Well, good thing I'm not from Laodicea then. Must be someone else he's talking about.
I also don't understand who "dropped out of school" and who were the "people speaking with spirits." A bit too cryptic.
Also, "irreducibly complex" using the definition of Behe, does not mean "could not have arrived through evolution by natural selection." So I'm not sure what the point of your link is.
Well, if I keep going North, I get to the North Pole and can't go North any further. Guess that's the edge, then!
No one has trouble understanding what the phrase means *figuratively*, but still that doesn't mean it can be used to say anything conclusive about the *physical* shape of the Earth.
Which hopefully isn't in dispute among Slashdot readers, but you can never be sure.
That misses the point. You were able to sell these people on Macs & iPods because you could convince them that a NON-geek would want it.
If Apple made GEEK products like a Linux iPod that plays only Ogg Vorbis with a crude, skinnable display, would you have been able to sell them on Apple products?
my bible still says the earth is round, Isaiah 40:22.
Well, I missed this point earlier. My goodness, this proves every one of your points. The Bible has at least one verse which does not contradict physical reality, therefore must be 100% true.
Of course, there are people who read the Bible and conclude (admittedly, with a heavy dose of sarcasm), that it proves the earth to be square.
Four corners of the earth, and all that.
Of course, I'm sure I can find some verses in the Koran and Tao Te Ching that are not obviously false; I suppose that makes them equally authoritative?
Your metaphysics is extraordinarily sloppy and facile; you assume a logical chain
1a. morality is important 1b. evolution excludes morality 1c. therefore, evolution is false.
which is completely backwards. Both premises are likely false, anyway.
Also, you've made absolutely absurd extrapolations of evolution; natural selection is limited by the raw material of genetic variation. DNA codes for proteins, and it exceedingly unlikely to naturally evolve into something else. "Clay-based beings" and "bodiless consciousness" are both almost certainly beyond the bounds of chemistry and physics; however, they are certainly not beyond the powers of an omnipotent creator. In any case, evolution is not teleological; it cannot know where an "optimum" is, it can only work through selecting among what is already present in the population.
The question for *you* is to explain why God doesn't allow for these, if they indeed are optimal examples of intelligent design, not for evolution to explain why they don't happen.
Science and even metaphysics is not some realm where imagination gets full rein; it is stringently determined by an apparently objective physical reality. And independent of confirmation by some "manual" you might have read.
Or maybe you'd realize that Genesis is no more accurate than the Hindu or Shinto or Greek or Babylonian creation myths.
This kind of "well, if you squint your eyes, it looks partly accurate" is the most pathetic type of grade-school apologetics. The language is pretty damn clear, and it meant "day" not "uh, could be a day, could be billions of years, but whichever it is, this story is still 100% completely accurate, so believe it."
Anyhow, with that absolutely incisive analysis "day == thousands of years" are we all supposed to slap our foreheads, and say, "Oh, my. Now I understand that Genesis IS 100% true, I just need the right decoder ring. I'll stop looking through my telescope now, because it is all right there in the Good Book. Thanks, caino59, you've made my life better."
Next, I'll suppose you'll tell us about the angels guarding the entrance to the Garden of Eden, so that none of us wander back there.
The only thing more annoying is those people who will talk about the "talents" in Matt. 25:14-30 as a metaphor for our abilities, even after admitting that talent is just a unit of weight.
If the "end of us" is "a better and more complete understanding of the world we live in," I'm all for it, especially when it leads to tremendous advances in improving the health, well-being, and satisfaction of humanity. That's what science has done, and hopefully, will continue to do, for humanity.
Ctrl-C Return was the monitor command; DOS would usually get reattached as soon as Basic printed the prompt character and waited for keyboard input. But you could, in theory, totally disconnect the I/O hooks without doing I/O to reconnect them. 3D0G would re-establish the DOS connection cleanly, assuming you hadn't toasted the instruction at $3D0 itself.
Well, if evolutionists *did* try to claim such a thing, it would be a weak argument indeed.
The fact is, your invention is exactly the opposite of the current state of affiars: we don't need such arguments to address what *appears* in the fossil record, but merely reasonable beliefs in what is, unfortunately, missing from the fossil record as we have observed it to date.
