In my research I have found it a common understanding that speciation has never been observed, despite numerous experiments involving thousands of generations of bacteria and mutated species. What is this wallaby you speak of? I have tried numerous searches for it, but can find nothing on it.
See the talk.origins FAQ. There are two links off of it pointing to data on observed speciation events. I can't find references to Hawaiian wallabies there, but there are pointers to rock wallabies.
As for macro-evolution, take the given scenario...
You're just tossing around buzzwords.
Why would a difference in the number of genes be necessary?
What makes you think that it's unlikely? Entire chromosomes, containing thousands of genes, are often duplicated or deleted in organisms all the time.
Are you a geneticist? If not, how do you know that they would find such commonplace events difficult to believe?
The lousy debating tactics, shoddy logic and false statements are still amusing. Amusing enough to keep posting to this thread, even though Slashdot won't let anyone retrieve it for the moment (imagine, a write-only discussion!). Thank goodness for caches.
If you want to know who: 1) Fred Hoyle, Thomas Gold, Leslie Orgel, Francis Crick (hopefully you know a few).. the theory is dubbed "panspermia" referring to life brought to Earth from elsewhere
2) Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe calculated that by chance it was one in 10**40000 that all functional proteins necessary for life would form in one place.
A number of people did calculations which proved that no known source of energy could have powered the Sun for more than a few thousand years, therefore the Earth could be no older than that. But they didn't know about hydrogen fusion, so their numbers were worthless; garbage in, garbage out.
I'm sure you put great stock in the 10^40000 number because it fits with your prejudices. Problem is, the figure is highly sensitive to the assumptions behind it, and you've posted nothing to justify any of them. As just one for-instance, the implied assumption is that proteins are necessary for life. This ignores the possibility that the first self-replicator was an auto-catalytic molecule of RNA, to give just one other alternative.
If you like names, maybe you like quotes:
Life could not have originated here on Earth. Nor does it look as though biological evolution can be explained from within an earthbound theory of life. Genes from outside the Earth are needed to drive the evolutionary process. This much can be consolidated by strictly scientific means, by experiment, observation and calculation.
Fred Hoyle, The Intelligent Universe, (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1983), p. 242
Hoyle assumes that he has covered all the possibilities on Earth. Don't you think it's just a little bit presumptuous of him? I just gave one that he obviously missed.
As far as the reproducing organism, the cell has extremely complex parts to it, all necessary as the basic building block of life. So how did we go from nothing to something that not only had the capability to reproduce, but the energy drawing ability mitochondria, the membrane to filter out harmful materials, a nucleus with the ability to wrap long strands of DNA into a tiny compartment and safely keep it. Remember, all these things are needed for the most basic life to reproduce the first time.
You're quite wrong. Bacteria do not have mitochondria, nor do they have nuclei; yet they reproduce quite successfully. The trick of incorporating the DNA into a nucleus didn't have to come along until later. Mitochondria are an interesting case, and I'm glad you mentioned them. They are partially independent, and even have some of their own DNA. They reproduce inside cells, and the protein coding (translation from base triplets to amino acids) used in this DNA is different from the coding used by the rest of the cell! Oddly enough it is the same as the coding used by the archaebacteria, which includes many species of salt-loving beasties (halophytes) and photosynthetic bacteria. The best guess we have today is that some large cell once either ate an oxygen-loving archaebacterium and let it live instead of digesting it, or the archaebacterium invaded a large cell and made itself at home instead of killing it. The archaebacterium provided its special talent (processing of oxygen) to the larger cell, and the cell provided nutrients and defense and such to the archaebacterium. Thereafter they reproduced, and evolved, together.
Further, bacteria have over 100 times the DNA of a mammal, so 100 times the DNA somehow came together 3.8 billion years ago at the same time the Earth became habitable for life. So give or take half a billion years, there's still no chance. Even given your timeframe.
The human genome is about 3 billion base pairs. The genome of Methanococcus jannaschii is about 1.7 million base pairs long. Guess what? You're off by 5 orders of magnitude; bacteria have on the order of 1/1000 the DNA of a mammal.
