`Well-supported' means that there is much evidence to back it. Evolution has had much opinion, much theory and much modelling grow up around it but essentially zero actual hard evidence in support of it being right.
Well, despite your claims, there is overwhelming evidence that evolution occurs. And the theory of evolution explains the data. Just like the theory of gravity explains the effects of gravity.
Odd that you should choose that example (you're good at this), because the `theory of gravity' only matches what gravity does, it can't actually say why it does what it does. It says `gravity does this' and stops before getting to the `because' part. Same goes for theories of magnetism. The theory of evolution, despite its amazing flexibility, does not explain the data. For example, turtles have nice hard shells that fossilise readily, and indeed we have plenty of turtle fossils - but no fossils at all of proto-turtles, half-formed turtles. Nothing markedly different from the turtles that swim past a few kilometers east of me right now. Pulling the `unlucky' gag about the incompleteness of the fossil record won't wash, because - as I said - we have plenty of turtle fossils... and the same goes for many other species.
One of the big problems with evolution is that it can be bent to fit almost any circumstance, almost any evidence. In other words, it has very little - if any - actual
explanatory power.
Well, you are the one trying to use a theory in the field of biology for questions dealing with geology (see below), or Adolph Hitler
No, I use science to deal with science. You are the one subcategorising everything and wriggling like a worm on the hook instead of giving straight answers. You don't seem to have understood the point about explanatory power. If it explains too much, then it shows that it has really explained nothing. If it is so flexible that it will fit anything, then it is also so weak that it cannot support anything.
About Pattersons lecture. Everything he wrote before and after that time supports evolution. So I expect that it is an out of context quote, an opening dialog meant to be contraversial to get their audiences attention.
Suspect all you like, then go read the docs. Patterson was indeed troubled to the depths of his heart (read a lot more context here) by what he could see. His faith was not as string as Lewin's - or, come to think of it, as the other participants in the Wistar series:
After a particularly telling paper by Marcel Shutzenberger of the University of Paris, the chairman of the gathering, C.H. Waddington, said, "Your argument is simply that life must have come about by special creation!" The stenographer records, "Schutzenberger: No! Voices: No!" Anything but creation; it wasn't even fair (in spite of the evidence!) to bring up the word. --
Facts of Life , Page 21 (quote from the transcript)
Well, I don't know what an evolutionist would do with this but I could guess. When I ask them about evolution the only answer I get from them is, "Convergence is everywhere." -- Pattersen again
No materialist prejudice here, is there?
Oh yes, Baughs famous hammer. Typical creationist "Evidence". A 19th century miners hammer encased in soluble minerals.
You say that very simply, as you do with many things, but how was that actually done? The report you link says things like `Well-preserved wood from Mesozoic or Paleozoic formations would not be expected to have such an appearance' - as if the entire situation were expected. As it turns out, wood just sticking out of the ground in France, and wood embedded in Hawkesbury sandstone (ie, neither sample from `modern' times, the Hawkesbury at least double the `age', and see RAE for some other examples) was not mineralised either. In short, good effort but no definite conclusions. I do wish anyone but Baugh had it, he's not a very careful researcher at all - and a few other things.
And Mt St Helens - you really cannot try to compare "canyons" carved through ash to canyons carved in rock.
Were they indeed carved through hard rock? How do you know? Or is it materialist presumptions again? If Creation theory is correct, the rock the Grand Canyon was carved through was likely to have been not particularly hard at the time.
Furthermore, evolution isn't supposed to explain these two things. Evolution is a theory in the field of biology, and those events are (other than fraudulent or deceptive) in the field of geology.
Yes, they are. But biological evolution has certain prerequisites, and these prerequisites can be eliminated by examining geology. Again, you are acting as if reality were partitionable at will to suit your needs. It isn't. It's all interconnected. Which, BTW, is another problem for evolution.
All of science deals with the natural, not the supernatural.
Support that assertion. And see my post of a few minutes ago.
Science, faith and the material world
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The Wistar conference wasn't a disagreement. The mathematicians there were in general agreement on this point: evolution is mathematically well out of the question.
ROTFL.
Really?
`The central question of the Chicago conferences was whether the mechanisms underlying microevolution can be extrapolated to explain the phenomena of macroevolution.' -- Roger Lewin,
Evolutionary Theory Under Fire, in Science, November 21, 1980.