When you look, for instance, at the correlation between index fossils and radioactive dating in sequencing the geological column, the evidence is *very* strong that we have the layers in the right order and the organisms bracketed in the same way throughout the world.
We don't have that kind of dramatic discordance that would call our current understanding into question. That we have so much fossil evidence that continues to fill in the gaps, rather than call the basic structure into question, is what shows we are on the right track.
T Rex showing up 65 million years "out of place" is astronomically unlikely, and hasn't happened. The current understanding of the coelecanth got *further* support as more evidence was looked for and found.
"unsubstantiated claims of evolutionary theory"???
It is a pretty weak science library that doesn't have a good hundred volumes containing the substantiation for evolutionary theory that you seek. Look through the past year of articles in the journal Science, for instance, and find how much substance is being added to the claims of evolutionary theory every week.
It was substantial even a long time ago, which is why practicing biologists stopped talking about Genesis a hundred years ago, when the evidence made such talking look positively silly.
Evolutionists *don't* "fill in" these blanks and forget about them. Try picking up a journal like Science, once in a while. Practically every week there is some article about evolution, in which serious biologists are trying to piece together how various things evolved.
Such as the "Comparison of Fine-Scale Recombination Rates in Humans and Chimpanzees", "A Late Jurassic Digging Mammal and Early Mammalian Diversification," "Evolution of Oxygen Secretion in Fishes and the Emergence of a Complex Physiological System," yes, even textbook examples: "Fossil Horses--Evidence for Evolution"
These are just some random titles from the past two months.
Anybody who filled in a major remaining blank, for instance, by piecing together how the DNA mechanism actually evolved from an RNA precursor, for example, would move to the head of the line for a Nobel prize. But these are *hard* things to discover, not simply easy places to say "oh, well, must have been designed then." It's hard to figure these things out when the best evidence probably was eaten 4 billion years ago. But I'm sure hundreds of working biologists are thinking hard about how to do the comparative genetic analysis that would explain it. And they aren't going to waste their time explaining themselves to a Kansas school board.
The debate is not something that has to be hashed out on Slashdot OVER and OVER, everytime any topic vaguely related to evolution comes up.
The debate was among naturalists and biologists and paeleontologists, and geologists, beginning with the publication of Origin of Species. In that debate, where many well-informed people took either side, Darwin (or at least the modern "synthesis" informed by the more modern discoveries in genetics as well as more complete analysis of the meaning of "species") won out. The question is settled, as far as scientific theories can be, and science has moved on to exploring more carefully the various elements in the overall Darwinian structure of life.
The only place ID proponents, and similar non-Darwinian theories still have any chance is in the political arena, with unsophisticated school boards, or politicians more responsive to those in the pulpit than those in the biology lab. They bring up *bad* examples of so-called "flaws" or "gaps" in the theory, and bogus claims of "irreducible complexity." Folks, the "watchmaker" argument was made *long ago* by Paley, and was defeated by the superior evidence on the side of evolution.
There is no point in re-arguing these things. It is reminiscent of Galileo: "You find, on making the experiment, that the larger outstrips the smaller by two finger-breadths, that is, when the larger has reached the ground, the other is short of it by two finger-breadths; now you would not hide behind these two fingers the ninety-nine cubits of Aristotle, nor would you mention my small error and at the same time pass over in silence his very large one."
Yet again and again, we hear about the two finger-breadths that arise from subtle complications in Darwin's theory, but fail to hear about the total lack of scientific integrity on the part of the anti-Darwinists.
Your judgement on "reliability" of sources is quite revealing.
You are happy to accept any source that agrees with what you read in the Bible. And reject anything else as "human" bias.
That is exactly the opposite of the scientific approach, which is to close the books written thousands of years ago, and look at the world with careful observations, and without faith-based preconceptions. Those who choose to do so find compelling support for the theory of evolution. Those who choose to remain comfortable in their fairy tales can believe whatever they want, but will be holding back human progress, especially if they insist others get educated to agree with them.
It was the same kind of human observation and thinking that led to that computer technology being possible as led to the modern synthesis of evolution.