For the sake of the people reading this, would you care to post the sources which wrote this malarkey? I'm sure they'd love to know who's trying to feed the public so many lies.
Just because one group cannot breed with another, does not mean it's a new species. Are horses and donkeys the same species?
Just because one group cannot breed with another, does not mean it's a new species. Take dogs for instance. Toy Poodles and Saint Bernards don't breed but they are still the same species, probably coming from the same wolf-like ancestor.
You can easily inseminate a St. Bernard with toy poodle sperm, and get viable (if mighty funny-looking) offspring. You can "mate" them via a succession of intermediate-sized breeds, which are all inter-fertile and create fertile offspring. Dogs are one species. Horses and donkeys are two different species.
Don't confuse microevolution with macroevolution. Each species has an incredible number of genes that can be selected among, leading to a large, yet finite, number of possibilities. The real question is, can new genes be created that fundamentally change the species?
There's no dividing line between "microevolution" and "macroevolution"; there's only evolution, which goes in different directions in varying amounts depending on the selective pressures and available variation in the gene pool.
The only people with a need to deny "macroevolution" are Creationists. They cannot deny that evolution occurs, so they have to create a fiction that it only occurs within a "kind", which they equate to "species". I regret (not really) to tell you that the facts are in and they refute your dogma.
Our Mr. AC here seems to have taken the ICR's lies as gospel.
Everything that you mentioned is theory and yet you present it as fact. The facts are that there are certain amounts of radioactive particles in the rocks or in the organic matter. The assumption comes when you say that the amount of radioactivity has remained constant and that the ratio in living tissue is a constant as well. These assumptions as well as the assumption that the decay rate has remained constant are the underlying basis for most of the theories that you state. Let's look at those assumptions one at a time.
And I'll refute your assertions, one at a time.
1) The amount of radioactive particles in the atmosphere is constant. This has been shown not to be true. Volcanoes emit huge amounts of radioactive particles and the amount of radioactive particles in the atmosphere is in constant fluctuation. All of the cataclysmic events that you list would cause tremendous changes in the amounts and ratios radioactive particles and non-radioactive particles.
Sorry, but you're wrong. First, that only applies to carbon-14, not other radioisotopes. Second, that is NOT an assumption used in radiocarbon dating, because it is known that the concentration of C-14 varies with the cosmic-ray bombardment of the Earth (which varies in turn with the solar cycle and other factors).
The radiocarbon scale has been calibrated using tree growth-ring data, which is completely independent of any radioisotope production or decay rate. Tree rings depend on there being 1 growth season and 1 winter per year, which is pretty easy to check on.;-)
2) The ratio of radioactive to non-radioactive particles in living material is a constant.
This can easily be shown to be untrue by sampling currently living organisms. A living mollusk was tested by the C-14 method and found, according to the formulas, to have been dead for over 10,000 years.
Horribly over-simplified; a straw-man argument. The assumption is that plants which draw their carbon from the atmosphere will all have pretty close to the same proportion of C-14. If a mollusc is feeding on bacteria which are growing on an oil seep (in which all the C-14 has long since decayed), of course it will register older than it is. The thing being dated is the carbon source, the plant which first fixed the atmospheric carbon. If the carbon source is a lot older than the organism, you get an incorrect date. Easy solution: don't carbon-date oil-consuming bacteria or the things that live on them. Date them by other means; in this case, a cross-check with the carbon date can yield information on the creature's diet.
3) The rate of decay of radioactive particles is a constant.
The rate of decay, from the evidence we have, fits an equation that includes the speed of light. Independent scientists have discovered evidence that the speed of light is much slower than it used to be.
This is another ICR lie. There is no scientific evidence that the speed of light has changed, and the fact that radioactive decay and atomic energy levels would be radically affected by such wild variations in mu-nought or epsilon-nought proves that this did not occur. The fact is that we are seeing light from billions of light-years away, and a universe which is less than 10,000 years old could not have such a thing, therefore, there is a lot of creationist handwaving associated with the attempt to paper over the contradiction. This is the only reason that anyone invokes a decreasing speed of light.
