I have a more plausible rumor. Microsoft has abandoned Intel for the XBox, and is using a PowerPC family chip instead (this part is fact, not rumor). Presumably, this means that Microsoft has already implemented much of its core OS technology on the PowerPC chip. So why not go all of the way, and release a PowerPC native version of Windows with the next generation of VirtualPC? Microsoft could offer PowerPC native versions of its office apps, while apps that have not yet been recompiled to run natively in PowerWindows could run in emulation (as with the current version of VirtualPC) but with the speed boost of a native PowerPC Windows OS.
Neither I nor over 75% of my neighnors can afford HD televisions currently and those who can are only getting the same content as the SD people just sharper picture
Actually, HD-capable TV sets are now down to $500 or so, what people used to pay for a decent quality standard TV. Sure, the big flat screens are still pricey. But a lower-end CRT HD set will give you a better picture than all but the very high-end multi-thousand dollar flat screens. And a 34" HD picture still looks dramatically better than a standard definition picture.
But yes, it is still the same old shows, just a better picture.
Well, it doesn't really, at least not yet. Initially, DirecTV will be using the new MPEG-4 satellites to deliver local HD channels, which HD TiVo owners currently get over-the-air (the HD TiVo has two over-the-air tuners). The HD TiVo is unable to decode MPEG-4 with the current hardware, so it will be unable to take advantage of the new channels, but HD TiVo owners will be able to continue to get them over the air.
However, in a couple of years or so, DirecTV hopes to convert all HD channels to MPEG-4. This will leave HD TiVo owners only able to record over-the-air HD broadcasts. DirecTV has indicated that they will provide an upgrade to HD TiVo owners. Details have not been announced, but it is widely suspected that the "upgrade" will be to a non-TiVo HD DVR, which DirecTV is known to be developing.
DirecTV has yet to announce what they will be doing regarding current HD DVR customers or when, except that some sort of upgrade will be available eventually. DirecTV and TiVo both claim that their association is continuing, but DirecTV is also developing their own DVR. It is widely suspected that DirecTV hopes to substitute their home-grown DVR for TiVos, and that any upgrade may be to DirecTV's own system, but nothing has been announced. Whether Comcast's recent deal with TiVo will affect this remains to be seen.
You make a good point. However, there is a fundamental difference between entertainment and education. The latter has a "higher" purpose (at least meant to have).
As a lecturer, I'm not particularly concerned if people share copies of my lecture (unless I make a mistake, of course, in which case I wish all recording devices to magically malfunction).
When I give a lecture, I am providing personal guidance to the material. I am available to answer questions during and after the lecture. A recording may be useful to students studying for exams, either to jog their memories or if they couldn't attend to lecture and want to know what I emphasized. But it is not the same as being there. Most of the time, if I have a choice between listening to a recorded lecture or reading a text covering the same material, I'll do the latter--it's simply a more efficient use of my time.
This sounds to me like a sneaky dodge to force the state to add expensive and trouble-prone filtering that simultaneously drive up the cost to the state and reduce the value of the service to travelers.
What do you want to bet that the people really behind this measure are not the bluenoses, but rather telecom services that would like to undermine public WiFi so that they can offer a similar product for a fee (with no filtering, naturally).
AOL monitor. Seriously, don't they do background checks for this type of job. I understand not doing them for most jobs, but this type of job, you would think it would be par for the course. But I guess if he doesn't have a record and she was only 17 at the time and if he was like 21-24 its not that bad (illegal, but not like he was 45). But what is really sad is that she is the one sueing. She made the decision to meet someone from a chat room and now is sueing because she was allowed to meet the guy. Sounds like sueing for dollars more than anything. Isn't America great...
I don't feel a lot of sympathy for the sort of guy who takes advantage of a professional relationship to seduce somebody who is (at least initially) underage, inexperienced, and in emotional turmoil. And it would not surprise me if, with a little time to reflect upon what happened, the young woman felt that his behavior toward her was unethical. Regardless of whether it would have been legal or illegal for him to have sex with her in that state, it seems like AOL has an obligation to supervise the activities of its chat room monitors and make sure that they are in accord with company policies and the representations that AOL has made to customers.
