The candle flame gutters. Its little pool of light trembles. Darkness gathers. The demons begin to stir. [Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science As a Candle in the Dark]
More evidence that when it comes to learning about science and technology, Americans are the smartest butter churners, blacksmiths, and wheelwrights in the world:
This is the result of a new survey of people’s attitudes toward evolution, country by country.
What is it that the rest of the enlightened world knows and we don’t? Are all the technologically advanced peoples on this planet under some magic spell of the evil Darwinists? What are the real world consequences of this kind of scientific ignorance?
There is little doubt that science education in this country is a joke. While American 4th graders score very well on international standardized tests, finishing 3rd in the most recent TIMSS Report (Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study), it’s all downhill from there. Our 8th graders finish in the middle of the pack while our seniors in high school are almost dead last.
The good news is that we are very big country so that we still have a fairly large pool of scientifically inclined students who get advanced degrees and fill out the ranks in industry, government, and research firms. This Rand study shows that there is no shortage of qualified Americans graduating with degrees in life sciences who go to work for our bio/pharm companies at the moment.
The bad news is also in that Rand study; other countries are graduating many more scientific and engineering students per capita and will begin to seriously press our graduates for jobs in a globalized economy in the coming years.
I disagree with PZ Meyers who was kind enough to reprint the table above. He blames “God and the Republicans:”
Americans are being rolled in large numbers by an ideological ‘elite’ nested in our churches and in the Republican party—the reason we are falling so far behind in our understanding of the biological sciences is that political and religious authority figures are lying to the people and fostering ignorance, and Americans are dumbly falling for it…and the more ignorant they are, the more they depend on those false authorities.
Americans aren’t second to last because they are “famously independent.” They’re failing biology because they’re god-soaked sheep, and the Republican party has exploited that failing.
Nonsense! First of all, the grim figures about science education in America relative to the rest of the world have been trending downward since the early 1970’s, long before the religious right achieved influence in Republican politics. It goes hand in hand with declines in our international rankings in mathematics as well which has nothing to do with God or praying or belief in the supernatural.
PZ’s explanation is simplistic. It fails to take into account the hidden failure of our science education; that poverty and rotten schools have more to do with attitudes toward evolution than “Republican elites” or even God.
It goes without saying that those school systems – mostly located in large cities and the rural south – don’t need a belief in God to keep them from understanding evolution. All they need is local government (run by Democrats for the most part) to run the schools so incompetently that students can graduate while lacking the scientific fundamentals.
This table shows the huge disparities between achievement scores by race. The crisis in science education in the inner city is a direct result of neglect as well as a cultural bias on the part of students where any academic achievement is frowned upon.
And if PZ’s explanation is correct, how do you explain this?
Between 1995 and 2003, U.S. eighth grade students improved their performance on the Trends in International Math and Science Study (TIMSS) assessment, which measures mastery of curriculum-based knowledge and skills. However, scores of fourth graders generally remained flat over the same period. Both U.S. fourth and eighth grade students scored above the international average on the 2003 TIMSS, in which both developed and developing countries participated.
A ray of good news that sort of knocks some of PZ’s argument for a slight loop. During almost the exact period of Republican ascendancy, scores for eighth graders improved relative to the rest of the world. At the very least, this shows that other factors are at work when making judgements about our very real problems with science education.
I know what PZ is saying and I share some of his concerns. But to place the blame solely on a belief in the almighty or one political party is a stretch.
As for the notion that conservatives in government are playing politics with science I might ask why this is news? To the extent that the Bush Administration has injected politics into global warming research or other scientific projects one might better ask why is it that this is news when Republicans are in power and not the other party? The political arm twisting at EPA that has been going on for 25 years over second hand smoke has led to shoddy research, poor methodology, and perhaps even jiggered conclusions. It’s no accident that there were 82 studies funded during the Clinton Administration on second hand smoke effects. The trial lawyers were pleased with this avalanche of studies that they could introduce in their class action suits against the tobacco companies.
Aids research has enjoyed similar political attention from Democratic Administrations in order to pander to one interest group or another. And anyone who can’t see the politics on both sides of the global warming debate when it comes to interpreting data needs to take off their rose colored glasses and start paying attention.
My point is that there is enough politicization of science as it is. Blaming Republicans or “god-soaked sheep” is shallow thinking indeed. Better to address other aspects of the problem as well before the rest of the world surpasses us in scientific fields vital both to our economy and national security.