Quantum mechanics is true, whether you want to believe it or not. Even if you don't believe it, every time you use a CD player or a transistor in your computer's CPU, you are testing it, and quantum mechanics is passing the test EVERY TIME.
The reason I don't try to "debate" you is because you would not recognize how soundly you were being beaten.
As they say, don't wrestle with a pig: you both get muddy, and the pig enjoys it.
The only way I could "win" is for you to suddenly wake up and say "OH, evolution is right after all." Which would never happen. So why should I try?
The word is D.E.S.T.R.O.Y. science education by letting in all sorts of nonsense where science should be, by D.E.E.M.P.H.A.S.I.Z.I.N.G. the teaching of honest-to-goodness S.C.I.E.N.C.E.
I'm not being emotional. I'm very calmly pointing out that your inability to understand evolution is not a problem with the theory, to be fixed by coming up with another theory, but with your limited brain function.
I don't have any solution to your limited brain function. On the other hand the quote "Better remain silent and be thought a fool than speak and remove all doubt" comes to mind.
That you cannot emotionally deal with your own stupidity is unfortunate. That you want to weaken education by giving equal time to insipid ideas alongside great ideas is even more unfortunate.
You keep using the term "transitional" in a way which has no meaning. Your question "Where did any creature (with no species?) originate?" has no meaning that I can comprehend.
No, they don't get "taught evolution." Even TODAY, the teaching of evolution is weak and usually non-existent, because of worries that some fundie will get offended that what is taught doesn't include Noah's ark.
With any further "de-emphasis", kids will be taught that "all this is controversial, so approach it with your open mind" while on Sunday, the preachers will all warn them about "godless Evolution being the tool of the devil" and the result will be more stupid people.
If people started teaching math "well, you know 2+2=4 depends on controversial set theory, so we should maintain an open mind, such as a theory that 2+2=5 might also be true" people would become stupider. The analogy is exact.
As far as ID, the whole point of the movement is to open up a hole to drive religion into the schools where science education gets pushed out.
This whole brouhaha is about political controversy replacing logical thought. The logical thinkers settled this so-called controversy a century ago, and have moved on to other things. ID was recognized as bogus a hundred years ago, but the flat-earth types keep bringing it up again.
Why not give equal time to Aristotle's theories of celestial motion? Because they are wrong.
We don't have "faith" in evolution, you dumbfuck. "Faith" is something you have in RELIGION.
In science, we have things called "credibility" and "plausibility" and "testability." ID fails at least the testability, and based on its advocates, fails credibility, and depending on the examples chosen, often lacks plausibility.
Evidence for evolution is everywhere you look. Unless you close your eyes by believing in "faith" that guides you to "Intelligent Design."
And to address your "decaying" argument, perhaps you can clearly define what you mean by "decay."
If you want an example, look at the weather. It's not like the weather just "decays" until it is sunny all the time, it keeps on changing, rain, sun, snow, wind, keeps on happening, without "decaying" at all.
That's because there is a continuous input of thermal energy (from the sun), and enough degrees of freedom in the system to keep things chaotic. And it isn't particular to Earth: Jupiter's Red Spot is a storm that has been going on for hundreds of years without "decaying."
They exist concurrently because they are species that exist at a particular point in time. You are the one who is artificially calling some species "transitional" and presumably other species "non-transitional." The distinction has NO MEANING.
The point is that there is no *destination* that species are traveling toward, or making a "transition" to. It's not like some bell rings and says "We have now arrived at the Homo sapiens evolution stop. We will be standing by for 10,000,000 years until the next scheduled transition. Mind the gap."
There is no way to come up with an example to explain something to someone who does not understand the basic terms of discussion.
It's like asking me to show you an example of calculus when you get confused over basic algebra.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, good thing I'm not from Laodicea then. Must be someone else he's talking about.
I also don't understand who "dropped out of school" and who were the "people speaking with spirits." A bit too cryptic.
Also, "irreducibly complex" using the definition of Behe, does not mean "could not have arrived through evolution by natural selection." So I'm not sure what the point of your link is.
Well, if I keep going North, I get to the North Pole and can't go North any further. Guess that's the edge, then!
No one has trouble understanding what the phrase means *figuratively*, but still that doesn't mean it can be used to say anything conclusive about the *physical* shape of the Earth.