Regardless of your obscure views of paedophiles this guy was employed to protect her from people like himself.
It seems to me that the guy's behavior was improper, given that he had a professional relationship with the young woman. On the other hand, I think the term "paedophile" should be reserved for those who are sexually attracted to people who are below the age of sexual maturity, not merely below the age of consent in a particular locale.
It's a kind of chromatic aberration. The eye has a rather simple lens structure, and so can't focus different wavelengths at exactly the same point, and can't focus really short wavelengths (the violet end) at all. You see a purple blur around UV lights because some of the light is simply out of focus.
I don't just see a blur around the UV light. If the UV bulb is anywhere in view, even at the periphery of my vision, there is a uniform haze everywhere I look.
Here is another reference to even more examples of speciation. Here are still more . As you can see, there are a huge number of documented examples. For that matter, different breeds of dogs would undoubtedly be considered to be different species if encountered in the wild. We call them "breeds" only because of their origin by artificial rather than natural selection. A great dane and a chihuahua are morphologically more different than a coyote and a wolf, and, being functionally unable to breed, meet one definition of different species. But of course, one can always demand something "bigger." If somebody managed to breed a dog into something resembling a horse (even though such large changes are thought to take millions of years rather than 3000), Creationists would no doubt demand an elephant.
Genome sequencing studies in recent years have demolished the notion that there is any real distinction between "micro" evolution and "macro" evolution. At the genetic level, they are no different--"macro" evolution is just more of the same.
Besides that, if God created everything, then what created God?
Well, this is a problem with any explanation of origins. Basically, there are only two possible answers--the universe is eternal, and does not require creation, or the universe is somehow self-creating. So they are no more unreasonable applied to God than to anything else, although Occam's Razor is certainly more comfortable with an uncreated or self-created simple universe than with a complex sentient intelligence.
Most rational creationists accept that micro-evolution - the development of new species, sub-species, and distinct populations - occurs regularly, thanks to adaptive survival and the remarkable propensity of the genome to re-activate inactive DNA. I remember a recent example where a species of bacteria unable to digest lactose developed that ability within a few generations after being grown in a lactose-rich solution. The bacteria didn't gain this ability through random mutations, but by the activation of a previously unknown gene in the "junk DNA" part of the genome.
Yes, the microevolution dodge is a common tactic of creationists. Since there is no actual distinction between microevolution and macroevolution (as genetic studies show that the genetic changes that occur in so-called "microevolution" as exactly the same as the differences that divide species), Creationists are always free to dismiss every observed example of evolution as "micro" and demand something "bigger."
Activation of so-called "junk" DNA is one predicted mechanism of evolution. A gene gets duplicated, and the duplicate copy is then free to mutate, since the duplicate copy is no longer required for life. It can then pick up a new function. Genetic studies have shown that most proteins fall into families created by exactly this process of duplication and mutation.
aith can be proven, by logic. "God is omnipotent, created everything, etc.". You cannot find a hole in that reasoning, logically speaking not from experience.
Actually, omnipotence is a logical impossibility, as the medieval scholars realized, because it leads into contradictions like, "Can God make a rock larger than He can lift?" Either answer implies a limitation on God.
This should probably be phrased as: "Can this possibly be used to show that evolution is more than just a theory?"
Nope. All scientific generalizations and explanations are "just" theories. More evidence just makes a theory stronger; it never stops being a theory. The only real facts in science are specific observations. "The apple dropped today" may be a fact. "Apples fall under the influence of gravity" will always be "just" a theory, no matter how many apples you drop.
Furthermore, shadows (absence of light, or the process of 'shutting off' of a light source) absolutely follow the rules of light travel and are not known to ever, even trivially, have traveled faster than the speed of light (in a vacuum).