6:52 pm
I’ll tell you exactly why student performance declines with grade level. It is true that the entire school system has been thoroughly politicized, but that is only part of the problem. although a large part. The curriculum has been totally de-Westernized. By that I mean all aspects of the curriculum that emphasize individual achievement have been removed.
The kids are bored out of their minds. That’s the real problem. The textbooks are dull, unchallenging and uninspiring. The assignments are a joke. The tests are an even bigger joke. And grades are utterly meaningless.
As someone with extensive experience teaching junior high, high school and college, I can state with certainty: students rise to the expectation of the teacher. The problem is that teachers, who are hamstrung by administrators and castrated by the curriculum, are not allowed to expect anything from the students, or even less than their parents expect from them. So the students respond with the lowest level of achievement.
I truly believe that education reform is the most serious challenge facing this country.
8:17 pm
[...] We can have Rick Moran’s read on things, or we can have PZ’s. [...]
12:22 am
Well said, Mr. Moran. I despise our public school system – it is indeed a joke. Not only are standards down for students, they are apparently down for (many, not all) teachers too. Michael Crowley did an article in the September 2005 issue of “Reader’s Digest” about teachers that are beyond disgraceful. According to his article, not only are inept teachers routinely hired, but it is nearly impossible to fire bad teachers because they are backed by the Teachers Union…I have to ask, where on earth do the children’s best interests come into play? Then there are the school systems who decide that you aren’t capable of teaching your child sex ed, refuse to allow kids to celebrate traditional Christian holidays, and require their own police stations inside the school. I grew up in a small East Texas town and our high school had its own police force when I was a freshman in ‘94. We didn’t feel like students, we felt like closely watched suspects.
My two children are just toddlers now, but when they are old enough to go to school they won’t – I am home schooling them. I firmly believe that the chance of my children getting a good, solid education from the government is too low to risk their futures on.
7:36 am
In what way does belief in the quasi-religion of Darwinist Evolution qualify one to be a competent, successful engineer or scientist?? I understand the theory (achieving the highest grades in Evolutionary Science in my college years), but that doesn’t mean I have to believe it.
11:06 am
How does understanding one of the great ideas of western civilization, in science, help one be a good scientist?
Scientists need to learn to trust the data, the information found, rather than preconceived notions. They need to follow the facts to find proximate causes.
That’s all an engineer does, really, is deal with proximate causes. The good ones do, anyway. Most of the others start finding it difficult to find jobs, or end up in a courtroom explaining why they didn’t bother to verify that the steel in the bolts holding the bridges was up to to specification.
Why do you regard science as “quasi-religion,” Mr. Schmidtman? And why do you think engineering any different from the application of any other science?
1:54 pm
I’ll tell you why no one believes evolution: its a lie.
If you were walking in a field and saw a watch, you’d think it was made by someone, but a cell, which is many, many times more complex, is just here by ‘chance’ and this vast force of ‘evolution’...which no one can measure. There is no mathematical formula to measure evolution, like there is for other forces, such as gravity. Besides being unmeasurable, evolution is arbitrary! Oh yes, we evolve because we’re special, but things like coelecanths, sharks, etc. do not. Of course evolution just works on living things, not on inorganic matter, for some reason….computers didn’t evolve, neither did steel. Evolution sure is picky!!
Any questioning of evolution is not permitted! Oh no, those who dissent are silenced, threatened, and run out of the ‘scientific’ community. Evolution is the primary doctrine in the religion of humanism (liberalism), and heresy is not permitted!
this quaint 19th century idea is heading towards the dust-bin of history along with marxism and fruedianism. Thank God!
6:45 pm
Interesting post, but scary comments. sigh The problems faced by educators (and science educators) are clearly in evidence in the comments to this post. Science education received a big boost in the US after the USSR launched Sputnik (the first human-made sattelite). Do we need another similar wake up call before we get serious?
Science is a method of inquiry. It has biases (as do all forms of inquiry into the world), but it has been extremely successful at helping humans to understand the natural world. Teacher training, better standards, and (most importantly) parental enthusiasm about school, learning, and inquiry, all go a long way towards building a more scientifically literate society.
Most people don’t understand the difference between a scientific theory or concept – built on thousands of observations or experiments, and validated from many different scientific angles – and an opinion or idea based on armchair theorizing or quaint analogies (like the one about a clock in a field). Children in school very rarely do science, they are merely told about its results and asked to accept them. So the skepticism of the public to those results isn’t all that surprising.