To show that the theory is only that and not fact, one only has to disprove one of the assumptions. two of the three assumotions are false and the third is in question.
Only in your own mind.
Also, to the age of the moon, with the original trips to the moon, NASA was concerned that the spacecraft would sink into the dust that has been collecting on the surface of the moon since it has been there. They estimated up to 40+ feet of dust based on theories of the age of the earth and moon. They were concerned about Neil Armstrong being ready to catch the ladder with his hands and go down the stairs slowly in case he started to sink, he could catch himself. It turns out that there was about 1/8" of dust allowing an age of the moon of about 4000-40,000 years. A relatively short amount of time compared to current evolutionary theories. This of course is if the rate of dust falling is approximately what it is now. If the solar system came out of collisions and explosions, there would have been more dust in the past than currently.
You're wrong several times over in just this one paragraph.
The Surveyor probe soft-landed on the moon and dug at it with a robotic arm before the first Apollo landing. There was no mystery about the properties of the Lunar surface by the time Neil Armstrong set foot on it; they had been tested.
The lack of 40 feet of loose dust is not proof for a young moon. Far from it; the moon has no atmosphere, and in a vacuum materials vacuum-weld themselves together. It is bonded together with a strength somewhere between soil and dried mud.
I do wish you ICR-types would come up with some new arguments.
There won't be a Scopes as a result of this. What will happen is that all the little podunk school districts will no longer have their graduates tested on anything related to evolution of species during the state exams, so they can water down their science curricula and still remain accredited.
This, of course, is going to make the existing problems of a scientifically-illiterate public and ill-prepared college applicants even worse.
And you know this how? The Scablands of Washington, IIRC, were cut by the catastrophic draining of a lake (the lake was created the the melting of part of a glacier during an ice age). Notice that the terrain of Washington does not resemble the Grand Canyon, and it is obvious that the Grand Canyon was not formed by a single catastrophic event.
If you actually believe "Creation Science" stuff, you'll believe anything.
Have you observed one species mutating into a completely different and better species? ie - fish to lizard, lizard to mouse, mouse to monkey, monkey to man...
What do you mean, "completely different and better"? Better for what? You relate monkeys and men as if the latter are superior to the former; that is your value judgement, not any kind of scientific ranking.
The only evolutionary comparison you can make is to look at which is the best at surviving and reproducing, and that only between two species trying to occupy the same niche. Monkeys like to eat fruits and leaves and live in the tropics, I like to eat meat and grains and live in the temperate zone; there is no scientific comparison you can make between me and a monkey in terms of "which is better". We are not competitors.
Now on to observations. It has been observed, I am told, that the wallabies which escaped into the wild in Hawaii have developed a mutation which allows them to eat some plants which are poisonous to Australian wallabies. Apparently they are also no longer inter-fertile with the Australian species; they have formed a completely new species. You can't deny that the new wallabies are "better" at surviving in the environment of Hawaii; they are better adapted. This has occurred in the space of what, a century? Numerous speciation events have been observed, in the laboratory and in the wild, in insects (especially fruit flies, which have such short generation times that observing them in the act of diverging is vastly easier than any vertebrate). We've watched evolution turn many different kinds of organisms (from bacteria to marsupials) into superior survival machines. And that is all that the theory of evolution predicts.
Also, gravity is not a theory. It is something that can be verified without a doubt time and time again. How gravity works has numerous theories. Evolution is just an unproven idea which makes it a theory to make sense of a pile of bones and rocks.
And piles of DNA, and a growing list of species we see now that weren't there a hundred, or even twenty, years ago... It can't be denied, Mr. AC. It's fact, just like gravity; just like gravity, it cannot be honestly denied. The remaining work is to pry out the details of its mechanisms.