There are lots of things that "travel" faster than light, including a shadow or sweeping light beam. What they have in common is that there is nothing physical actually traveling faster than light; what appears to be traveling is more like an interference phenomenon. For example, when a light beam sweeps across space, at great distances the reflection of the light beam sweeps across objects faster than the speed of light. But no photons are moving faster than light, because the photons that make up the reflection at point A are not the same as the photons that make up the reflection at point B. Furthermore, any change of the sweep speed propagates down the beam at the speed of light.
Quantum entanglement absolutely does, and has already been shown to 'violate' the faster than light travel theory.
The sorts of "information" that can be transmitted faster than light by quantum entanglement are highly constrained, and have a lot in common with the apparent movement of a shadow, in that they do not permit an arbitrary message to be transmitted faster than light of the sort that would permit violation of causality, even if transmitter and receiver are traveling at high velocity relative to one another. If arbitrary information can be transmitted faster than light, then it is possible to conceive of circumstances in which you can send a signal with content "do not send the signal" back to yourself, such that the signal arrives before the time when you sent the signal.
Instantaneous, does have a definition and denotes something that happens concurrently
This is merely a synonym. However, in relativistic physics, instantaneous (or "concurrently" if you prefer) only has a unique meaning for something that happens not only at the same time but at the same place. Events that happen at different places may be simultaneous in one frame of reference, but not in another.
The human mind can only focus on things outside itself, that's why there are psychologists.
Actually, we probably know ourselves in much the same way we know other people. The part of our mind that constitutes our awareness likely has very little access to our motivations, but rather infers them from our actions.
My suspicion is that the conscious mind originally evolved to anticipate the actions of others, and that consciousness is mostly self-observation, and our impression that our conscious mind is "in charge" is largely illusory. I suspect that our conscious mind is actually a lot like the little kids you sometimes see happily playing a videogame in an arcade--not realizing that they haven't put in a coin, and are only "playing" the attract mode.
Re:When will these scientists learn
on
Mapping the Mind
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
The mind is more than the brain. The brain is merely a processing unit.
The safest bet is to do an "upgrade and install," which is the OS X version of a clean install (but you don't have to reinstall your apps as a rule). But unless I hear of an unusually high level of problems, I'll probably do a straight upgrade, because that has always worked fine for me.
Jonathon Wells Stephen C. Meyer, PHD Michael J Behe, PHD J.P. Moreland, PHD
Only Behe. An obscure biochemist, he has no major publications in any of the refereed journals I listed, and has won no major scientific awards, so he certainly does not qualify as a "top" scientist. I know his name only because he has written a popularized book (non-refereed, of course) which I skimmed through in a bookstore once. His basic argument was obviously statistically invalid, so I didn't bother to buy it.
Never heard of the other guys. I did managed to find a web page for Moreland, who also has no publications in major refereed scientific journals. Care to try again? Be sure to list refereed publications in scientific journals.
Then as a scientist, you must also see how the idea of evolution does not lend itself to the Scientific Method
On the contrary, like any scientist who reads the literature, I see applications of the scientific method to evolution all of the time. It is truly amazing that a theory that predated even knowledge of genescontinues to hold up in the modern age molecular genetics. Today, evolution is one of the most extensively tested and confirmed theories in all of science.
Did you know that Isaac Newton, Louis Pasteur, and Marie Curie are amoung a large number of creationist scientists? Or do you not consider them to be real scientists?
Of all of the Creationist arguments, this has to be the stupidest.
Yes, I am aware that there one has to go back decades to find any examples of people who have made significant contributions to science yet still believed in Creationism. The main way in which science is distinguished from religion is that science progresses. There was a time when Creationism was a respectable scientific theory, although it is worth noting that even the Creationists of Darwin's time had rejected as inconsistent with the data many of the notions that modern Creationists still cling to, such as single creation event just a few thousand years ago. Modern Creationism is actually less consistent with the data than was the Creationism of Darwin's time, back when Creationism was actually a respectable theory instead of being confined solely to crackpots.
