But the occasional remake is so much superior that people forget it is a remake. Did you know that the Humphrey Bogart version of the "Maltese Falcon" was a remake? There were earlier 1931 and 1936 versions.
Did you know that the wonderful "Dirty Rotten Scoundrels", with Michael Caine and Steve Martin, was a remake of "Bedtime Story", with David Niven and Marlon Brando? Michael Caine's performance is at least an order of magnitude superior to Niven's original performance. The remake was both funnier and deeper.
Have you ever seen the 1973 Richard Lester version of The Three Musketeers? Subsequent remakes suck in comparison. But the 1973 version is also a remake.
As of 1991 the US Supreme Court ruled that a list of "fact" could not be copyright.
When Feist, was compiling a phone book they contacted the dozen of so companies that had compiled phone books for areas contained within the area for which Feist was preparing their phone book. Eleven companies agreed to liscence their data, Rural didn't. Feist copied 4,000 names from Rural's book. Rural sued. And they lost.
A list of "facts" could be copyright, if it was assembled in a creative order. But, in that case, changing the order would free it from copyright protection.
Even if you rolled all the rockets we have ever launched, and all the fuel we packed into them, I doubt it they would form a sphere even a single kilometer in diameter.
A Saturn V was about 20 meters in diameter, and about 100 meters tall, more or less.
Volume of a cylinder is pi r^2 * length. That would make the volume of a Saturn V about pi * 2500 meters^3.
The volume of a sphere is 3/4 * pi r^3. The volume of a sphere one kilometer in diameter would be pi * 93,750,000 meters^3. That would be volumne of something like the prelaunch volume of 37,000 Saturn Vs. The payload of a rocket is a fraction of the mass of the entire thing. Let's say 1%. Most rockets are much smaller than a Saturn V. Payloads launched into low earth orbits decay within decades, like Mir, or Spacelab.
It wouldn't surprise me if the volume of all the working satellites, and space detritus, that remain in orbit would be less than the prelaunch volume of a single Saturn V.
Firefighters and policemen are suddenly the great American heros. Policemen and firefighters are simply doing their jobs. They get paid for doing what they did. A hero is someone who goes far above and beyond the call of duty to help out in some way.
My take, every opportunity to be a hero is a new event. Yesterday's hero could be today's coward. Or vice versa. Cops who spend their career fillout traffic tickets aren't heroes. But they have chosen an occupation where opportunities to test their heroism are more likely. They still might fold, might fail,
When I worked at a University there was a bomb threat that caused the administration to evacuate the entire campus. It took hours because the University wasn't set up for evacuation. Classes that were in a different room, to write their midterms, didn't get found and told to clear out.
Yes, it was mid-term season. One clue the bomb threat would turn out to be a hoax.
Well, when the time when the anonymous tipster said the bombs would go off had passed the campus police were sent to check out all the buildings before the civilians were let back in.
If there really were bombs, or booby traps, to do a proper job of clearing the campus probably would have taken a battalian of combat engineers. The campus police had no bomb training, or bomb demolition equipment.
Within the next two weeks have the members of the campus police had resigned.
I don't understand why so many slashdotters are defending Ortiz. It's just like someone taking GPL code from a CVS server and passing it off as thier own without mentioning where they got the code and after they're caught, saying its ok because the project was taking forever to make an official release.
Maybe because they don't see Ortiz's team's actions as like violating the GPL, but see it more like innocently downloading MP3 tracks to fill their ipod.
There are clever hooks for hanging bicycles from ceilings. Maybe you have room to hang your bike near your doorway, without impeding pedestrian traffic?
Do you have a stool, or two or three step, step ladder? Then you could mount some shelves at that height.
"Somebody else discovering it too..." -- like Darwin and Russel, or Newton and Leibniz, is not what the American Astronomer now believes happened.
The computers that control the telescopes the American team used keep logs -- extensive logs, that can be googled and accessed over the internet.
What the American team discovered was that shortly before the Spanish team announced the discover of the object the Americans had been tracking the logs showed an unknown party had accessed the logs showing where the American team had been pointing their telescopes.