For the commenter in #6 – there are several mathematical formula that do just what you day they don’t do – measure evolution. There are measures of genetic drift, selective pressure, mitochondrial DNA change, etc. that have all been put down on paper, tested and argued about, confirmed or revised based on experiments and new findings. But none of this is really very interesting to you is it. Evolution is a theory about change of living organisms over time. It is not a theory of how living organisms first came to be, it is not a theory of how people should behave towards one another, and it is not a religious doctrine. It’s just science. And until
US citizens understand what science is and how evolution is NOT a threat to Christianity or any other religion, they probably deserve to be ranked just above Turkey in surveys like this.
6:52 pm
tom, questioning of evolution is permitted everywhere and all the time. The problem is that the questions are generally tiresome retreads of really shallow misinformed points that have been answered a million times. But you know what? Because biologists are scientists, and generally working in good faith, they’ll answer those challenges. Again and again. No matter how dishonestly presented they are. They have and they always will.
The arguments you give are a case in point. Evolution doesn’t work “by chance.” Evolution isn’t “a force,” but it DOES include countless working mathematical models that demonstrate the basic concepts in the abstract: even if we didn’t have the evidence sitting out plain enough to see ourselves (heck, I have a cheapass GA screensaver on my computer right now that seems to be working just fine in contradiction to your claims)
And you mention gravity. Interesting. Did you know that our measurements of gravity are only accurate to 1 decimal places? In contrast, the correlation coefficient of the twin-nest heirarchy (i.e. the backbone of the evidence for common descent) is accurate to almost 37 decimal places using ONLY 29 major taxa alone.
But no: all of this evidence just has to be ignored, because some random messageboard poster thinks that living things are like watches. Is evolution heading towards a dust bin? Well, that’s what creationists have been saying for more than 150 years: the collapse is right around the corner. Somehow, though, it never comes, and every new piece of physical evidence dicovered just keeps doggedly confirming the evolutionary pattern over and over while the discipline becomes ever more refined and useful.
But go on: claim it’s all a conspiracy. Make your arguments again, however lousy. You wont get kicked out for heresy. You will get answers though, you can count on that.
7:52 pm
As usual, darwiniacs try to substitute small genetic changes within a species ‘microevolution’ if you will, for macroevolution. As far as these mathematical formulas you talk about, why don’t they apply evenly to all species? Why is this VAST FORCE of evolution so arbitrary?
As far as genetic drift
‘But random genetic drift is even more that this. It also refers to accidental random events that influence allele frequency.’
how can you measure this? this sounds like the ‘hopeful monster’ or ‘puncutated equilibrium’ where some ‘magic’ happens and all of a sudden we have a new species. Same with ‘selective pressure’....all trying to make the jump from small genetic changes in a population to a new creature, which doesn’t happen. Since we know all that we do about genetics, why haven’t we just simulated evolution in the lab? it should be easy, since this is all just ‘chance’, shouldn’t it? we’ve went through thousands of generations of fruit flies in the lab…and guess what, its still a fruit fly. I have seen no evidence that genetic mutations can create a new species, invariably they are harmful.
Oh please, evolution IS a theory of origins. Evolutionists take great pains to write God out of existence. its not about science its about faith. it is a very religious doctrine, try reading Dawkins sometines. And yes, it is used a great deal in politics and economics. Hitler followed this theory to its bloody logical end. You can ignore it and pretend he didn’t but it is undeniable.
7:59 pm
Surely, tom in #6 is doing his best portrayal of a crazy, religious, anti-evolution whackjob just for our amusement. He had me fooled until he got to the part about computers and steel not evolving. I mean, really, no one can be THAT stupid.
Err… can they?
8:12 pm
plunge: Why don’t you ask Richard Sternberg what happens when the god of evolution is questioned?? Why do evolutionists go to court, as in Pennsylvania, to stop any mention of any HERESY towards the god of evolution?? In Kansas, when the evolutionists were invited to debate before the school board, not one showed up? Why is that? where is this ‘openness’, ‘willingness to engage’ hmmmmm??? I see no answers coming from evolutionists, just an effort to silence critics.
All evidence is interpreted in light of a person’s assumptions. Since the fossil record doesn’t show evolution, especially given the cambrian explosion, we now have ‘punctuated equilibrium’. Once the universe was discovered not to be eternal, and given that life cannot possibly have arisen by ‘evolution’ (ie chance) in that time, we have ‘panspermia’.