BTW, a growing number our top scientists are rejecting evolution.
Really? Name some! As a criterion for a modern "top scientist" I will accept any of the following:
1) Recipients of the Nobel or Lasker prizes in the last 25 years. 2) A refereed research publication in the last 25 years in any of the following top journals: Science, Nature, Journal of Biological Chemistry, Journal of Molecular Biology, Cell, Gene, Journal of Neuroscience, Neuron, Molecular Pharmacology, Developmental Biology, Journal of Physiology (note to other biologists: no offense to your field's leading journal; those are off the top of my head).
As a scientist, I've met many of the top biologists. I've yet to meet even one person who has made any significant contribution to biology who believed in Creationism.
The common practice of creationists citing the eye as a challenge to evolution reveals how abysmally primitive their knowledge of science is. To be sure, in Darwin's time the eye seemed miraculous enough that Darwin felt obliged to devote a special discussion to how it might have evolved by selection.
But we know a lot more today that Darwin knew. In particular, our knowledge of biochemistry is more advanced. We now know that all sorts of biochemical reactions are sensitive to light. It is almost inevitable that in a mostly transparent life form, the activity of some nerve cells would be affected by light. Given the extreme selective advantage to sensing light, evolution of light sensors of increasing sophistication seems almost unavoidable.
Slashdot Mirror
1. Yes
2. Yes.
3. I don't play $5/minute for much of anything unless there is substantial novelty value.
4. Yes
5. No
I have a more plausible rumor. Microsoft has abandoned Intel for the XBox, and is using a PowerPC family chip instead (this part is fact, not rumor). Presumably, this means that Microsoft has already implemented much of its core OS technology on the PowerPC chip. So why not go all of the way, and release a PowerPC native version of Windows with the next generation of VirtualPC? Microsoft could offer PowerPC native versions of its office apps, while apps that have not yet been recompiled to run natively in PowerWindows could run in emulation (as with the current version of VirtualPC) but with the speed boost of a native PowerPC Windows OS.
"Apple is unhappy with the PowerPC production at IBM and will be switching to Intel-compatible chips this very year. ...seriously"
Actually, it was "Yeah, seriously," which makes the sarcasm more obvious.
At this point, it seems like nobody is using Intel compatible chips except people who are tied into Windows legacy code.
GameCube: PowerPC
Playstation3: fancy multicore PowerPC
TiVo: PowerPC
XBox2 (or is it XBox360?) PowerPC
I'd find it easier to believe a rumor that Microsoft was releasing a version of Windows for PowerPC, especially in the wake of XBox2.
Neither I nor over 75% of my neighnors can afford HD televisions currently and those who can are only getting the same content as the SD people just sharper picture
Actually, HD-capable TV sets are now down to $500 or so, what people used to pay for a decent quality standard TV. Sure, the big flat screens are still pricey. But a lower-end CRT HD set will give you a better picture than all but the very high-end multi-thousand dollar flat screens. And a 34" HD picture still looks dramatically better than a standard definition picture.
But yes, it is still the same old shows, just a better picture.
Why does it obsolete the HD TiVo?
Well, it doesn't really, at least not yet. Initially, DirecTV will be using the new MPEG-4 satellites to deliver local HD channels, which HD TiVo owners currently get over-the-air (the HD TiVo has two over-the-air tuners). The HD TiVo is unable to decode MPEG-4 with the current hardware, so it will be unable to take advantage of the new channels, but HD TiVo owners will be able to continue to get them over the air.
However, in a couple of years or so, DirecTV hopes to convert all HD channels to MPEG-4. This will leave HD TiVo owners only able to record over-the-air HD broadcasts. DirecTV has indicated that they will provide an upgrade to HD TiVo owners. Details have not been announced, but it is widely suspected that the "upgrade" will be to a non-TiVo HD DVR, which DirecTV is known to be developing.