The leader of the American team gave the Spaniards gracious congratulations, and were willing to acknowledge that they had independently discovered the object his team had been tracking.
But, when further investigations showed that the unknown party who had accessed the the American team's telescope logs could be tracked, through their IP address, to computers at the Spanish team's institution, this was the smoking gun.
Discovering a celestial object through peaking at your competitor's instrument logs is not what most people would call a real discovery.
...then losing the fame is your own fault.
The leader of the American team acknowledged a mistake they had made that made the "discovery" of his teams results easier. His team had picked code names for various KBOs they were looking for. They picked a code name for the then undiscovered KBO larger than Pluto. They picked some other code names. And the logs the Spaniards found used these code names. The American team, and maybe most Astronomers, did not realize that google could search logs that used their code names.
So, in a very limited sense, one could say the American team was at fault for not being suspicious enough to anticipate tricky competitors would take advantage of the insecure log files.
About twenty years ago Scientific American reviewed the most recent sequel to "Clan of the Cave Bear", and compared it with the work of Bjorn Ku:rten, a real anthropologist, who wrote a pair of novels about the meeting between Neanderthal and modern humans. Excellent novels. I highly recommend them too.
The Scientific American reviewer commented that the author of COTCB had done a reasonable amount of homework. She got details about the technology right. But that her heroine was like a Californai "vallery girl" transplanted to the paleolithic.
Various contributors to this thread have said "We killed them. We were smarter than they were. That's life." But there is no evidence that we were more intelligent. Some anthropologists have suggested that one advantage modern humans had over Neanderthals was that the shape of our throat and larynx allows modern humans to make sounds that Neanderthals couldn't -- and that this allowed a richer, more expressive, vocal expression.
They are about the size of a learjet. If the USAF retired them, could some wily entrepenuer buy them up, remove the bomb-racks, put in some windows an comfy chairs, and turn them into supersonic executive jets?
And if the passenger is unruly, those bomb-bay would sure come in useful.
The Russians built something comparable. If the USAF won't auction off their jets maybe the Russians will auction of theirs.
It is not just "people". The article says that Tucker, the internet executive who said he bought a new machine, and threw out his old one, because getting rid of the spyware was too difficult, has a PhD in Computer Science.
Ordinary people getting frustrated is one thing. They lack the right skills. A PhD in computer science is a whole other question.
There were some spin-off novels published a year or two after the game came out. I strongly suspected they would suck, but curiousity about how much they would suck, induced me to buy one.
I couldn't believe how much the author had bent over backwards to make the novel faithful to the game. And that made it suck far more than you could possibly imagine.
Would it be agreeable to you to allow citizens of (insert your country here) to be extradited for trial by a court run by the UN? The same organization that brought us the oil for food scandal? The same organization that put Libya on the human rights board? At times when nations are feuding with each other, what do you think your chances would be if you got stuck with a judge from the other side?
Did the UN system allow Saddam, and collaborators in other nations to loot the oil for food funds? Yes. The USA is one of the five permanet members of the UN Security Council. So, why doesn't the USA share some of the responsibility for this scandal?
The CPA took over the administration of the remaining $20 billion in May of 2003.
Was Iraqi money looted during Paul Bremer's stewardship? Yes. Billions went missing.
He blew through almost all of the Iraqi money in not much longer than a year, with very poor audit controls. Billions were expended with no sign that the expenditure was actually spent on anything that benefitted Iraqis. On a year by year basis a greater portion of the funds can't be accounted for when it was under Paul Bremer's stewardship than when it was under the UN stewardship.
Yes, I know this is "off-topic". It is worth losing some karma to challenge the flawed reasoning of the parent post -- which, moderators, is just as off-topic.
They followed an order from another country to aim armed nuclear missiles at Florida. That earned them a permanent spot on the blacklist. This is bad blood that doesn't expire. You don't aim a nuke at the East Coast and then say you're sorry.
Fishbowl has this all backwards. He portrays the Cuban missile batteries as a hostile act, against an innocent USA. Rather it was the predictable counter to a US launched invasion.