Which hopefully isn't in dispute among Slashdot readers, but you can never be sure.
No, H.264 *de*coders are available off the shelf. Digital set-top boxes do all that stuff with highly integrated chips/chipsets.
But it does require far more power dissipation than audio.
That misses the point. You were able to sell these people on Macs & iPods because you could convince them that a NON-geek would want it.
If Apple made GEEK products like a Linux iPod that plays only Ogg Vorbis with a crude, skinnable display, would you have been able to sell them on Apple products?
Well, that Broadcom 7411 at least takes 2 Watts peak power consumption, and is a full INCH square.
That's a battery life of less than 2 hours for the iPod, if everything else is turned off.
This generation of chips is for set-top boxes, plugged into wall power, not for handheld devices.
my bible still says the earth is round, Isaiah 40:22.
Well, I missed this point earlier. My goodness, this proves every one of your points. The Bible has at least one verse which does not contradict physical reality, therefore must be 100% true.
Of course, there are people who read the Bible and conclude (admittedly, with a heavy dose of sarcasm), that it proves the earth to be square.
Four corners of the earth, and all that.
Of course, I'm sure I can find some verses in the Koran and Tao Te Ching that are not obviously false; I suppose that makes them equally authoritative?
Well, we seem to have come full circle.
Your metaphysics is extraordinarily sloppy and facile; you assume a logical chain
1a. morality is important
1b. evolution excludes morality
1c. therefore, evolution is false.
which is completely backwards. Both premises are likely false, anyway.
Also, you've made absolutely absurd extrapolations of evolution; natural selection is limited by the raw material of genetic variation. DNA codes for proteins, and it exceedingly unlikely to naturally evolve into something else. "Clay-based beings" and "bodiless consciousness" are both almost certainly beyond the bounds of chemistry and physics; however, they are certainly not beyond the powers of an omnipotent creator. In any case, evolution is not teleological; it cannot know where an "optimum" is, it can only work through selecting among what is already present in the population.
The question for *you* is to explain why God doesn't allow for these, if they indeed are optimal examples of intelligent design, not for evolution to explain why they don't happen.
Science and even metaphysics is not some realm where imagination gets full rein; it is stringently determined by an apparently objective physical reality. And independent of confirmation by some "manual" you might have read.
Or maybe you'd realize that Genesis is no more accurate than the Hindu or Shinto or Greek or Babylonian creation myths.
This kind of "well, if you squint your eyes, it looks partly accurate" is the most pathetic type of grade-school apologetics. The language is pretty damn clear, and it meant "day" not "uh, could be a day, could be billions of years, but whichever it is, this story is still 100% completely accurate, so believe it."
Anyhow, with that absolutely incisive analysis "day == thousands of years" are we all supposed to slap our foreheads, and say, "Oh, my. Now I understand that Genesis IS 100% true, I just need the right decoder ring. I'll stop looking through my telescope now, because it is all right there in the Good Book. Thanks, caino59, you've made my life better."
Next, I'll suppose you'll tell us about the angels guarding the entrance to the Garden of Eden, so that none of us wander back there.
The only thing more annoying is those people who will talk about the "talents" in Matt. 25:14-30 as a metaphor for our abilities, even after admitting that talent is just a unit of weight.
If the "end of us" is "a better and more complete understanding of the world we live in," I'm all for it, especially when it leads to tremendous advances in improving the health, well-being, and satisfaction of humanity. That's what science has done, and hopefully, will continue to do, for humanity.
Only if DOS is installed in the machine.
Ctrl-C Return was the monitor command; DOS would usually get reattached as soon as Basic printed the prompt character and waited for keyboard input. But you could, in theory, totally disconnect the I/O hooks without doing I/O to reconnect them. 3D0G would re-establish the DOS connection cleanly, assuming you hadn't toasted the instruction at $3D0 itself.
Well, if evolutionists *did* try to claim such a thing, it would be a weak argument indeed.
The fact is, your invention is exactly the opposite of the current state of affiars: we don't need such arguments to address what *appears* in the fossil record, but merely reasonable beliefs in what is, unfortunately, missing from the fossil record as we have observed it to date.