From what I understand, this universe will eventually experience what is know as the "Heat death". So just what are we progressing towards?
"Heat death" is a concept which applies to a closed, non-expanding system. In such a system, heat builds up and cannot dissipate, and all thermodynamic processes which depend on an entropy sink (like life on earth) grind to a halt. That's heat death.
"Heat death" does not apply to an expanding universe. As the universe expands, the radiated heat from all other objects is red-shifted to longer and longer wavelengths (colder and colder temperatures) over time. There is always a place to radiate waste heat, and thermodynamic processes continue to be useful indefinitely.
There have been no new species in human history...
Sorry, you're completely wrong. New species of both invertebrates and vertebrates (including one marsupial) have been observed to evolve naturally in the last CENTURY. Look up "Hawaiian wallaby" if you are interested in some of the details that are really difficult for Creationism to deal with. Of course, fruit flies have been observed to speciate quite rapidly also (with generation times so short, they obviate many of the problems with things taking far longer than human lifetimes).
The fossil record does not indicate age at all, it is impossible for organic material to be dated to further back than a few thousand years using Carbon-14 methods.
You're making some extremely sloppy assumptions:
That it is necessary to date the carbon from the original organism to date the fossil;
That the material laid down with the fossil, or the fossil's position in strata which cannot be anything other than consecutive from bottom to top, carries no information about the age of the fossil.
You probably want to think more carefully in the future.
We theorize about the mechanisms and results of evolution.
Therefore, evolution is both fact and theory, QED.
You can say exactly the same about gravity: we observe the fact of gravity, we have theories about the mechanism of gravity, therefore gravity is both theory and fact (if you are only being as consistent and rigorous with the terms as most people are).
And why not? The sum of many small changes can add up to a big change, just like the sum of many small numbers can be a big number.
Micro evolution deals with adaptation within a species, macro evolution deals with the creation of species.
If that's your criterion, you have to concede your point already. We have observed speciation events (in insects, true) both in the laboratory and in the field. We have also observed it in mammals, specifically the Hawaiian wallaby if memory serves.
Now tell me, how do multiple species arise from a *SINGLE* population? It can't happen. According to the theory of evolution, how can there be a half dozen species of monkeys in a single area? *ANY* interbreeding, and the species don't seperate.
That's pretty simple. Suppose you have two different food trees in an area. Due to a mutation, a monkey gets a variant of a digestive enzyme which is considerably better at digesting the leaves of one, and is worse at the other. This monkey spends most of his time on trees of type A, and avoids type B. As this gene spreads among the monkeys which stay around A trees, the other monkeys stay around B trees because there is less competition (and their stomachs work better on B leaves anyway). Breeding between the groups isn't good for the A-tree monkeys, and maybe not for the B-tree monkeys either, so they tend to form reproductively-isolated populations even if they occupy the same territory. Eventually you wind up with two species which do not or cannot interbreed.
But, while evolution may even be possible, it ain't what's going on here. In addition to all this evidence that I just showed you, recently some mathematicians prove that it would have taken 40-50 billion years to get to the present stage.
If you take that seriously, you'll love this:
There are 365 days in a year available for work.
You get 2 weeks of vacation each year, leaving 351 days for work.
You only work 8 hours of a 24 hour day, leaving 117 days for work.
You have 2 days off each of 50 weekends, leaving 17 days for work.
You have 10 sick days each year, leaving 7 days for work.
You have the holidays of Christmas, New Year's Eve, New Year's Day, Memorial Day, Labor Day and Thanksgiving. That is 6 days, leaving 1 day for work.
AND YOU WANT A DAY OFF, YOU LAZY BUM?!
No, I'm not serious. I'm just showing you how easy it is to feed garbage into a calculation and get garbage out. (Those "mathematicians"... you wouldn't be able to name any, would you?)
Your view of enthropy is incorrect. In order for the sun to reverse the flow of enthropy, it would have to absorb energy, not radiate it. You'd turn the sun into a 'white hole' with your theory.