The CIA, in a case of bad intelligence analysis, hired, trained, planned and equipped a disastrous invasion of Cuba.
I am going to try to phrase this in the most tactful way I can.
The views you echoed here? Maybe you and Arp can build a coherent case for them... but, they are a lot more outside the mainstream than you represented earlier in the thread. Okay, fine, you or I can think of examples from the past where the formerly mainstream view have fallen by the wayside.
Early critics of the theory of evolution discounted the discovery of the fossils of extinct creatures by saying: Ah, simple! Those are the creatures who didn't make it onboard Noah's Ark, and were destroyed in the great flood.
Well, it is an amusing argument. Would you challenge the interpretation of the fossil record that, not only does it include extinct animals, but absent are the species found today? If so, how do you account for this apparent absence?
Do you discount molecular biology? Molecular biologists argue that we can measure how closely related individuals are by looking at their genes. Do you reject that the same technology that can establish paternity, or link a suspect, or forensic remains to a blood stain, can measure how closely related different species are?
So, if new species don't evolve from old ones, how do you explain the genetic consanguity?
In an earlier comment you said that we didn't live in a young Universe with a forged date-stamps -- that the various date stamps were being misinterpreted.
Since observation shows us redshifted objects clustered into "shells" around us, we must be near the middle of stuff; and
This is just local granularity... so what?
since many physically associated objects with different redshift and a smooth redshift gradient between them exist, redshift is probably not (or not primarily) a measure of expansion; and
I don't know what you mean by physically associated objects or smooth redshift gradient.
since it involves the entire visible universe, it's not a localised effect (hyper galactic explosion or whatever); it follows thatWe are a cosmic stone's throw from the center of the universe.
You write this as if you knew the shape of the Universe. You know that the Universe has a center? A finite but unbounded Universe would not have a center. How do you know that the Universe is not finite but unbounded?
They change, and go extinct. If by "evolve" you mean degenerate, then yes.
Degenerate is a value lade, anthropocentric term. I think biologists prefer to use terms like adapted or adaptive.
Consider zebra mussels, they were well adapted to living in the Great Lakes. And when they were accidentally introduced there, there was a population explosion. If the Great Lakes environment were to change, they might not be adapted any longer. They could die off.
Langauge shapes are thoughts. Certain ideas were literally inconceivable until some genius invented the terms to talk about them. May I suggest that you disrupt your ability to give the other view a fair examination if you restrict yourself from using the terms you challenge.
You would need divine intervention for either, since firstly the only stews that form by accident are simple, racemised and poisoned, and secondly even if you somehow against practically every observation of physics got an idealised protein soup, self-organsing that into enough DNA etc to make something self-reproducing is a very, very, very long uphill battle on loose shale. So long, in fact, that the universe doesn't contain anything like the required amount of ammunition.
In that great 13 part series, "The Ascent of Man", Jacob Bronowski talked about sitting beside his little new born daughter, and marvelling at how perfect her little hands were. He describes thinking, "Her little hands are so perfect, I couldn't design something so perfect I I had a million years!" Then he says, "Of course a million years is how long it took."
Your assertion that the assembly of simple life, or proto-life, from a "stew", was impossible, is unproveable. It is an assertion based on faith, not fact. Just as if I were to assert the opposite I would be relying on faith, not fact.
mutations are generally not heritable. Since all observed mutations are damaging, anything which was inherited is going to - on average - cripple or kill the organism rather than improve it.
Hold on, you said you accepted "Natural Selection". Now it sounds like you don't. Of course mutations that kill the individual before they can reproduce are not inherited. Is that all you mean? But where do you get the idea that "all observed mutations are damaging"?
No. The observations (or in many cases compilations of others' observations) of Halton Arp and co are showing with increasing definition that we are indeed in a special place in the universe.
I saw an old Pogo cartoon, maybe republished in one of Carl Sagan's books, where two characters pondered this question.
(Pogo was written about Washington politics. But it was set in a dark swamp, and the characters were cute little swamp creatures. The characters were often fishing from a dilapidated skiff.)
