Some very brilliant fellow once noted that Creationists will accept any level of evolution up to the point where they have to accept that humans evolved from monkeys. Darwin realized it even in the mid-19th century, which is why Origin plays a little coy with human evolution, although Darwin knew perfectly well that if everything else on Earth evolved from a common ancestor, so did we.
Years ago, during my days on talk.origins, someone pointed out that even if Omphalism (the notion that God made the Universe look a certain way, light created in transit from galaxies, fossils stuck in the ground, etc.) is true, from a methodological perspective it would be irrelevant. Since science can only work with observations, if the observations are the product of God faking it, then we can only work with the idea that they're true anyways. In other words, Omphalism doesn't make God more important, it only makes him more irrelevant.
Then there are the severe theological issues that go along with claiming God is a liar.
But are spiritualists in fact making more sense of it. The power to invent a claim in and of itself does not grant the claim any sensibility or explanatory power.
While science cannot prove anything beyond any question, there are theories that are so well demonstrated, such as evolution is, that you might as well consider it proven. Do we have all the answers, no we don't. But we have enough of them to know that if evolution is incomplete, a more complete theory is still going to be an evolutionary theory. Just as Darwin lacked a verified system of inheriting traits, but still produced a theory with substantial explanatory power, so to with current scientists.
Evolution has nothing to do with life coming to being. Evolution starts right AFTER life came to being.
This always bothers me, because it creates an artificial boundary between living and non-living which simply does not exist. As long as you have imperfect replicators, you have evolution. Proto-life may not have had all the aspects of what we consider to be living organisms (although even among living organisms there are beasties that test the standard definitions of life), but most certainly it was just as much being shaped by evolutionary forces as anything we consider unquestionably to be living is shaped by evolutionary forces. Abiogenesis itself was most certainly an evolutionary process.
Don't fall into the trap the Creationists set when they insist that if we don't have a complete biological theory of evolution, we don't have a useful and predictive theory of evolution. Yes, we do not know how life came to be, and in fact, even if we discover a means of abiogenesis in the lab, we cannot say for certain that that is the way that life on Earth evolved (there may be multiple pathways to life, for all we know).
It would be no different than proclaiming "We have no useful explanation for gravity!" just because we don't have a testable quantum theory of gravity yet. The fact is that we do have a useful theory of gravity, even if it is incomplete. In the same way, biological evolution is useful and has significant explanatory power, even if abiogenesis itself is still an unanswered question.
Of course, the problem is that what Creationists call "micro-evolution" and what scientists call "micro-evolution" are two different things. For Creationists, it generally means "The level of evolution I can handle before my head explodes". For scientists, it's a term used, and used rather infrequently, to denote change below the level of speciation, but because speciation is a complex topic, micro-evolution isn't always a terribly useful concept, so, scientists, tend to just use the word "evolution", which refers to all changes in the genetic makeup of a population, regardless of whether it leads to a new species or not.
Newtonian physics was unshakable until Einstein disproved it.
First of all, there were known issues with Newtonian mechanics decades before Einstein came along, and Einstein didn't disprove Newtonian mechanics so much as make it a special non-relativistic case of GR.
1. Sudden emergence of new species out of nowhere, fully complete with all their characteristics and not changing over time. "...the infinitude of connecting links has still not been discovered and the fossil record is about as discontinuous as it was when Darwin was writing the Origin." - Michael Denton, "Evolution: A Theory in Crisis"
Look up diploidy, idiot.
2. Computers have shown that the neat evolutionary trees that get drawn up are in fact based on imaginary relations of similarity and difference that owe more to the human mind's tendency to perceive patterns than to the raw biological data.
Bullshit. Similar techniques have been used to trace historic and extant languages since the 18th century.
3. Many putative The order of nucleotides in a DNA or RNA molecule, or the order of amino acids in a protein molecule.sequences which look logical based on the progression of one set of anatomical characteristics suddenly look illogical when attention is switched to another set. For example, the lungfish superficially seems to make a good intermediate between fish and amphibian, until one examines the rest of its internal organs, which are not intermediate in character, nor are the ways in which its eggs develop.
The lungfish is a modern species, and the rest of the statement is a word salad.
4, ....the evolution of present-day organisms from their supposed ancestors are in fact highly conjectural if not downright false.... And even the emergence of one species from another has never been directly observed by science.