DirecTV has yet to announce what they will be doing regarding current HD DVR customers or when, except that some sort of upgrade will be available eventually. DirecTV and TiVo both claim that their association is continuing, but DirecTV is also developing their own DVR. It is widely suspected that DirecTV hopes to substitute their home-grown DVR for TiVos, and that any upgrade may be to DirecTV's own system, but nothing has been announced. Whether Comcast's recent deal with TiVo will affect this remains to be seen.
You make a good point. However, there is a fundamental difference between entertainment and education. The latter has a "higher" purpose (at least meant to have).
As a lecturer, I'm not particularly concerned if people share copies of my lecture (unless I make a mistake, of course, in which case I wish all recording devices to magically malfunction).
When I give a lecture, I am providing personal guidance to the material. I am available to answer questions during and after the lecture. A recording may be useful to students studying for exams, either to jog their memories or if they couldn't attend to lecture and want to know what I emphasized. But it is not the same as being there. Most of the time, if I have a choice between listening to a recorded lecture or reading a text covering the same material, I'll do the latter--it's simply a more efficient use of my time.
This sounds to me like a sneaky dodge to force the state to add expensive and trouble-prone filtering that simultaneously drive up the cost to the state and reduce the value of the service to travelers.
What do you want to bet that the people really behind this measure are not the bluenoses, but rather telecom services that would like to undermine public WiFi so that they can offer a similar product for a fee (with no filtering, naturally).
AOL monitor. Seriously, don't they do background checks for this type of job. I understand not doing them for most jobs, but this type of job, you would think it would be par for the course. But I guess if he doesn't have a record and she was only 17 at the time and if he was like 21-24 its not that bad (illegal, but not like he was 45). But what is really sad is that she is the one sueing. She made the decision to meet someone from a chat room and now is sueing because she was allowed to meet the guy. Sounds like sueing for dollars more than anything. Isn't America great...
I don't feel a lot of sympathy for the sort of guy who takes advantage of a professional relationship to seduce somebody who is (at least initially) underage, inexperienced, and in emotional turmoil. And it would not surprise me if, with a little time to reflect upon what happened, the young woman felt that his behavior toward her was unethical. Regardless of whether it would have been legal or illegal for him to have sex with her in that state, it seems like AOL has an obligation to supervise the activities of its chat room monitors and make sure that they are in accord with company policies and the representations that AOL has made to customers.
Regardless of your obscure views of paedophiles this guy was employed to protect her from people like himself.
It seems to me that the guy's behavior was improper, given that he had a professional relationship with the young woman. On the other hand, I think the term "paedophile" should be reserved for those who are sexually attracted to people who are below the age of sexual maturity, not merely below the age of consent in a particular locale.
It's a kind of chromatic aberration. The eye has a rather simple lens structure, and so can't focus different wavelengths at exactly the same point, and can't focus really short wavelengths (the violet end) at all. You see a purple blur around UV lights because some of the light is simply out of focus.
I don't just see a blur around the UV light. If the UV bulb is anywhere in view, even at the periphery of my vision, there is a uniform haze everywhere I look.
Anyone notice that a blue LED has a 'haze' around it when looked at from the side (i.e. not looking at where the light comes out)?
Ultraviolet lights do this too. I've wondered if it had to do with fluorescence within the eye, but I suppose that it could also be light scattering.
Here is another reference to even more examples of speciation. Here are still more . As you can see, there are a huge number of documented examples. For that matter, different breeds of dogs would undoubtedly be considered to be different species if encountered in the wild. We call them "breeds" only because of their origin by artificial rather than natural selection. A great dane and a chihuahua are morphologically more different than a coyote and a wolf, and, being functionally unable to breed, meet one definition of different species. But of course, one can always demand something "bigger." If somebody managed to breed a dog into something resembling a horse (even though such large changes are thought to take millions of years rather than 3000), Creationists would no doubt demand an elephant.