In the strip in question, as near as I can recall, went like this:
Panel one: "Did you ever think, that we live in a Universe, full of stars, all circled by planets,, and that each of them could have life on it, just like us?"
Panel two: "Or maybe the Earth is unique? Maybe it is the only inhabited planet in the whole Universe? Maybe we are completely alone?"
Panel three:
Panel fout: The other critter replies: "Either way, it is a sobering thought."
So, how about giving us the 25, or 50 word summary of Arp's reasoning?
there are not "many" if by "creationist" you mean disbeliever in evolution, natural selection, etc.
No, I don't. Natural Selection is fine by Creationists. Genetics is fine by Creationists. Random Mutation is fine by Creationists. Clear on that now?
Natural Selection? OK.
Genetics? OK.
Random Mutation? OK.
So far, it sounds like you aren't talking about real creationists. I don't happen to believe that our Universe had a supernatural creator. But I don't know of a way to prove or disprove whether the Universe was initially created by a supernatural being.
It would hardly surprise me to learn you can find lots of people with scientific training, who believe those three ideas reflect how actual, observable phenomenon, one can see, when biological organisms reproduce, who still believe the Univerise had a creator.
Any combination of the above producing an average improvement in a species (or indeed adding any constructive information at all) is not fine by Creationists.
What!
You are going to have to explain this.
You accept that a random mutation can be an improvement, or could be an adaptation to a change in environment -- correct?
You accept that this mutation is inheritable -- correct?
But you assert that "an average improvement" is "not fine"?
Are you going to try to tell us that there are little angels floating around, making little miracles, to balance out those random beneficial mutations, so that species don't change? Lol.
So, do they conduct periodic genetic audits?
Evolutionist Zoologist Gerald A Kerkut (died last year, sad to see him go especially since he was very rational and sporting): "The theory that all the living forms in the world have arisen from a single source which itself came from an inorganic form."...
This, I have a problem with, for lots and lots of reasons. Where shall we start? Bats? Squid? Pick a species?
James Usher read the bible, interpreted it literally, counted on his fingers, and asserted that God's seven days of creation occurred 6000 years ago. So, where do you agree with Bishop Usher, and where do you differ?
You accept that the Earth is just one planet, among many, circling on star, among billions in our Galaxy, which is just one, not really different than any other?
You seemed to be accepting that species evolve, and go extinct. This is something Bishop Usher wouldn't accept. But you won't accept that life could arrive from a stew organic chemicals without divine intervention?
Do you think God created the basic Universe 15 billion years ago, and then waited 12 billion years, before he created the first life on Earth? Or do you think God created life, and a Universe with a forged date-stamp, all at the same time?
If you believe the Universe might have a forged date stamp, how do you know it existed even ten seconds ago? How do you know it existed before you started reading this sentence? Maybe God created life, and the Universe with the forged date-stamp, including all your childhood memories, 9 seconds ago?
Slashdot Mirror
But the occasional remake is so much superior that people forget it is a remake. Did you know that the Humphrey Bogart version of the "Maltese Falcon" was a remake? There were earlier 1931 and 1936 versions.
Did you know that the wonderful "Dirty Rotten Scoundrels", with Michael Caine and Steve Martin, was a remake of "Bedtime Story", with David Niven and Marlon Brando? Michael Caine's performance is at least an order of magnitude superior to Niven's original performance. The remake was both funnier and deeper.
Have you ever seen the 1973 Richard Lester version of The Three Musketeers? Subsequent remakes suck in comparison. But the 1973 version is also a remake.
As of 1991 the US Supreme Court ruled that a list of "fact" could not be copyright.
When Feist, was compiling a phone book they contacted the dozen of so companies that had compiled phone books for areas contained within the area for which Feist was preparing their phone book. Eleven companies agreed to liscence their data, Rural didn't. Feist copied 4,000 names from Rural's book. Rural sued. And they lost.
A list of "facts" could be copyright, if it was assembled in a creative order. But, in that case, changing the order would free it from copyright protection.
Even if you rolled all the rockets we have ever launched, and all the fuel we packed into them, I doubt it they would form a sphere even a single kilometer in diameter.
