us it seems to be) it will have a cold, dark end. I think that the idea that God provided that initial matter and that initial energy along with the very fundamental 'code' of this universe itself (which we as scientists are only reverse-engineering) is far more plausible than your theory that it "just happened"."
Your explanation of God is neither testible, nor does it explain anything more than it "just happened" (poof! is not an explanation of anything). So science is indifferent to it. That's not the same thing as saying it's wrong. It's just that it's not particularly interesting because its among the nearly infinate number of untestable propositions.
"So before you make a fool out of yourself by mocking what you do not understand, and get carried away in your own importance and puff up with pride, just remember we're just mammals on one tiny little dust ball in a galaxy of hundreds of billions of stars, amongst hundreds of billions of galaxies each with hundreds of billions of stars. Don't EVER think that you are even close to understanding it all!"
Who is more humble: the person who examines evidence and tries to best work out the way things work from this evidence through long hard study and makes provisional statements that are always subject to the evidence, and always presented in great detail so that anyone may examine the logic and argument themselves so as to challenge it if they have a better idea?
Or the person who declares they have magic superknowledge of the very core and purpose of all reality, subject to no ones criticisms or checking?
"One day, hopefully not too soon, you'll find this
"Who do you think created the science we use?"
The answer to this can be found in a history book about the development of the scientific method and the liberal enlightenment.
"Evolution is just a theory."
If you read that history book, you'd know that there is no such thing in science as "just a theory." But then, you've probably been told that a million times, and refuse to understand it.
"It has never been proven, evolutionary scientists have been trying for over 100 years. They have yet to proven that it has happened. There are no hard facts!'
Anyone could make the same false claim about anything. There are countless hard facts. It's only BECAUSE of the extremely robust evidence that scientists take evolution seriously.
"Where is the missing link?"
That term is outdated. No one is looking for "the" missing link to anything.
"There are no tranistional life forms to be found living or fossilized on the planet."
There are countless transitional forms, by which we mean creatures that have blends of traits previously unique to different classes of modern life. We have fossils with both land mammal and whale traits. Fossils with dinosaur and bird traits. And so on. And we even have atavisms: snakes born with legs, dolphins born with legs, humans born with tails, etc.
"Until it is, proven it's every Evolutionists "belief" that it has occurred and is occurring today, by faith. Just as I cannot see with my eyes, the very being of God, it is my belief that He exists, I believe by faith."
Science doesn't work like that. It uses evidence and inference: chains of reasoning. If the reasoning isn't sound, then it gets tossed. If the evidence doesn't support a theory, then the theory gets tossed. That's how it works.
Actually, this is no longer the prevailing idea. It seems that close to the origin of life, it's likely that genetic material and all sorts of structures were traded around quite freely. It's quite possible that life arose separately in terms of protein structures several times, and the life we see today is a blend of these sorts of previously limited complexes. DNA may well be a much later development once this morass of melding calmed down.
"As always the devil is in the detail. To get from one species to another (as currently determined by a pair of genetic pools) requires a viable path. Not just stepping stones but a real, viable path. For every protein, every gene, every process that is needed to support life."
Indeed. And molecular biologists have spent plenty of time working out exactly what those paths, both in specific and in general, are. Interestingly enough, living systems are a lot more plastic than most people give them credit for. Heck, there are 6 major types of human aorta morphology, all of which work about as well as the others. And the way this stuff grows is fasincatingly NOT like a strict blueprint, but rather like a recipe in which different ingredients can affect the outcome but don't necessarily turn the whole thing to mush right away.
"The conventional dogma is that this occurs through a multiplicity of small changes (we have observed such small changes in real experiments - I have seen such data from my own lab), each of which gradually moves the population (genetic drift). The problem is that whilst this is a cosy theory, there is little remenant of this."
I'm not sure what you mean by this. There is plenty of remnant of this. Not only do we have the rare examples of diatoms and snail shells showing that these changes, while they may not move at a steady pace, do generally happen gradually, but we have plenty of molecular evidence that the divergences we see happened because of natural selection and lots of mutation, both of which are characteristic processes that leave very specific marks where they've done their work.
"We should now have more species than at any time ever,"
Er, ??? Why? Are you doubting that countless species go extinct, sometimes in massive numbers? Although, it must be said: it seems like we do have one of the most diverse set of species in the history of the earth around today. We're currently in the process of killing off a good portion of it, but the globe is crawling with life in every corner, and again: species are more morphologicaly diverse than almost ever before that I can think of.
"and species should not be distinct but a continuum (if we take the slow steady mountain climb approach advocated by the likes of Dawkins)."
Not if some die out, which they very often do. But as a matter of fact we do have many continuums as well: ring species, the way hybridization has all sorts of varying levels instead of a bright line, etc.
"This is not something that makes sense but is very nice for putting very long timescales on things. Burst evolution, where dramatic environmental changes radically alter the genetic pressure on organisms whilst providing the circumstances to allow genetic change can be observed experimentally but, being unpredictable, throws all the happy 'slow steady climb' molecular clocks out of the window."
You don't know much about how molecular clocks work if you think that they don't have ways to compensate for differences in evolutionary change. Of course, you probably _definately_ don't understand how they work if you think they primarily measure rates of evolutionary change, when in fact they measure the fairly constant rates of mutation in particular sorts of non-coding sections of genetic material, controlled to detect error and changes via statistical methods.
"There are also distinct problems with establishing mechanisms for major events - evolution of sex, evolution of DNA duplication, evolution of completely novel genes etc."
The evolution of novel genes is so well documented that it's absurd to include on this list. The other two are indeed very hot questions in biology, but the problems are largely that we don't have enough evidence to determine which of many many different possibilities were the one actual mechanism. That's not at all the same thing as having a problem seeing how they could have happened at ALL. An inability to know where certain comets were in the distant past does not const