Genome sequencing studies in recent years have demolished the notion that there is any real distinction between "micro" evolution and "macro" evolution. At the genetic level, they are no different--"macro" evolution is just more of the same.
Besides that, if God created everything, then what created God?
Well, this is a problem with any explanation of origins. Basically, there are only two possible answers--the universe is eternal, and does not require creation, or the universe is somehow self-creating. So they are no more unreasonable applied to God than to anything else, although Occam's Razor is certainly more comfortable with an uncreated or self-created simple universe than with a complex sentient intelligence.
Most rational creationists accept that micro-evolution - the development of new species, sub-species, and distinct populations - occurs regularly, thanks to adaptive survival and the remarkable propensity of the genome to re-activate inactive DNA. I remember a recent example where a species of bacteria unable to digest lactose developed that ability within a few generations after being grown in a lactose-rich solution. The bacteria didn't gain this ability through random mutations, but by the activation of a previously unknown gene in the "junk DNA" part of the genome.
Yes, the microevolution dodge is a common tactic of creationists. Since there is no actual distinction between microevolution and macroevolution (as genetic studies show that the genetic changes that occur in so-called "microevolution" as exactly the same as the differences that divide species), Creationists are always free to dismiss every observed example of evolution as "micro" and demand something "bigger."
Activation of so-called "junk" DNA is one predicted mechanism of evolution. A gene gets duplicated, and the duplicate copy is then free to mutate, since the duplicate copy is no longer required for life. It can then pick up a new function. Genetic studies have shown that most proteins fall into families created by exactly this process of duplication and mutation.
You can find references to multiple documented instances of evolution being observed in the "Five Major Misconceptions About Evolution"
aith can be proven, by logic. "God is omnipotent, created everything, etc.". You cannot find a hole in that reasoning, logically speaking not from experience.
Actually, omnipotence is a logical impossibility, as the medieval scholars realized, because it leads into contradictions like, "Can God make a rock larger than He can lift?" Either answer implies a limitation on God.
This should probably be phrased as: "Can this possibly be used to show that evolution is more than just a theory?"
Nope. All scientific generalizations and explanations are "just" theories. More evidence just makes a theory stronger; it never stops being a theory. The only real facts in science are specific observations. "The apple dropped today" may be a fact. "Apples fall under the influence of gravity" will always be "just" a theory, no matter how many apples you drop.
Furthermore, shadows (absence of light, or the process of 'shutting off' of a light source) absolutely follow the rules of light travel and are not known to ever, even trivially, have traveled faster than the speed of light (in a vacuum).
There are lots of things that "travel" faster than light, including a shadow or sweeping light beam. What they have in common is that there is nothing physical actually traveling faster than light; what appears to be traveling is more like an interference phenomenon. For example, when a light beam sweeps across space, at great distances the reflection of the light beam sweeps across objects faster than the speed of light. But no photons are moving faster than light, because the photons that make up the reflection at point A are not the same as the photons that make up the reflection at point B. Furthermore, any change of the sweep speed propagates down the beam at the speed of light.
Quantum entanglement absolutely does, and has already been shown to 'violate' the faster than light travel theory.
The sorts of "information" that can be transmitted faster than light by quantum entanglement are highly constrained, and have a lot in common with the apparent movement of a shadow, in that they do not permit an arbitrary message to be transmitted faster than light of the sort that would permit violation of causality, even if transmitter and receiver are traveling at high velocity relative to one another. If arbitrary information can be transmitted faster than light, then it is possible to conceive of circumstances in which you can send a signal with content "do not send the signal" back to yourself, such that the signal arrives before the time when you sent the signal.
Instantaneous, does have a definition and denotes something that happens concurrently
This is merely a synonym. However, in relativistic physics, instantaneous (or "concurrently" if you prefer) only has a unique meaning for something that happens not only at the same time but at the same place. Events that happen at different places may be simultaneous in one frame of reference, but not in another.