A Saturn V was about 20 meters in diameter, and about 100 meters tall, more or less. Volume of a cylinder is pi r^2 * length. That would make the volume of a Saturn V about pi * 2500 meters^3.
The volume of a sphere is 3/4 * pi r^3. The volume of a sphere one kilometer in diameter would be pi * 93,750,000 meters^3. That would be volumne of something like the prelaunch volume of 37,000 Saturn Vs. The payload of a rocket is a fraction of the mass of the entire thing. Let's say 1%. Most rockets are much smaller than a Saturn V. Payloads launched into low earth orbits decay within decades, like Mir, or Spacelab.
It wouldn't surprise me if the volume of all the working satellites, and space detritus, that remain in orbit would be less than the prelaunch volume of a single Saturn V.
The slashdot article says Pluto is the only Kuiper Belt Object to have a moon. Not so: Tenth Planet Has A Moon
Two scientists in lab coats. One is holding up a test-tube. He says:
Finally! Success! A moth that eats synthetic fibers!
So, if the police and firemen who showed up and climbed the WTC were not heroes, would that mean the 249 New Orleans Police Officers who didn't bother to show up for work weren't cowards?
My take, every opportunity to be a hero is a new event. Yesterday's hero could be today's coward. Or vice versa. Cops who spend their career fillout traffic tickets aren't heroes. But they have chosen an occupation where opportunities to test their heroism are more likely. They still might fold, might fail,
When I worked at a University there was a bomb threat that caused the administration to evacuate the entire campus. It took hours because the University wasn't set up for evacuation. Classes that were in a different room, to write their midterms, didn't get found and told to clear out.
Yes, it was mid-term season. One clue the bomb threat would turn out to be a hoax.
Well, when the time when the anonymous tipster said the bombs would go off had passed the campus police were sent to check out all the buildings before the civilians were let back in.
If there really were bombs, or booby traps, to do a proper job of clearing the campus probably would have taken a battalian of combat engineers. The campus police had no bomb training, or bomb demolition equipment.
Within the next two weeks have the members of the campus police had resigned.
You never read Samuel Pepys diary did you?
In he youth, he lived in London, when it was slept by the plague. People were dying like flies. It was, in many ways, like the end of the world.
He found that, with no consequences, lots of women were ready to engage in sexual relations with random strangers. He made out like gang-busters.
Slashdotters need to be able to predict the end of the world! It might be our only chance to get laid! We better make the most of it.
Maybe because they don't see Ortiz's team's actions as like violating the GPL, but see it more like innocently downloading MP3 tracks to fill their ipod.
Do you have a stool, or two or three step, step ladder? Then you could mount some shelves at that height.
"Somebody else discovering it too..." -- like Darwin and Russel, or Newton and Leibniz, is not what the American Astronomer now believes happened. The computers that control the telescopes the American team used keep logs -- extensive logs, that can be googled and accessed over the internet.
What the American team discovered was that shortly before the Spanish team announced the discover of the object the Americans had been tracking the logs showed an unknown party had accessed the logs showing where the American team had been pointing their telescopes.
The leader of the American team gave the Spaniards gracious congratulations, and were willing to acknowledge that they had independently discovered the object his team had been tracking.
But, when further investigations showed that the unknown party who had accessed the the American team's telescope logs could be tracked, through their IP address, to computers at the Spanish team's institution, this was the smoking gun.
Discovering a celestial object through peaking at your competitor's instrument logs is not what most people would call a real discovery.
The leader of the American team acknowledged a mistake they had made that made the "discovery" of his teams results easier. His team had picked code names for various KBOs they were looking for. They picked a code name for the then undiscovered KBO larger than Pluto. They picked some other code names. And the logs the Spaniards found used these code names. The American team, and maybe most Astronomers, did not realize that google could search logs that used their code names.
So, in a very limited sense, one could say the American team was at fault for not being suspicious enough to anticipate tricky competitors would take advantage of the insecure log files.
Sincerity is a highly over-rated virtue. If he did a lousy job it doesn't matter very much if he was sincere in how he tried to carry out his duties.