`At the risk of doing violence to the positions of some of the people at the meeting, the answer can be given as a clear No.' -- Roger Lewin, The Neck of the Giraffe (1982), p. 12.
Go on, accuse Lewin of being a Creationist, I dare you! (-:
Note that Lewin is an evolutionist despite knowing that what he believes is mathematically impossible. Is that not a wonderfully strong faith?
Gary Parker thought so:
In one graduate class, the professor told us we didn't have to memorize the dates of the geologic systems since they were far too uncertain and conflicting. Then in geophysics we went over all of the assumptions that go into radiometric dating. Afterwards, the professor said something like this, "If a fundamentalist ever got hold of this stuff, he would make havoc out of the radiometric dating system. So, keep the faith." That's what he told us, "keep the faith." If it was a matter of keeping faith, I now had another faith I preferred to keep.
Now you know that there is faith on both sides of the question. Let's carry on...
You claim that creationists have had answers to the question "what is the scientific theory of creationism?". But they all fail the simple tests of any scientific theory:
Must explain the data
Must be falsifiable
Must be able to make predictions.
These are simple criteria; however, their answers all boil down to one thing: Goddoneit!
Uh, yes? That's why it's called creationism, you see. The theory is that `God done it.' Materialists, having no God, are reduced to saying `accidents done it' (but accidents destroy, they don't structure), `coincidences done it' (ie let's ignore the odds) or `time done it' (but there ain't enough time).
And that ceases to be science,
Wrong.
since science deals with the natural world
No, science deals with whatever it can test. Science attempts to make predictions even when it doesn't really understand what's going on. Newton could say what apples do when they abandon their tree, even if he couldn't say why, and that was science. Even if God intervened in an experiment essentially at random, a scientist can deal with that in the same way that they deal with other factors which might randomly influence an experiment (deleting outliers, that kind of thing).
Basically, if something is supernatural, items 1-3 would not necessarly hold.
Not every time, no. But they hold often enough to be testable.
By the way, "special creation" is a supernatural event, so it is not in the re[a]lm of science.
And a `big bang' isn't? Someone was there with a camera? Or is it experimentally repeatable? Pull the other one, it plays `jingle bells'!
Well, science does not deal with the supernatural
Says who?
On one hand you're saying that I must present to you a theory, and on the other you are ruling any possible theory `out of court'. Make up your mind: will your faith in materialism (and confusion of it with science) prevent you from examining any theory rationally (so you must forfeit any proof and be honest about your faith), or will you actually reason through a theory if I present one?
Evolution is a fact. This is physical evidence, and there is an overwhelming amount of it. This includes fossels, DNA, and evolution observed in the wild and in the laboratory.
So you keep asserting and opining, but assertions and opinions are not evidence.
Millions of sequencing exercises are not evidence for evolution unless they can provide a reasonable and statistically likely path for evolution (or show all alternatiuves to be even less likely, but that still wouldn't prove evolution).
Fossils speak loudly of millions of years not existing. Polystrates are a good example of this. Fossils supposedly 65 million years old yet containing intact organic material are another.
DNA speaks loudly of design and structure impossible to achieve incrementally. Where to the Urey/Miller experiments lead? Nowhere! What is `junk DNA'? Proof of a clumsy God? Says we, who have yet to design an organism that functions at all, leta lone poorly. An Australian company has just assured itself a place in history by `patenting' junk DNA and then showing that it isn't junk - as predicted by many Creationists!
Evolution has never been witnessed in the wild. Variation within kind (baramin) has. As I mentioned elsewhere, even the beak-size adaptation in Darwin Finches so beloved of the AAAS is cyclic. Peppered moths are a well-established fraud, more variation in kind, and the moths in the photos were glued on to the bark because they don't normally hang out where they can be seen and eaten. And so on.
Re:Social Darwinism (long)
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And, speaking of Hitler:
"Hence today I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord."
A bit of research into background will show you that Adolf had some seriously weird ideas about who `the Lord' was. It's a bit difficult to say from this snippet whether he was at this time using a definition which most closely matched `myself', `some nebulous creative force', `my Lord the Pope' or even something more or less Godlike. As well as being a Roman Catholic in good standing right up to his death, Adolf has also been tagged (with reasonable support) as a worshipper of Wotan. It's probably important for your understanding to point out that `Roman Catholic' and `Christian' are concepts which overlap in places but are most definitely not identity.