The human mind can only focus on things outside itself, that's why there are psychologists.
Actually, we probably know ourselves in much the same way we know other people. The part of our mind that constitutes our awareness likely has very little access to our motivations, but rather infers them from our actions.
My suspicion is that the conscious mind originally evolved to anticipate the actions of others, and that consciousness is mostly self-observation, and our impression that our conscious mind is "in charge" is largely illusory. I suspect that our conscious mind is actually a lot like the little kids you sometimes see happily playing a videogame in an arcade--not realizing that they haven't put in a coin, and are only "playing" the attract mode.
The mind is more than the brain. The brain is merely a processing unit.
And the mind is software running on it.
The safest bet is to do an "upgrade and install," which is the OS X version of a clean install (but you don't have to reinstall your apps as a rule). But unless I hear of an unusually high level of problems, I'll probably do a straight upgrade, because that has always worked fine for me.
Do you recognize any of these names?
Jonathon Wells
Stephen C. Meyer, PHD
Michael J Behe, PHD
J.P. Moreland, PHD
Only Behe. An obscure biochemist, he has no major publications in any of the refereed journals I listed, and has won no major scientific awards, so he certainly does not qualify as a "top" scientist. I know his name only because he has written a popularized book (non-refereed, of course) which I skimmed through in a bookstore once. His basic argument was obviously statistically invalid, so I didn't bother to buy it.
Never heard of the other guys. I did managed to find a web page for Moreland, who also has no publications in major refereed scientific journals. Care to try again? Be sure to list refereed publications in scientific journals.
Then as a scientist, you must also see how the idea of evolution does not lend itself to the Scientific Method
On the contrary, like any scientist who reads the literature, I see applications of the scientific method to evolution all of the time. It is truly amazing that a theory that predated even knowledge of genescontinues to hold up in the modern age molecular genetics. Today, evolution is one of the most extensively tested and confirmed theories in all of science.
Did you know that Isaac Newton, Louis Pasteur, and Marie Curie are amoung a large number of creationist scientists? Or do you not consider them to be real scientists?
Of all of the Creationist arguments, this has to be the stupidest.
Yes, I am aware that there one has to go back decades to find any examples of people who have made significant contributions to science yet still believed in Creationism. The main way in which science is distinguished from religion is that science progresses. There was a time when Creationism was a respectable scientific theory, although it is worth noting that even the Creationists of Darwin's time had rejected as inconsistent with the data many of the notions that modern Creationists still cling to, such as single creation event just a few thousand years ago. Modern Creationism is actually less consistent with the data than was the Creationism of Darwin's time, back when Creationism was actually a respectable theory instead of being confined solely to crackpots.
BTW, a growing number our top scientists are rejecting evolution.
Really? Name some! As a criterion for a modern "top scientist" I will accept any of the following:
1) Recipients of the Nobel or Lasker prizes in the last 25 years.
2) A refereed research publication in the last 25 years in any of the following top journals: Science, Nature, Journal of Biological Chemistry, Journal of Molecular Biology, Cell, Gene, Journal of Neuroscience, Neuron, Molecular Pharmacology, Developmental Biology, Journal of Physiology (note to other biologists: no offense to your field's leading journal; those are off the top of my head).
As a scientist, I've met many of the top biologists. I've yet to meet even one person who has made any significant contribution to biology who believed in Creationism.
The common practice of creationists citing the eye as a challenge to evolution reveals how abysmally primitive their knowledge of science is. To be sure, in Darwin's time the eye seemed miraculous enough that Darwin felt obliged to devote a special discussion to how it might have evolved by selection.
But we know a lot more today that Darwin knew. In particular, our knowledge of biochemistry is more advanced. We now know that all sorts of biochemical reactions are sensitive to light. It is almost inevitable that in a mostly transparent life form, the activity of some nerve cells would be affected by light. Given the extreme selective advantage to sensing light, evolution of light sensors of increasing sophistication seems almost unavoidable.