Simply false.
5....(Evolution) remains incapable of explaining how anything could evolve that doesn't make biological sense when incomplete. The wings of birds are the classic example: what good is half of one?
There is no such thing as a half bird. There were feathered dinosaurs who may have used the feathers for cooling. At any rate, co-option of one feature for another purpose is a hallmark of evolution.
6. It was hoped that a thorough cross-species comparison of these (organic compounds) would reveal the kinds of relationships of graded similarity that evolution implies. But it hasn't. Instead, it has given the same picture of distinct species that examination of gross anatomy does.
Molecular biology made this statement false four decades ago.
7. The data used to support evolution are neither experiments nor repeatable, nor can they be, since the origin of species on earth was a unique event.
Indicates a complete lack of understanding of what science is.
Are you trying to argue for dualism, or for the utility of the Big Lie (ie. it may be false, but it makes me feel okay).
And if you think me claiming "Ten thousand invisible faeries command your mind" is the equivalent of "Your mind is made up of the electrochemical interactions of your neurons", then man, you've got some intellectual issues.
Where do you people learn about evolution? "Mistakes" is a loaded and inaccurate word.
All evolution requires is a steady change in the genetic makeup of a population. Some of that certainly comes from sudden alterations in the genome due to environmental or recombinant errors, but just as much comes from other evolutionary forces like neutral drift. We can even see in some cases in molecular biology where such forces alter the makeup of a population.
In simple terms, evolution is a change in the genetic makeup of a population over time. Whether that change is due to neutral drift, mutation, introduction of genes from incursions by related populations or by horizontal transmission (ie. ERVs) is all a matter of the particular details. The large picture is that evolution is observable, it is predictable, it has utility and can answer significant questions about the life we observe; both extant and extinct.
As to God, that's not science's problem. Whether such a being is involved or not is fundamentally beyond any scientific means to explore.
So far as I'm aware, Marx never said "destroy religion". He thought eventually it would fade away.
And you will notice when you talk about guys like Stalin that while they may have attacked religion, they basically duplicated it in their cults of personality and putting ideology on the same pedestal that theological claims had once held.
I'm confused. Where exactly did I attack religion? I certainly don't buy into it, but, in general I don't hold someone's religion against them, unless they proclaim absurd things like "there was a global flood and only Noah, his kin and the critters on board survived."
I don't think the concept is broken so much as it is simply not a binary concept. The idea that you can one single quality; interfertity is a hold over from the 18th and 19th centuries, a sort of easy to understand shorthand that hasn't applied to actual species concepts for nearly a century.
I don't think there are many supporters of punctuated equilibrium left any more. Your point is probably 15 years out of date. In particular, claims about the Cambrian "explosion" have been steadily chipped at for over half a century, and the notion of that the pre-Cambrian was full of dull, static species has been debunked.
Have you ever actually read a book on evolution. First of all, mutation is but one mechanism for evolution. There are others, in particular the effects of neutral genetic drift are increasingly being seen as far greater than previously assumed.
As to "how does structure A" evolve, there are certainly enough other kinds of reproductive systems to be found in the world of multicellular organisms to demonstrate how a placental structure can evolve from an egg-laying ancestor.
Ultimately your biggest problem is that you're just invoking gaps (in this case, I don't think there is a gap, the evolution of placental mammals is reasonably well understood), but in general, trying to make an argument based on gaps only invites the argument to be eliminated when the gap is filled.
Besides, since when do we need to understand every single aspect of any phenomena to be able to produce valuable theories? We don't fundamentally understand gravity, and yet we can predict the orbits of extra-solar planets, and launch probes to Saturn, so clearly the gaps in our knowledge on that subject are not so vast that the theory is useless.
Well yes, if you utterly ignore what the intent of the writers was, you can come up with anything. But the original peoples that believed the Genesis mythos and cosmography believed in six literal days, in a world that was flat and a crystal firmament above it in which the stars and planets were set.
Speciation, including speciation that leads to mutual infertility, has been observed. Besides, the whole concept of speciation is far more complex than you seem to understand. You can have two different species that can still reproduce with each other.
I don't think you know what "circumstantial" means. Besides, one does not have to have direct evidence to infer the existence of something. Have you ever seen an electron?
Why does there have to be a why? Just because you want to project some meaning on the universe doesn't mean that there is any meaning.