So, here he is using Christianity, instead of Darwins' theory of evolution. I condemn both uses. How about you?
Firstly, it's not determinate that he's basing his speech on Christianity as such at all.
If he were speaking from a Roman Catholic perspective, his conclusion could match in one of several ways. The Roman Catholic Church supported Adolf up to the point where it became obvious that he was going to lose, then they shafted him.
They'd supported Communism in an effort to destroy their ancient Orthodox enemy, and that went completely bung so they next tried supporting Hitler against both. That went almost completely bung too, except in countries like Yugoslavia and Poland (they killed millions of Orthodox in ways that sickened even the SS(!)) but at least they got most of their gold back.
But I digress. Adolf wanted to model the Reich after the Jesuit organisation, so it wouldn't be hard for him to mix up whatever helped the Reich or Romanism with `the work of the Lord' in his mind.
Consider also that Adolf's view of `the mighty creator' seems to consistently regard it as having created gradually and by a wasteful and destructive process of natural selection, which process he intended to assist particularly with regard to non-Aryan races.
BTW, compared with how he treated other peoples, Hitler wasn't actually that hard on the Jews. The six-million figure often quoted is clearly bullshit (population figures can't possibly support it), it was likely of the order of a million. He killed more Czeks than that.
One reason for His antagonism against the Jews as a race, at least initially, was that they (as Judaism) were ancient enemies of his supporter and model, Romanism.
Anyway, I digress again, Adolf's practice of Eugenics was based squarely on a rational interpretation of the process of natural selection coupled with the classic bigoted opinion about who the `better' race were - just like Darwin himself. It's kind of ironic that Adolf favoured tall, blonde races but was short and dark-haired himself.
I'm going to digress again. `Bigot' came from Reformers being torched by Romanists: `will you renounce your neresy?' `no, by God' => byGod => bigot. So originally, a bigot was simply someone stubborn to the point of death.
In summary of all of the above, I don't believe Adolf to have been misapplying Darwinism. Darwin himself used Darwinism that way, regarding Negroes as biologically inferior and destined one day to fade away, the victims of natural selection. It's an inescapable conclusion of any reasoning which starts with natural selection as a base.
If Adolf was misusing Christinity as such, then he was simply wrong. The Lord did not call on him to smite anyone.
It seems to be at least 24km, large-Milo(r)-tin-to-half-omni, provided that the half-omni is in Perth's Hills area and the Milo(r) tin has clear LOS to it from the flat bit.
There is no relation between Darwin's theory of evolution and so called Social Darwinism.
I kind of suspected you were operating from a different planet. I strongly suggest starting with the actual names, `Darwinian Evolution' and `Social Darwinism' and see if you can draw at least the tiniest smidgeon of commonality from them.
Quoting one Adolph Hitler Shicklgruber, from the chapter `On Race and Man' in Mein Kampf: `If Nature does not wish that weaker individuals should mate with the stronger, she wishes even less that a superior race should intermingle with an inferior one; because in such a case all her efforts, throughout hundreds of thousands of years, to establish an evolutionary higher stage of being, may thus be rendered futile. [...] In short, the results of miscegenation are always the following: (a) The level of the superior race becomes lowered; (b) physical and mental degeneration sets in, thus leading slowly but steadily towards a progressive drying up of the vital sap. [...] anyone who sincerely wishes that the pacifist idea should prevail in this world ought to do all he is capable of doing to help the Germans conquer the world'
There you have it: principle, method, implementation. Any questions? Want more examples from other Atheists? Or is your plastic starting to leak?
dork.origins, Wistar and theories
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trying to point out minor disagreements by scientists in fields related to evolution, and then claiming that it disproves the theory of evolution is dangerous.
The Wistar conference wasn't a disagreement. The mathematicians there were in general agreement on this point: evolution is mathematically well out of the question.
The `disagreement' you cite was over whether this pointed to special creation or not, and the transcript clearly shows that essentially all present regarded this as deplorable heresy, unthinkable, excluded from consideration by their prior commitment (ie not by reason alone), presumably to materialism dressed in a white lab coat.