The Scientific American reviewer commented that the author of COTCB had done a reasonable amount of homework. She got details about the technology right. But that her heroine was like a Californai "vallery girl" transplanted to the paleolithic.
Various contributors to this thread have said "We killed them. We were smarter than they were. That's life." But there is no evidence that we were more intelligent. Some anthropologists have suggested that one advantage modern humans had over Neanderthals was that the shape of our throat and larynx allows modern humans to make sounds that Neanderthals couldn't -- and that this allowed a richer, more expressive, vocal expression.
They are about the size of a learjet. If the USAF retired them, could some wily entrepenuer buy them up, remove the bomb-racks, put in some windows an comfy chairs, and turn them into supersonic executive jets?
And if the passenger is unruly, those bomb-bay would sure come in useful.
The Russians built something comparable. If the USAF won't auction off their jets maybe the Russians will auction of theirs.
Ordinary people getting frustrated is one thing. They lack the right skills. A PhD in computer science is a whole other question.
I couldn't believe how much the author had bent over backwards to make the novel faithful to the game. And that made it suck far more than you could possibly imagine.
Citizens of various countries were kidnapped, in the middle of the night and shipped to Guantanamo Bay, where they were held, without trial, without being charged, without even being permitted to learn what, if any, evidence there was against them. Let me suggest that this US policy is more antidemocratic, more contrary to the principles of fundamental justice, and more to be feared than your hypothetical UN extradition strawman, where, at least, the prisoners would have charges laid against them, would be free from the fear of torture, and could expect a reasonably fair trial, where they could actually hear the evidence against them.
Did the UN system allow Saddam, and collaborators in other nations to loot the oil for food funds? Yes. The USA is one of the five permanet members of the UN Security Council. So, why doesn't the USA share some of the responsibility for this scandal?
The CPA took over the administration of the remaining $20 billion in May of 2003. Was Iraqi money looted during Paul Bremer's stewardship? Yes. Billions went missing. He blew through almost all of the Iraqi money in not much longer than a year, with very poor audit controls. Billions were expended with no sign that the expenditure was actually spent on anything that benefitted Iraqis. On a year by year basis a greater portion of the funds can't be accounted for when it was under Paul Bremer's stewardship than when it was under the UN stewardship.
Yes, I know this is "off-topic". It is worth losing some karma to challenge the flawed reasoning of the parent post -- which, moderators, is just as off-topic.
Fishbowl has this all backwards. He portrays the Cuban missile batteries as a hostile act, against an innocent USA. Rather it was the predictable counter to a US launched invasion. The CIA, in a case of bad intelligence analysis, hired, trained, planned and equipped a disastrous invasion of Cuba.
But, even if you got the link right, I don't think you explained yourself well enough for people to understand what you had in mind.
Did you copy this guys post verbatim? That would be low man.
The views you echoed here? Maybe you and Arp can build a coherent case for them... but, they are a lot more outside the mainstream than you represented earlier in the thread. Okay, fine, you or I can think of examples from the past where the formerly mainstream view have fallen by the wayside.
Didn't you say: " How do you explain away the many successful scientists who are both out-and-out Creationists and dare to say so ..."
Didn't you say:
Natural Selection is fine by Creationists. Genetics is fine by Creationists. Random Mutation is fine by Creationists." But your later comments suggest you didn't really accept those ideas.
Sorry. It looks like mbrother is correct. It looks like your version of creationism is more marginal than you were ready to acknowledge.
Well, it doesn't really matter. Arguments based on an appeal to authority suck.
I think you are left with the burden of defending your ideas based on their merits, not by appeals to authority.
Well, it is an amusing argument. Would you challenge the interpretation of the fossil record that, not only does it include extinct animals, but absent are the species found today? If so, how do you account for this apparent absence?
Do you discount molecular biology? Molecular biologists argue that we can measure how closely related individuals are by looking at their genes. Do you reject that the same technology that can establish paternity, or link a suspect, or forensic remains to a blood stain, can measure how closely related different species are?
So, if new species don't evolve from old ones, how do you explain the genetic consanguity?
In an earlier comment you said that we didn't live in a young Universe with a forged date-stamps -- that the various date stamps were being misinterpreted.