The word is "entropy", and it is obvious that you failed thermodynamics. Entropy is carried by flows of energy and matter. The solar energy which flows into Earth has less entropy than the low-temperature heat that Earth radiates away. Thus, the flow of energy from the Sun allows (but does not require; re-read your intro thermo textbook) entropy to be removed from the Earth, QED.
If evolution dogma is as opinionated as that story, we're doing scientific investigation a disservice to allow evolution into the dictionary.
We're doing a tremendous disservice to the children of the USA to allow any concessions to the religious right in their science classes. To avoid teaching science which questions Creationist dogma requires that evolution be short-changed as a subject; since understanding of modern biology requires an understanding of evolution and its principles, this basically puts these children into a state where they require remedial classes in order to get a science degree. I should not have to point out that this is a luxury that we cannot afford.
And you know this because you have measured the length of the bacterial genome and found it to have increased? Pardon me if I do not take you seriously.
Just because the bacterium became resistant to something does not mean it increased in complexity. It just means that it was changed to become better at a particular task, like resisting hexachlorophene or streptomycin. If the superior proteins had no more amino acids than the originals, the complexity of the DNA molecule would not necessarily have changed at all. It would just be a different sequence.
Oh give me a clone Of my own flesh and bone With the Y chromosome changed to X And when she is grown My very own clone She will be of the opposite sex.
Clone, clone of my own With the Y chromosome changed to X And when we're alone 'Cause her mind is my own She'll be thinking of nothing but sex.
Even the foremost scientists in evolution are now pointing to a meteor that came down to Earth and brought life with it.
"They" are? Who? Name some names. If "they" are as prominent as you claim you should have no difficulty, should you?
Statements like this only prove your ignorance; anyone can see that the origin of life, and the subsequent development of life, are two completely different issues. Whether life originated on Earth or was seeded from somewhere else has no bearing on the observed fact of evolution since that time.
Why? because they concluded the Earth is too small to possibly have enough reactions to create a protein molecule in a billion-billion years.
This is the same "they" you cited above, no? On the other hand, repeated experiments done with mixtures of ammonia, methane, CO2 and water subjected to electric sparks and ultraviolet life showed the creation of amino acids in just a few days.
You probably bought into the fallacy that because one particular protein molecule would have taken 10^18 years to create by random chance, that it is therefore impossible. The person who fed you this lie didn't bother telling you that different species and even different genes found within the same species make different proteins for doing the same job (proving that one particular protein sequence is not important). Second, molecular evolution experiments done in the laboratory have proven that molecules which are selected for their ability to perform a given task evolve very quickly. This comes up to my last point: once the first self-reproducing agent exists, no matter how small or how simple, the rules of the game are dominated by reproductive success under the selective pressures of the environment: in other words, evolution.
Just as an example of the faulty reasoning you're using...
A small planet needs to orbit entirely within the "Goldilocks zone" and maintain it over a long period of time. If the Earth-Sun distance were 1% larger, our mean global temperature would be -50 degrees farenheight.
Studies of younger stars, IIRC, show that they shine up to 30% less brightly than our Sun for the same mass; this corresponds to about a 15% greater distance from the Sun to get the same reduction in energy. According to the reasoning you've bought into, Earth should have been a frozen waste for most of the last 4 billion years. The geologic record including the Carboniferous era shows that Earth has been quite a bit warmer in the past than it is now.
Obviously the premise, that climate is extremely sensitive to the solar energy supply, cannot be correct. The obvious connection is greenhouse gases. Carbon dioxide is put into the atmosphere by volcanoes, and removed by the weathering of rocks to form carbonates. When the carbonates are subducted, the CO2 winds up coming back through volcanoes again. If an ice age interferes with rainfall there will be a hiatus in the weathering of rocks, and the CO2 level of the atmosphere will build up as nothing acts to remove the volcanic output from the air. This regulatory mechanism goes on as long as the process of plate tectonics works to recycle the oceanic crust. When the planet cools to the point where plate tectonics stops (like Mars), CO2 is not replaced, the greenhouse regulation mechanism stops working, and an ice age ensues which lasts until the parent star heads into its red-giant phase.