When you look, for instance, at the correlation between index fossils and radioactive dating in sequencing the geological column, the evidence is *very* strong that we have the layers in the right order and the organisms bracketed in the same way throughout the world.
We don't have that kind of dramatic discordance that would call our current understanding into question. That we have so much fossil evidence that continues to fill in the gaps, rather than call the basic structure into question, is what shows we are on the right track.
T Rex showing up 65 million years "out of place" is astronomically unlikely, and hasn't happened. The current understanding of the coelecanth got *further* support as more evidence was looked for and found.
"unsubstantiated claims of evolutionary theory"???
It is a pretty weak science library that doesn't have a good hundred volumes containing the substantiation for evolutionary theory that you seek. Look through the past year of articles in the journal Science, for instance, and find how much substance is being added to the claims of evolutionary theory every week.
It was substantial even a long time ago, which is why practicing biologists stopped talking about Genesis a hundred years ago, when the evidence made such talking look positively silly.
Evolutionists *don't* "fill in" these blanks and forget about them. Try picking up a journal like Science, once in a while. Practically every week there is some article about evolution, in which serious biologists are trying to piece together how various things evolved.
Such as the "Comparison of Fine-Scale Recombination Rates in Humans and Chimpanzees", "A Late Jurassic Digging Mammal and Early Mammalian Diversification," "Evolution of Oxygen Secretion in Fishes and the Emergence of a Complex Physiological System," yes, even textbook examples: "Fossil Horses--Evidence for Evolution"
These are just some random titles from the past two months.
Anybody who filled in a major remaining blank, for instance, by piecing together how the DNA mechanism actually evolved from an RNA precursor, for example, would move to the head of the line for a Nobel prize. But these are *hard* things to discover, not simply easy places to say "oh, well, must have been designed then." It's hard to figure these things out when the best evidence probably was eaten 4 billion years ago. But I'm sure hundreds of working biologists are thinking hard about how to do the comparative genetic analysis that would explain it. And they aren't going to waste their time explaining themselves to a Kansas school board.
The debate is not something that has to be hashed out on Slashdot OVER and OVER, everytime any topic vaguely related to evolution comes up.
The debate was among naturalists and biologists and paeleontologists, and geologists, beginning with the publication of Origin of Species. In that debate, where many well-informed people took either side, Darwin (or at least the modern "synthesis" informed by the more modern discoveries in genetics as well as more complete analysis of the meaning of "species") won out. The question is settled, as far as scientific theories can be, and science has moved on to exploring more carefully the various elements in the overall Darwinian structure of life.
The only place ID proponents, and similar non-Darwinian theories still have any chance is in the political arena, with unsophisticated school boards, or politicians more responsive to those in the pulpit than those in the biology lab. They bring up *bad* examples of so-called "flaws" or "gaps" in the theory, and bogus claims of "irreducible complexity." Folks, the "watchmaker" argument was made *long ago* by Paley, and was defeated by the superior evidence on the side of evolution.
There is no point in re-arguing these things. It is reminiscent of Galileo: "You find, on making the experiment, that the larger outstrips the smaller by two finger-breadths, that is, when the larger has reached the ground, the other is short of it by two finger-breadths; now you would not hide behind these two fingers the ninety-nine cubits of Aristotle, nor would you mention my small error and at the same time pass over in silence his very large one."
Yet again and again, we hear about the two finger-breadths that arise from subtle complications in Darwin's theory, but fail to hear about the total lack of scientific integrity on the part of the anti-Darwinists.
Your judgement on "reliability" of sources is quite revealing.
You are happy to accept any source that agrees with what you read in the Bible. And reject anything else as "human" bias.
That is exactly the opposite of the scientific approach, which is to close the books written thousands of years ago, and look at the world with careful observations, and without faith-based preconceptions. Those who choose to do so find compelling support for the theory of evolution. Those who choose to remain comfortable in their fairy tales can believe whatever they want, but will be holding back human progress, especially if they insist others get educated to agree with them.
Listen, that computer you are typing on?
It was the same kind of human observation and thinking that led to that computer technology being possible as led to the modern synthesis of evolution.