And that still doesn't speak to science. Even if there is a WHY, that doesn't make any or all science false or questionable.
Human beings evolved from ape-like ancestors millions of years ago in Africa. The fossil and genetic evidence are overwhelming. If you feel some great desire to find a big "WHY" to all of it, that's fine, but that does not change the facts themselves.
In other words; basic research is absolutely critical to scientific advancement, and those that have to ask why are ignorant of how we got to where we are now.
You're quite right. Historically companies building space vehicles for NASA were contractors. These vehicles were not strictly speaking private craft, any more than an aircraft carrier is a private ship.
Why would anyone buy firewalls when we have iptables and as far traffic monitoring, why pay for some custom Snort frontend? Actually that goes for iptables too. I haven't boought a router, firewall, traffic monitor, shaper or spam appliance in well over a decade.
Slashdot Mirror
Some very brilliant fellow once noted that Creationists will accept any level of evolution up to the point where they have to accept that humans evolved from monkeys. Darwin realized it even in the mid-19th century, which is why Origin plays a little coy with human evolution, although Darwin knew perfectly well that if everything else on Earth evolved from a common ancestor, so did we.
Years ago, during my days on talk.origins, someone pointed out that even if Omphalism (the notion that God made the Universe look a certain way, light created in transit from galaxies, fossils stuck in the ground, etc.) is true, from a methodological perspective it would be irrelevant. Since science can only work with observations, if the observations are the product of God faking it, then we can only work with the idea that they're true anyways. In other words, Omphalism doesn't make God more important, it only makes him more irrelevant.
Then there are the severe theological issues that go along with claiming God is a liar.
But are spiritualists in fact making more sense of it. The power to invent a claim in and of itself does not grant the claim any sensibility or explanatory power.
While science cannot prove anything beyond any question, there are theories that are so well demonstrated, such as evolution is, that you might as well consider it proven. Do we have all the answers, no we don't. But we have enough of them to know that if evolution is incomplete, a more complete theory is still going to be an evolutionary theory. Just as Darwin lacked a verified system of inheriting traits, but still produced a theory with substantial explanatory power, so to with current scientists.
This always bothers me, because it creates an artificial boundary between living and non-living which simply does not exist. As long as you have imperfect replicators, you have evolution. Proto-life may not have had all the aspects of what we consider to be living organisms (although even among living organisms there are beasties that test the standard definitions of life), but most certainly it was just as much being shaped by evolutionary forces as anything we consider unquestionably to be living is shaped by evolutionary forces. Abiogenesis itself was most certainly an evolutionary process.
Don't fall into the trap the Creationists set when they insist that if we don't have a complete biological theory of evolution, we don't have a useful and predictive theory of evolution. Yes, we do not know how life came to be, and in fact, even if we discover a means of abiogenesis in the lab, we cannot say for certain that that is the way that life on Earth evolved (there may be multiple pathways to life, for all we know).
It would be no different than proclaiming "We have no useful explanation for gravity!" just because we don't have a testable quantum theory of gravity yet. The fact is that we do have a useful theory of gravity, even if it is incomplete. In the same way, biological evolution is useful and has significant explanatory power, even if abiogenesis itself is still an unanswered question.
Of course, the problem is that what Creationists call "micro-evolution" and what scientists call "micro-evolution" are two different things. For Creationists, it generally means "The level of evolution I can handle before my head explodes". For scientists, it's a term used, and used rather infrequently, to denote change below the level of speciation, but because speciation is a complex topic, micro-evolution isn't always a terribly useful concept, so, scientists, tend to just use the word "evolution", which refers to all changes in the genetic makeup of a population, regardless of whether it leads to a new species or not.
First of all, there were known issues with Newtonian mechanics decades before Einstein came along, and Einstein didn't disprove Newtonian mechanics so much as make it a special non-relativistic case of GR.
Look up diploidy, idiot.
Bullshit. Similar techniques have been used to trace historic and extant languages since the 18th century.
The lungfish is a modern species, and the rest of the statement is a word salad.
Are you trying to argue for dualism, or for the utility of the Big Lie (ie. it may be false, but it makes me feel okay).
And if you think me claiming "Ten thousand invisible faeries command your mind" is the equivalent of "Your mind is made up of the electrochemical interactions of your neurons", then man, you've got some intellectual issues.
Where do you people learn about evolution? "Mistakes" is a loaded and inaccurate word.