On top of this, life does not require the world as a whole to be hospitable; isolated niches like volcanic vents deep under the seas are sufficient. If fossil (or existing) life is found on Mars, it will prove that life is robust and adaptable and probably exists anywhere that conditions permit; those conditions are far broader, in places far stranger, than you are even able to imagine.
So you push the problem back to the scale of the universe. The problem still exists.
Nope. The universe cannot experience "heat death" so long as it is expanding. Expansion keeps "diluting" the existing stock of entropy. If the universe were static or contracting, then the problem would exist, but an expanding universe amounts to an infinite heat sink.
Evolution is a gradual change that takes hundreds of thousands if not millions of years.
Nope. Not even. Evolution of a new species (a group which does not reproduce with members of the original species) has been observed in insects within a single human lifetime. Of course insects have much shorter generations (making it feasible to observe this in a relatively small interval of time), but the principle is the same.
i think that federal laws automatically take precedence over state laws
Where there is a conflict. But just because a section of one law in one place says that act X is not a violation of that law, it does not mean that another law in another place cannot criminalize act X.
If you look at the badsoftware.com web site (like an idiot I forgot to bookmark it), you'll find examples of ways that a company could write a license to prohibit use of the product for purposes of reverse-engineering. Under UCITA, a company could sell you software under a "license" that you couldn't examine until after you'd paid for it, and under the terms of that license prohibit you from doing anything to analyze how the software works or compare it against other software (like McAffee prohibits others from publishing results of tests without their consent.) Go to the site and read the papers.
...
it would be quite hard to find spefic lines that have been reversed.
You are obviously confusing copied code with reverse engineered code. While it would be trivial to compare two blocks of code line-by-line to see if one had been copied, it is all but impossible to look at an independently-created block of code and see if it was developed by disassembling another program to examine its methods of operation or by just watching its interactions with the rest of the world.
Slashdot Mirror
- Why would a difference in the number of genes be necessary?
- What makes you think that it's unlikely? Entire chromosomes, containing thousands of genes, are often duplicated or deleted in organisms all the time.
Are you a geneticist? If not, how do you know that they would find such commonplace events difficult to believe?Pardon me if I stop taking you seriously.
I'm sure you put great stock in the 10^40000 number because it fits with your prejudices. Problem is, the figure is highly sensitive to the assumptions behind it, and you've posted nothing to justify any of them. As just one for-instance, the implied assumption is that proteins are necessary for life. This ignores the possibility that the first self-replicator was an auto-catalytic molecule of RNA, to give just one other alternative.
Hoyle assumes that he has covered all the possibilities on Earth. Don't you think it's just a little bit presumptuous of him? I just gave one that he obviously missed. You're quite wrong. Bacteria do not have mitochondria, nor do they have nuclei; yet they reproduce quite successfully. The trick of incorporating the DNA into a nucleus didn't have to come along until later. Mitochondria are an interesting case, and I'm glad you mentioned them. They are partially independent, and even have some of their own DNA. They reproduce inside cells, and the protein coding (translation from base triplets to amino acids) used in this DNA is different from the coding used by the rest of the cell! Oddly enough it is the same as the coding used by the archaebacteria, which includes many species of salt-loving beasties (halophytes) and photosynthetic bacteria. The best guess we have today is that some large cell once either ate an oxygen-loving archaebacterium and let it live instead of digesting it, or the archaebacterium invaded a large cell and made itself at home instead of killing it. The archaebacterium provided its special talent (processing of oxygen) to the larger cell, and the cell provided nutrients and defense and such to the archaebacterium. Thereafter they reproduced, and evolved, together. The human genome is about 3 billion base pairs. The genome of Methanococcus jannaschii is about 1.7 million base pairs long. Guess what? You're off by 5 orders of magnitude; bacteria have on the order of 1/1000 the DNA of a mammal.For the sake of the people reading this, would you care to post the sources which wrote this malarkey? I'm sure they'd love to know who's trying to feed the public so many lies.