I know that the good [hah!] folks at the Usenet newsgroup talk.origins have been asking creationists that for many. many years for that, and have never gotten an answer.
Search the archives: they've had many answers and simply ruled them inadmissable using their own, materialist, non-scientific criteria. And or forgotten them (welcome to cognitive dissonance land). What do you expect?
Scientific theory of creationism
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So, can you tell me what a scientific theory of creationism is? It has to follow all of the usual rules for a scientific theory - explain the data, be falsifiable, and be able to make predictions.
Sure can! Do you want my ideas, or are you interested in the pronouncements of more qualified people?
You know, there's a frighteningly simple reason for that, and it ought to be framed and displayed in every lab in the world.
Evolution is
not a scientific theory!
Evolution is a scientific-sounding expression of the religion of Materialism. It's kind of like turning the brightness on your video camera waaay down and then claiming to have video evidence that only white horses win horse-races: until you're prepared to adjust your view to include other colours of horse, you'll be fooling only people who don't watch other videos, and don't go to look at the horse races for themselves.
By the way, if there was a SERIOUS challenge to the theory of evolution, it could make a scientists career.
Or more likely, break it.
Stephen J Gould, for one example, found that evolution didn't work for him, so he completely rebuilt the theory of the mechanism for it. Now we have the pleasure of sitting back and reading from both his pen, and the pens of his opponents, why neither strand of evolutionary reasoning can work.
A chap named Senapathy tried a different tack, and hasn't ben as lucky in locating supporters.
Note a statement from supporter Mattox: `I realized that he was a scientist and definitely not a creationist, so I ordered the book'. Hmmm. That speaks volumes.
It [evolution] explains the fossel record, bacteria resistance to antibiotics, relationships of species, differences in DNA between species, etc.
Actually, you've hit on a very useful selection of arguments, from my POV. You might like to try some different ones.
Fossil record: it completely fails to explain polystrate fossils (in particular those with no detectable surrounding turbulence), out-of-sequence fossils (in particular those with no sign of reworking), paraconformities, and massive (tens of thousands of square km) out-of-sequence blocks of strata with little or no sign of overthrust damage, and countless other less obvious things.
Bacterial resistance: it completely fails to explain this, as well. Plasmid exchange is a very cunning and complex mechanism for passing around pieces of DNA for use in random-trial immunity development. Both the mechanisms and a useful selection of plasmids must have been available, complete, before this would have any selective advantage. Oops.
Species relationships and DNA: the DNA and the species they represent create more problems than solutions when viewed through evolution-coloured glasses. Sometimes there is a clear relationship, and sometimes there is not a hint of rhyme or reason in the correlation between DNA and creature. If you're thinking of resting your case on Darwin's finches and variations in beak size or shape, think again.
Quote, `During a drought on the Galapagos Islands, the average beak size of finches increased, enabling them to eat the larger, drought resistant seeds. By extrapolation, it was claimed that a new species of finch might develop within 200 years. Unfortunately, when the rains came, the beak sizes returned to normal, and the evidence only supports oscillating natural selection with no net evolutionary change.'
DNA itself should give you pause for thought. We have something like 300 million base-pairs in our own DNA, in a complex and very specific array of arrays of arrays. Accident? Don't bet on it.
Support for your theory
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The theory of evolution is one of the best supported scientific theories. An overwhelming number of scientists working in related fields concur.
Disagree. Popular != well-supported.
`Well-supported' means that there is much evidence to back it. Evolution has had much opinion, much theory and much modelling grow up around it but essentially zero actual hard evidence in support of it being right.
As one man, an evolutionist, said, `For over twenty years I had thought that I was working on evolution in some way. One morning I woke up, and something had happened in the night, and it struck me that I had been working on this stuff for twenty years, and there was not one thing I knew about it. That was quite a shock, to learn that one can be so misled for so long.' That was a word for word quote from the paleontologist, Dr Colin Patterson, addressing a persentation at the American Museum of Natural History (people like Niles Eldridge and James Farris) in November 1981.
What did he do about it? `So for the last few weeks, I've tried putting a simple question to various people and groups of people. The question is this: Can you tell me anything you know about evolution, any one thing, any one thing that you think is true? [...] And the absence of an answer seems to suggest that it is true, evolution does not convey any knowledge, or if so, I haven't yet heard it.'