Quantum mechanics is true, whether you want to believe it or not. Even if you don't believe it, every time you use a CD player or a transistor in your computer's CPU, you are testing it, and quantum mechanics is passing the test EVERY TIME.
Evolution by natural selection is similarly true.
Arrogant, pigheaded, elitist, I may be.
But scientifically, I'm on far more solid ground.
As for that "evidence" of God, I suppose you have scientific observations in mind that back that up?
The reason I don't try to "debate" you is because you would not recognize how soundly you were being beaten.
As they say, don't wrestle with a pig: you both get muddy, and the pig enjoys it.
The only way I could "win" is for you to suddenly wake up and say "OH, evolution is right after all." Which would never happen. So why should I try?
The word is D.E.S.T.R.O.Y. science education by letting in all sorts of nonsense where science should be, by D.E.E.M.P.H.A.S.I.Z.I.N.G. the teaching of honest-to-goodness S.C.I.E.N.C.E.
I.D. is N.O.T. S.C.I.E.N.T.I.F.I.C.
I'm not being emotional. I'm very calmly pointing out that your inability to understand evolution is not a problem with the theory, to be fixed by coming up with another theory, but with your limited brain function.
I don't have any solution to your limited brain function. On the other hand the quote "Better remain silent and be thought a fool than speak and remove all doubt" comes to mind.
That you cannot emotionally deal with your own stupidity is unfortunate. That you want to weaken education by giving equal time to insipid ideas alongside great ideas is even more unfortunate.
You keep using the term "transitional" in a way which has no meaning. Your question "Where did any creature (with no species?) originate?" has no meaning that I can comprehend.
You are very confused.
No, they don't get "taught evolution." Even TODAY, the teaching of evolution is weak and usually non-existent, because of worries that some fundie will get offended that what is taught doesn't include Noah's ark.
With any further "de-emphasis", kids will be taught that "all this is controversial, so approach it with your open mind" while on Sunday, the preachers will all warn them about "godless Evolution being the tool of the devil" and the result will be more stupid people.
If people started teaching math "well, you know 2+2=4 depends on controversial set theory, so we should maintain an open mind, such as a theory that 2+2=5 might also be true" people would become stupider. The analogy is exact.
As far as ID, the whole point of the movement is to open up a hole to drive religion into the schools where science education gets pushed out.
This whole brouhaha is about political controversy replacing logical thought. The logical thinkers settled this so-called controversy a century ago, and have moved on to other things. ID was recognized as bogus a hundred years ago, but the flat-earth types keep bringing it up again.
Why not give equal time to Aristotle's theories of celestial motion? Because they are wrong.
We don't have "faith" in evolution, you dumbfuck. "Faith" is something you have in RELIGION.
In science, we have things called "credibility" and "plausibility" and "testability." ID fails at least the testability, and based on its advocates, fails credibility, and depending on the examples chosen, often lacks plausibility.
Evidence for evolution is everywhere you look. Unless you close your eyes by believing in "faith" that guides you to "Intelligent Design."
And to address your "decaying" argument, perhaps you can clearly define what you mean by "decay."
If you want an example, look at the weather. It's not like the weather just "decays" until it is sunny all the time, it keeps on changing, rain, sun, snow, wind, keeps on happening, without "decaying" at all.
That's because there is a continuous input of thermal energy (from the sun), and enough degrees of freedom in the system to keep things chaotic. And it isn't particular to Earth: Jupiter's Red Spot is a storm that has been going on for hundreds of years without "decaying."
They exist concurrently because they are species that exist at a particular point in time. You are the one who is artificially calling some species "transitional" and presumably other species "non-transitional." The distinction has NO MEANING.
The point is that there is no *destination* that species are traveling toward, or making a "transition" to. It's not like some bell rings and says "We have now arrived at the Homo sapiens evolution stop. We will be standing by for 10,000,000 years until the next scheduled transition. Mind the gap."
There is no way to come up with an example to explain something to someone who does not understand the basic terms of discussion.
It's like asking me to show you an example of calculus when you get confused over basic algebra.
Except you are a dumbfuck from K.U., and I have a real education.
Nobody is saying you can't be an idiot. I'm just saying you ARE an idiot.
You want to believe 2+2=5, or the Earth is flat, go ahead. You are still WRONG.