The only people with a need to deny "macroevolution" are Creationists. They cannot deny that evolution occurs, so they have to create a fiction that it only occurs within a "kind", which they equate to "species". I regret (not really) to tell you that the facts are in and they refute your dogma.
The radiocarbon scale has been calibrated using tree growth-ring data, which is completely independent of any radioisotope production or decay rate. Tree rings depend on there being 1 growth season and 1 winter per year, which is pretty easy to check on. ;-)
Horribly over-simplified; a straw-man argument. The assumption is that plants which draw their carbon from the atmosphere will all have pretty close to the same proportion of C-14. If a mollusc is feeding on bacteria which are growing on an oil seep (in which all the C-14 has long since decayed), of course it will register older than it is. The thing being dated is the carbon source, the plant which first fixed the atmospheric carbon. If the carbon source is a lot older than the organism, you get an incorrect date. Easy solution: don't carbon-date oil-consuming bacteria or the things that live on them. Date them by other means; in this case, a cross-check with the carbon date can yield information on the creature's diet. This is another ICR lie. There is no scientific evidence that the speed of light has changed, and the fact that radioactive decay and atomic energy levels would be radically affected by such wild variations in mu-nought or epsilon-nought proves that this did not occur. The fact is that we are seeing light from billions of light-years away, and a universe which is less than 10,000 years old could not have such a thing, therefore, there is a lot of creationist handwaving associated with the attempt to paper over the contradiction. This is the only reason that anyone invokes a decreasing speed of light. Only in your own mind. You're wrong several times over in just this one paragraph.- The Surveyor probe soft-landed on the moon and dug at it with a robotic arm before the first Apollo landing. There was no mystery about the properties of the Lunar surface by the time Neil Armstrong set foot on it; they had been tested.
- The lack of 40 feet of loose dust is not proof for a young moon. Far from it; the moon has no atmosphere, and in a vacuum materials vacuum-weld themselves together. It is bonded together with a strength somewhere between soil and dried mud.
I do wish you ICR-types would come up with some new arguments."If marriage is outlawed, only outlaws will have inlaws."
This, of course, is going to make the existing problems of a scientifically-illiterate public and ill-prepared college applicants even worse.
If you actually believe "Creation Science" stuff, you'll believe anything.
The only evolutionary comparison you can make is to look at which is the best at surviving and reproducing, and that only between two species trying to occupy the same niche. Monkeys like to eat fruits and leaves and live in the tropics, I like to eat meat and grains and live in the temperate zone; there is no scientific comparison you can make between me and a monkey in terms of "which is better". We are not competitors.
Now on to observations. It has been observed, I am told, that the wallabies which escaped into the wild in Hawaii have developed a mutation which allows them to eat some plants which are poisonous to Australian wallabies. Apparently they are also no longer inter-fertile with the Australian species; they have formed a completely new species. You can't deny that the new wallabies are "better" at surviving in the environment of Hawaii; they are better adapted. This has occurred in the space of what, a century? Numerous speciation events have been observed, in the laboratory and in the wild, in insects (especially fruit flies, which have such short generation times that observing them in the act of diverging is vastly easier than any vertebrate). We've watched evolution turn many different kinds of organisms (from bacteria to marsupials) into superior survival machines. And that is all that the theory of evolution predicts.
And piles of DNA, and a growing list of species we see now that weren't there a hundred, or even twenty, years ago... It can't be denied, Mr. AC. It's fact, just like gravity; just like gravity, it cannot be honestly denied. The remaining work is to pry out the details of its mechanisms."Heat death" does not apply to an expanding universe. As the universe expands, the radiated heat from all other objects is red-shifted to longer and longer wavelengths (colder and colder temperatures) over time. There is always a place to radiate waste heat, and thermodynamic processes continue to be useful indefinitely.