One of the big problems with evolution is that it can be bent to fit almost any circumstance, almost any evidence. In other words, it has very little - if any - actual explanatory power.
There is also a considerable body of evidence which evolutionary theory is completely and utterly unable to explain in any meaningful way, from `spectacular' finds like a wooden-handled steel hammer in `300-450 million year old' rock and the mini-Grand-Canyon at Mt St Helens to very mundane problems with cell mechanisms.
And most of them are Christian.
Definitely untrue. A significant minority are Christian, or at least think of themselves as Christian. Not a majority (`most'). Even if there was a majority, what would it prove...?
I'm 39, have at least three children, and earn $120 an hour for consulting. And rarely get to play Quake, which I do admire for its, uh, execution.
99% of computers ever made have been constructed for some other purpose than playing a deathly boring first person killing game
Yeah, running viruses, apparently... oops, Billy boy only has 94% of the desktop. Does Quake exist for the Mac? If so, we could probably go pretty close to 99% at least capable of it, if not actually designed to do it. Tell me with a straight face that all of those 3D cards ship for use only in CAD workstations.
Pocket? What's the point of playing Quake in your pocket? Or maybe I shouldn't ask...
640*5104==3.2M CPUs... so I can dedicate four CPUs to each pixel on a 1024x768 display, and get reasonable Quake performance without hardware acceleration? (-:
You'd have to redesign a lot of atoms
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There may be forms of life out there that have nothing to do with amino acids or DNA or even liquid water.
You'd have to redesign a lot of atoms.
For example, water is very special in a number of ways, starting with being very small and highly polar, and working outwards.
In the case of systems like DNA, you have very specific atoms arranged in large, highly ordered groups of groups, to form codons; these codons are bound to their DNA strand (itself amazingly complex); the two DNA strands bound to each other with complementary codons and twisted just so, the whole lot folded, and folded again, each enfoldment a marvel of geometry and held in place by (again) very specific complementary geometry and features (bump-hollow, pluspolar-minuspolar, oily-oily etc). This is just DNA I'm on about so far, we haven't explored the miracles of RNA transcription, the automated untangling that happens as this progresses along the (foleded!) DNA strands, yadda, yadda, or worked up the scale to the incredibly complicated array of interdependent molecular factories, structure and membranes which fill a living cell... I have a couple of huge wall-charts from Roche which show a massive simplification of the 1,000 `most important' reaction paths of the 50,000 _known_ in a cell (and given a typical collection of roughly 2000 organelles in a cell, the 50,000 looks very impoverished, a small fraction of reality). The simplified diagrams look like a collection all of the marshalling yards in the USA, in colour, after an earthquake and a tornado came through.
OK, now if such specific atomic properties are necessary for the operation of this mind-boggling miracle of moelcular engineering, how many other systems of _successfull_ arrangment of the same atoms do you expect to find?
Again, go to www.talkorigins.org. So far, all of your arguements are false
When did assertion become proof? Show us that you actually understand something, anything! Address an argument instead of waving it off. Show us your brains, rather than clinging to someone else's opinion!
Slashdot Mirror
Support that assertion. And see my post of a few minutes ago.
Really?
Go on, accuse Lewin of being a Creationist, I dare you! (-:
Note that Lewin is an evolutionist despite knowing that what he believes is mathematically impossible. Is that not a wonderfully strong faith?
Gary Parker thought so:
Now you know that there is faith on both sides of the question. Let's carry on...
Uh, yes? That's why it's called creationism, you see. The theory is that `God done it.' Materialists, having no God, are reduced to saying `accidents done it' (but accidents destroy, they don't structure), `coincidences done it' (ie let's ignore the odds) or `time done it' (but there ain't enough time).
Wrong.
No, science deals with whatever it can test. Science attempts to make predictions even when it doesn't really understand what's going on. Newton could say what apples do when they abandon their tree, even if he couldn't say why, and that was science. Even if God intervened in an experiment essentially at random, a scientist can deal with that in the same way that they deal with other factors which might randomly influence an experiment (deleting outliers, that kind of thing).
Not every time, no. But they hold often enough to be testable.
And a `big bang' isn't? Someone was there with a camera? Or is it experimentally repeatable? Pull the other one, it plays `jingle bells'!
Says who?