All evolution requires is a steady change in the genetic makeup of a population. Some of that certainly comes from sudden alterations in the genome due to environmental or recombinant errors, but just as much comes from other evolutionary forces like neutral drift. We can even see in some cases in molecular biology where such forces alter the makeup of a population.
In simple terms, evolution is a change in the genetic makeup of a population over time. Whether that change is due to neutral drift, mutation, introduction of genes from incursions by related populations or by horizontal transmission (ie. ERVs) is all a matter of the particular details. The large picture is that evolution is observable, it is predictable, it has utility and can answer significant questions about the life we observe; both extant and extinct.
As to God, that's not science's problem. Whether such a being is involved or not is fundamentally beyond any scientific means to explore.
And another legacy monster is born. Microsoft has a peculiar expertise for loading itself down with this kind of cruft.
So far as I'm aware, Marx never said "destroy religion". He thought eventually it would fade away.
And you will notice when you talk about guys like Stalin that while they may have attacked religion, they basically duplicated it in their cults of personality and putting ideology on the same pedestal that theological claims had once held.
I'm confused. Where exactly did I attack religion? I certainly don't buy into it, but, in general I don't hold someone's religion against them, unless they proclaim absurd things like "there was a global flood and only Noah, his kin and the critters on board survived."
No continent has eroded in several thousand years. You're talking nonsense
There is the fossil and molecular data. In short you are wrong.
I don't think the concept is broken so much as it is simply not a binary concept. The idea that you can one single quality; interfertity is a hold over from the 18th and 19th centuries, a sort of easy to understand shorthand that hasn't applied to actual species concepts for nearly a century.
And what value is that exactly?
I don't think there are many supporters of punctuated equilibrium left any more. Your point is probably 15 years out of date. In particular, claims about the Cambrian "explosion" have been steadily chipped at for over half a century, and the notion of that the pre-Cambrian was full of dull, static species has been debunked.
Have you ever actually read a book on evolution. First of all, mutation is but one mechanism for evolution. There are others, in particular the effects of neutral genetic drift are increasingly being seen as far greater than previously assumed.
As to "how does structure A" evolve, there are certainly enough other kinds of reproductive systems to be found in the world of multicellular organisms to demonstrate how a placental structure can evolve from an egg-laying ancestor.
Ultimately your biggest problem is that you're just invoking gaps (in this case, I don't think there is a gap, the evolution of placental mammals is reasonably well understood), but in general, trying to make an argument based on gaps only invites the argument to be eliminated when the gap is filled.
Besides, since when do we need to understand every single aspect of any phenomena to be able to produce valuable theories? We don't fundamentally understand gravity, and yet we can predict the orbits of extra-solar planets, and launch probes to Saturn, so clearly the gaps in our knowledge on that subject are not so vast that the theory is useless.
Well yes, if you utterly ignore what the intent of the writers was, you can come up with anything. But the original peoples that believed the Genesis mythos and cosmography believed in six literal days, in a world that was flat and a crystal firmament above it in which the stars and planets were set.
Speciation, including speciation that leads to mutual infertility, has been observed. Besides, the whole concept of speciation is far more complex than you seem to understand. You can have two different species that can still reproduce with each other.
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-speciation.html
I don't think you know what "circumstantial" means. Besides, one does not have to have direct evidence to infer the existence of something. Have you ever seen an electron?
Why does there have to be a why? Just because you want to project some meaning on the universe doesn't mean that there is any meaning.
And that still doesn't speak to science. Even if there is a WHY, that doesn't make any or all science false or questionable.
Human beings evolved from ape-like ancestors millions of years ago in Africa. The fossil and genetic evidence are overwhelming. If you feel some great desire to find a big "WHY" to all of it, that's fine, but that does not change the facts themselves.
In other words; basic research is absolutely critical to scientific advancement, and those that have to ask why are ignorant of how we got to where we are now.
You're quite right. Historically companies building space vehicles for NASA were contractors. These vehicles were not strictly speaking private craft, any more than an aircraft carrier is a private ship.
Why would anyone buy firewalls when we have iptables and as far traffic monitoring, why pay for some custom Snort frontend? Actually that goes for iptables too. I haven't boought a router, firewall, traffic monitor, shaper or spam appliance in well over a decade.
The real irony is that I'm using an iPhone to defend Android.