You realize that leaves you a lot to explain?
This is just local granularity... so what?
I don't know what you mean by physically associated objects or smooth redshift gradient.
You write this as if you knew the shape of the Universe. You know that the Universe has a center? A finite but unbounded Universe would not have a center. How do you know that the Universe is not finite but unbounded?
Degenerate is a value lade, anthropocentric term. I think biologists prefer to use terms like adapted or adaptive.
Consider zebra mussels, they were well adapted to living in the Great Lakes. And when they were accidentally introduced there, there was a population explosion. If the Great Lakes environment were to change, they might not be adapted any longer. They could die off.
Langauge shapes are thoughts. Certain ideas were literally inconceivable until some genius invented the terms to talk about them. May I suggest that you disrupt your ability to give the other view a fair examination if you restrict yourself from using the terms you challenge.
In that great 13 part series, "The Ascent of Man", Jacob Bronowski talked about sitting beside his little new born daughter, and marvelling at how perfect her little hands were. He describes thinking, "Her little hands are so perfect, I couldn't design something so perfect I I had a million years!" Then he says, "Of course a million years is how long it took."
Your assertion that the assembly of simple life, or proto-life, from a "stew", was impossible, is unproveable. It is an assertion based on faith, not fact. Just as if I were to assert the opposite I would be relying on faith, not fact.
Hold on, you said you accepted "Natural Selection". Now it sounds like you don't. Of course mutations that kill the individual before they can reproduce are not inherited. Is that all you mean? But where do you get the idea that "all observed mutations are damaging"?
I saw an old Pogo cartoon, maybe republished in one of Carl Sagan's books, where two characters pondered this question.
(Pogo was written about Washington politics. But it was set in a dark swamp, and the characters were cute little swamp creatures. The characters were often fishing from a dilapidated skiff.)
In the strip in question, as near as I can recall, went like this:
Panel one: "Did you ever think, that we live in a Universe, full of stars, all circled by planets,, and that each of them could have life on it, just like us?"
Panel two: "Or maybe the Earth is unique? Maybe it is the only inhabited planet in the whole Universe? Maybe we are completely alone?"
Panel three:
Panel fout: The other critter replies: "Either way, it is a sobering thought."
So, how about giving us the 25, or 50 word summary of Arp's reasoning?
Natural Selection? OK.
Genetics? OK.
Random Mutation? OK.
So far, it sounds like you aren't talking about real creationists. I don't happen to believe that our Universe had a supernatural creator. But I don't know of a way to prove or disprove whether the Universe was initially created by a supernatural being.
It would hardly surprise me to learn you can find lots of people with scientific training, who believe those three ideas reflect how actual, observable phenomenon, one can see, when biological organisms reproduce, who still believe the Univerise had a creator.
What!
You are going to have to explain this.
You accept that a random mutation can be an improvement, or could be an adaptation to a change in environment -- correct?
You accept that this mutation is inheritable -- correct?
But you assert that "an average improvement" is "not fine"?
Are you going to try to tell us that there are little angels floating around, making little miracles, to balance out those random beneficial mutations, so that species don't change? Lol.
So, do they conduct periodic genetic audits?
James Usher read the bible, interpreted it literally, counted on his fingers, and asserted that God's seven days of creation occurred 6000 years ago. So, where do you agree with Bishop Usher, and where do you differ?
You accept that the Earth is just one planet, among many, circling on star, among billions in our Galaxy, which is just one, not really different than any other?
You seemed to be accepting that species evolve, and go extinct. This is something Bishop Usher wouldn't accept. But you won't accept that life could arrive from a stew organic chemicals without divine intervention?
Do you think God created the basic Universe 15 billion years ago, and then waited 12 billion years, before he created the first life on Earth? Or do you think God created life, and a Universe with a forged date-stamp, all at the same time?
If you believe the Universe might have a forged date stamp, how do you know it existed even ten seconds ago? How do you know it existed before you started reading this sentence? Maybe God created life, and the Universe with the forged date-stamp, including all your childhood memories, 9 seconds ago?