On one hand you're saying that I must present to you a theory, and on the other you are ruling any possible theory `out of court'. Make up your mind: will your faith in materialism (and confusion of it with science) prevent you from examining any theory rationally (so you must forfeit any proof and be honest about your faith), or will you actually reason through a theory if I present one?
So you keep asserting and opining, but assertions and opinions are not evidence.
Millions of sequencing exercises are not evidence for evolution unless they can provide a reasonable and statistically likely path for evolution (or show all alternatiuves to be even less likely, but that still wouldn't prove evolution).
Fossils speak loudly of millions of years not existing. Polystrates are a good example of this. Fossils supposedly 65 million years old yet containing intact organic material are another.
DNA speaks loudly of design and structure impossible to achieve incrementally. Where to the Urey/Miller experiments lead? Nowhere! What is `junk DNA'? Proof of a clumsy God? Says we, who have yet to design an organism that functions at all, leta lone poorly. An Australian company has just assured itself a place in history by `patenting' junk DNA and then showing that it isn't junk - as predicted by many Creationists!
Evolution has never been witnessed in the wild. Variation within kind (baramin) has. As I mentioned elsewhere, even the beak-size adaptation in Darwin Finches so beloved of the AAAS is cyclic. Peppered moths are a well-established fraud, more variation in kind, and the moths in the photos were glued on to the bark because they don't normally hang out where they can be seen and eaten. And so on.
A bit of research into background will show you that Adolf had some seriously weird ideas about who `the Lord' was. It's a bit difficult to say from this snippet whether he was at this time using a definition which most closely matched `myself', `some nebulous creative force', `my Lord the Pope' or even something more or less Godlike. As well as being a Roman Catholic in good standing right up to his death, Adolf has also been tagged (with reasonable support) as a worshipper of Wotan. It's probably important for your understanding to point out that `Roman Catholic' and `Christian' are concepts which overlap in places but are most definitely not identity.
Firstly, it's not determinate that he's basing his speech on Christianity as such at all.
If he were speaking from a Roman Catholic perspective, his conclusion could match in one of several ways. The Roman Catholic Church supported Adolf up to the point where it became obvious that he was going to lose, then they shafted him.
They'd supported Communism in an effort to destroy their ancient Orthodox enemy, and that went completely bung so they next tried supporting Hitler against both. That went almost completely bung too, except in countries like Yugoslavia and Poland (they killed millions of Orthodox in ways that sickened even the SS(!)) but at least they got most of their gold back.
But I digress. Adolf wanted to model the Reich after the Jesuit organisation, so it wouldn't be hard for him to mix up whatever helped the Reich or Romanism with `the work of the Lord' in his mind.
Consider also that Adolf's view of `the mighty creator' seems to consistently regard it as having created gradually and by a wasteful and destructive process of natural selection, which process he intended to assist particularly with regard to non-Aryan races.
BTW, compared with how he treated other peoples, Hitler wasn't actually that hard on the Jews. The six-million figure often quoted is clearly bullshit (population figures can't possibly support it), it was likely of the order of a million. He killed more Czeks than that.
One reason for His antagonism against the Jews as a race, at least initially, was that they (as Judaism) were ancient enemies of his supporter and model, Romanism.
Anyway, I digress again, Adolf's practice of Eugenics was based squarely on a rational interpretation of the process of natural selection coupled with the classic bigoted opinion about who the `better' race were - just like Darwin himself. It's kind of ironic that Adolf favoured tall, blonde races but was short and dark-haired himself.
I'm going to digress again. `Bigot' came from Reformers being torched by Romanists: `will you renounce your neresy?' `no, by God' => byGod => bigot. So originally, a bigot was simply someone stubborn to the point of death.
In summary of all of the above, I don't believe Adolf to have been misapplying Darwinism. Darwin himself used Darwinism that way, regarding Negroes as biologically inferior and destined one day to fade away, the victims of natural selection. It's an inescapable conclusion of any reasoning which starts with natural selection as a base.
If Adolf was misusing Christinity as such, then he was simply wrong. The Lord did not call on him to smite anyone.
Apparently true, as in, leaves gouges in 1mm sheetmetal, and CD drives aren't made that tough.
They do? How was this discovered?
+5 Informative
The short way of saying `me too'.