- That it is necessary to date the carbon from the original organism to date the fossil;
- That the material laid down with the fossil, or the fossil's position in strata which cannot be anything other than consecutive from bottom to top, carries no information about the age of the fossil.
You probably want to think more carefully in the future.Some beliefs just don't hold up, and should be discarded. To do otherwise is foolish, and ultimately damaging.
We observe evolution.
We theorize about the mechanisms and results of evolution.
Therefore, evolution is both fact and theory, QED.
You can say exactly the same about gravity: we observe the fact of gravity, we have theories about the mechanism of gravity, therefore gravity is both theory and fact (if you are only being as consistent and rigorous with the terms as most people are).
Are you still a devotee of the crackpot theories of Immanuel Velikovsky?
Just because the bacterium became resistant to something does not mean it increased in complexity. It just means that it was changed to become better at a particular task, like resisting hexachlorophene or streptomycin. If the superior proteins had no more amino acids than the originals, the complexity of the DNA molecule would not necessarily have changed at all. It would just be a different sequence.
Oh give me a clone
Of my own flesh and bone
With the Y chromosome changed to X
And when she is grown
My very own clone
She will be of the opposite sex.
Clone, clone of my own
With the Y chromosome changed to X
And when we're alone
'Cause her mind is my own
She'll be thinking of nothing but sex.
Statements like this only prove your ignorance; anyone can see that the origin of life, and the subsequent development of life, are two completely different issues. Whether life originated on Earth or was seeded from somewhere else has no bearing on the observed fact of evolution since that time.
This is the same "they" you cited above, no? On the other hand, repeated experiments done with mixtures of ammonia, methane, CO2 and water subjected to electric sparks and ultraviolet life showed the creation of amino acids in just a few days.You probably bought into the fallacy that because one particular protein molecule would have taken 10^18 years to create by random chance, that it is therefore impossible. The person who fed you this lie didn't bother telling you that different species and even different genes found within the same species make different proteins for doing the same job (proving that one particular protein sequence is not important). Second, molecular evolution experiments done in the laboratory have proven that molecules which are selected for their ability to perform a given task evolve very quickly. This comes up to my last point: once the first self-reproducing agent exists, no matter how small or how simple, the rules of the game are dominated by reproductive success under the selective pressures of the environment: in other words, evolution.
Obviously the premise, that climate is extremely sensitive to the solar energy supply, cannot be correct. The obvious connection is greenhouse gases. Carbon dioxide is put into the atmosphere by volcanoes, and removed by the weathering of rocks to form carbonates. When the carbonates are subducted, the CO2 winds up coming back through volcanoes again. If an ice age interferes with rainfall there will be a hiatus in the weathering of rocks, and the CO2 level of the atmosphere will build up as nothing acts to remove the volcanic output from the air. This regulatory mechanism goes on as long as the process of plate tectonics works to recycle the oceanic crust. When the planet cools to the point where plate tectonics stops (like Mars), CO2 is not replaced, the greenhouse regulation mechanism stops working, and an ice age ensues which lasts until the parent star heads into its red-giant phase.
On top of this, life does not require the world as a whole to be hospitable; isolated niches like volcanic vents deep under the seas are sufficient. If fossil (or existing) life is found on Mars, it will prove that life is robust and adaptable and probably exists anywhere that conditions permit; those conditions are far broader, in places far stranger, than you are even able to imagine.
If you look at the badsoftware.com web site (like an idiot I forgot to bookmark it), you'll find examples of ways that a company could write a license to prohibit use of the product for purposes of reverse-engineering. Under UCITA, a company could sell you software under a "license" that you couldn't examine until after you'd paid for it, and under the terms of that license prohibit you from doing anything to analyze how the software works or compare it against other software (like McAffee prohibits others from publishing results of tests without their consent.) Go to the site and read the papers.
However, this is
- NOT NEWS
. This identical item was on Slashdot a few weeks ago, and then the article suddenly disappeared.To re-post this as a new item is misleading and a disservice to the Slashdot community.