Bill could probably pay cash for it next week if he wanted to. And get a serious tax deduction. But he won't.
Oh, you saw the spin-CDs-to-destruction report as well? The one where CDs would consistently explode before getting to true 64x?
How shall I put this...?
Tornado? Cyclone? Hurricane? Hypercane? Willy-willy? Lightning? Sure, they don't hit a high enough balloon but they do hit the cables quite hard.
Also... doesn't that make things a little difficult for air traffic? How about shading if you've got that many balloons (or kites) up?
It seems to be at least 24km, large-Milo(r)-tin-to-half-omni, provided that the half-omni is in Perth's Hills area and the Milo(r) tin has clear LOS to it from the flat bit.
...else you'd get a +1 Funny.
I kind of suspected you were operating from a different planet. I strongly suggest starting with the actual names, `Darwinian Evolution' and `Social Darwinism' and see if you can draw at least the tiniest smidgeon of commonality from them.
Quoting one Adolph Hitler Shicklgruber, from the chapter `On Race and Man' in Mein Kampf: `If Nature does not wish that weaker individuals should mate with the stronger, she wishes even less that a superior race should intermingle with an inferior one; because in such a case all her efforts, throughout hundreds of thousands of years, to establish an evolutionary higher stage of being, may thus be rendered futile. [...] In short, the results of miscegenation are always the following: (a) The level of the superior race becomes lowered; (b) physical and mental degeneration sets in, thus leading slowly but steadily towards a progressive drying up of the vital sap. [...] anyone who sincerely wishes that the pacifist idea should prevail in this world ought to do all he is capable of doing to help the Germans conquer the world'
There you have it: principle, method, implementation. Any questions? Want more examples from other Atheists? Or is your plastic starting to leak?
The Wistar conference wasn't a disagreement. The mathematicians there were in general agreement on this point: evolution is mathematically well out of the question.
The `disagreement' you cite was over whether this pointed to special creation or not, and the transcript clearly shows that essentially all present regarded this as deplorable heresy, unthinkable, excluded from consideration by their prior commitment (ie not by reason alone), presumably to materialism dressed in a white lab coat.
Search the archives: they've had many answers and simply ruled them inadmissable using their own, materialist, non-scientific criteria. And or forgotten them (welcome to cognitive dissonance land). What do you expect?
Sure can! Do you want my ideas, or are you interested in the pronouncements of more qualified people?
You know, there's a frighteningly simple reason for that, and it ought to be framed and displayed in every lab in the world.
Evolution is a scientific-sounding expression of the religion of Materialism. It's kind of like turning the brightness on your video camera waaay down and then claiming to have video evidence that only white horses win horse-races: until you're prepared to adjust your view to include other colours of horse, you'll be fooling only people who don't watch other videos, and don't go to look at the horse races for themselves.
Or more likely, break it.
Stephen J Gould, for one example, found that evolution didn't work for him, so he completely rebuilt the theory of the mechanism for it. Now we have the pleasure of sitting back and reading from both his pen, and the pens of his opponents, why neither strand of evolutionary reasoning can work.
A chap named Senapathy tried a different tack, and hasn't ben as lucky in locating supporters.
Note a statement from supporter Mattox: `I realized that he was a scientist and definitely not a creationist, so I ordered the book'. Hmmm. That speaks volumes.
Actually, you've hit on a very useful selection of arguments, from my POV. You might like to try some different ones.
Fossil record: it completely fails to explain polystrate fossils (in particular those with no detectable surrounding turbulence), out-of-sequence fossils (in particular those with no sign of reworking), paraconformities, and massive (tens of thousands of square km) out-of-sequence blocks of strata with little or no sign of overthrust damage, and countless other less obvious things.
Bacterial resistance: it completely fails to explain this, as well. Plasmid exchange is a very cunning and complex mechanism for passing around pieces of DNA for use in random-trial immunity development. Both the mechanisms and a useful selection of plasmids must have been available, complete, before this would have any selective advantage. Oops.
Species relationships and DNA: the DNA and the species they represent create more problems than solutions when viewed through evolution-coloured glasses. Sometimes there is a clear relationship, and sometimes there is not a hint of rhyme or reason in the correlation between DNA and creature. If you're thinking of resting your case on Darwin's finches and variations in beak size or shape, think again.
Quote, `During a drought on the Galapagos Islands, the average beak size of finches increased, enabling them to eat the larger, drought resistant seeds. By extrapolation, it was claimed that a new species of finch might develop within 200 years. Unfortunately, when the rains came, the beak sizes returned to normal, and the evidence only supports oscillating natural selection with no net evolutionary change.'
DNA itself should give you pause for thought. We have something like 300 million base-pairs in our own DNA, in a complex and very specific array of arrays of arrays. Accident? Don't bet on it.
Disagree. Popular != well-supported.
`Well-supported' means that there is much evidence to back it. Evolution has had much opinion, much theory and much modelling grow up around it but essentially zero actual hard evidence in support of it being right.
As one man, an evolutionist, said, `For over twenty years I had thought that I was working on evolution in some way. One morning I woke up, and something had happened in the night, and it struck me that I had been working on this stuff for twenty years, and there was not one thing I knew about it. That was quite a shock, to learn that one can be so misled for so long.' That was a word for word quote from the paleontologist, Dr Colin Patterson, addressing a persentation at the American Museum of Natural History (people like Niles Eldridge and James Farris) in November 1981.
What did he do about it? `So for the last few weeks, I've tried putting a simple question to various people and groups of people. The question is this: Can you tell me anything you know about evolution, any one thing, any one thing that you think is true? [...] And the absence of an answer seems to suggest that it is true, evolution does not convey any knowledge, or if so, I haven't yet heard it.'
One of the big problems with evolution is that it can be bent to fit almost any circumstance, almost any evidence. In other words, it has very little - if any - actual explanatory power.
There is also a considerable body of evidence which evolutionary theory is completely and utterly unable to explain in any meaningful way, from `spectacular' finds like a wooden-handled steel hammer in `300-450 million year old' rock and the mini-Grand-Canyon at Mt St Helens to very mundane problems with cell mechanisms.
Definitely untrue. A significant minority are Christian, or at least think of themselves as Christian. Not a majority (`most'). Even if there was a majority, what would it prove...?
I'm 39, have at least three children, and earn $120 an hour for consulting. And rarely get to play Quake, which I do admire for its, uh, execution.
Yeah, running viruses, apparently... oops, Billy boy only has 94% of the desktop. Does Quake exist for the Mac? If so, we could probably go pretty close to 99% at least capable of it, if not actually designed to do it. Tell me with a straight face that all of those 3D cards ship for use only in CAD workstations.
In realtime 3D with blood and swords and genuine terrified screams as a pawn is ridden down by a knight... (-:
Pocket? What's the point of playing Quake in your pocket? Or maybe I shouldn't ask...
640*5104==3.2M CPUs... so I can dedicate four CPUs to each pixel on a 1024x768 display, and get reasonable Quake performance without hardware acceleration? (-:
You'd have to redesign a lot of atoms.
For example, water is very special in a number of ways, starting with being very small and highly polar, and working outwards.
In the case of systems like DNA, you have very specific atoms arranged in large, highly ordered groups of groups, to form codons; these codons are bound to their DNA strand (itself amazingly complex); the two DNA strands bound to each other with complementary codons and twisted just so, the whole lot folded, and folded again, each enfoldment a marvel of geometry and held in place by (again) very specific complementary geometry and features (bump-hollow, pluspolar-minuspolar, oily-oily etc). This is just DNA I'm on about so far, we haven't explored the miracles of RNA transcription, the automated untangling that happens as this progresses along the (foleded!) DNA strands, yadda, yadda, or worked up the scale to the incredibly complicated array of interdependent molecular factories, structure and membranes which fill a living cell... I have a couple of huge wall-charts from Roche which show a massive simplification of the 1,000 `most important' reaction paths of the 50,000 _known_ in a cell (and given a typical collection of roughly 2000 organelles in a cell, the 50,000 looks very impoverished, a small fraction of reality). The simplified diagrams look like a collection all of the marshalling yards in the USA, in colour, after an earthquake and a tornado came through.
OK, now if such specific atomic properties are necessary for the operation of this mind-boggling miracle of moelcular engineering, how many other systems of _successfull_ arrangment of the same atoms do you expect to find?
When did assertion become proof? Show us that you actually understand something, anything! Address an argument instead of waving it off. Show us your brains, rather than clinging to someone else's opinion!