As a science it has collapsed, as a faith it’ll keep going…keep the faith!!
8:13 pm
Andy: thanks for illustrating my point….and why wouldn’t evolution work on non-living things? Does gravity work on living and non-living things?
again, DARWINIACS have no answers, just try to silence the critics..
8:25 pm
Everyone, I stand corrected: they can be that stupid.
8:39 pm
“As usual, darwiniacs try to substitute small genetic changes within a species ‘microevolution’ if you will, for macroevolution.”
This is meaningless boilerplate. Small genetic changes are both micro and macro: the sum total of the difference between species is their genetic difference, and the criterion for species (reproductive compatibility) is no more or less genetic change in allele frequency than any other feature.
But we don’t even need to know anything about natural selection to know that all life on earth evolved, and evolved from a common origin. The means is secondary to that question: the evidence is clear and overwhelming from the way fossils match genetics match taxonomy, and the entire shebang happens to fit exactly all the other necessary characteristics (like the movement of the continents matching up with major splits in taxa, and so forth). All the facts fit, and they fit into a very very specific and easily falisifiable pattern that we find re-inforced time and time again on every level.
“As far as these mathematical formulas you talk about, why don’t they apply evenly to all species? ”
This question is about as meaningful as asking why the application of basic math gives different results for different equations instead of always equaling the same value. Different selection pressures acting on different genomes will get you different results. There’s nothing shady or even surprising about that: it’s perfectly logical if you understand all the elements involved and what a genome is like.
If you think it’s arbitrary, ok. But that isn’t an argument against it being a fact. Evolution isn’t a some “VAST FORCE” with a direction or goal: it’s a collection of physical processes and realities that follow from the basics of heredity with variation.
“Since we know all that we do about genetics, why haven’t we just simulated evolution in the lab? it should be easy, since this is all just ‘chance’, shouldn’t it? we’ve went through thousands of generations of fruit flies in the lab…and guess what, its still a fruit fly. I have seen no evidence that genetic mutations can create a new species, invariably they are harmful.”
Look, if this is what you believe, then I can see why you might think that evolution is some vast conspiratorial orthodoxy. But the reality is that you are working from a lot of false premises.
First and most fundamental is that you don’t understand taxonomy. All species that would descend from the group represented by the term “fruit flies” (and many different species already have) will be fruit flies. Evolution doesn’t suggest anything different. Taxonomically, creatures descend into nested groups within nested groups: they don’t turn into different creatures, and the old terms all still apply to describe the ancestral groups. That’s why human beings are still eukaryotes, still tetrapods, still amniotes, still eutherians, still apes. At no point did anything classed under those categories have an ancestor in a different category whose descendants “jumped over” into a different one.
Even seeming exceptions like dolphins and whales, which are still tetrapods despite not having four limbs, have vestigial legs apparent in their embryonic state, and even atavisms that appear periodically. Their ancestors and hence they themselves are merely modified tetrapods, something that is apparent to anyone that studies their form and genetic construction. Always were, and always will be, just as all the species descendants of dolphins will be rightly classed as dolphins: no matter how different they become from one antoher, they will still always by their common origin be more like each other than like any other living thing, and the features that unite them will be characteristically dolphin. This is part of the pattern we see everywhere, in every form of life, living and extinct.
If you believe that genetic mutation is always harmful, then I’m afraid you are arguing for an impossibility. Mutation is random. Anything it can do, it can undo: if you can admit that mutation can be harmful, then you must also admit that it can be beneficial as well: there is simply no way to suggest that mutation would limit itself to only what is harmful. Not only is natural selection constantly working against that outcome, but mutation is ignorant: it CAN’T be biased in favor only of harmful mutations. And, in fact, the observation of beneficial mutations is so commonly accepted that a paper demonstrating it yet again won’t even make the top journals unless it offers some new twist. In human beings alone, we can point to countless major mutations in just the last few generations that beneficial: from increased bone mass (which virtually prevents osteperosis or fracture) to immunity to LDH cholesterol to four-color vision in women.
In field tests, the findings are solid and conclusive: the rate at which new genetic variation is observed to develop is many many times greater than that which is necessary to explain even the fastest transitions in the fossil record. In fact, one of the main effects of natural selection is, ironically, not promoting change, but actually slowing it down.
“Since we know all that we do about genetics, why haven’t we just simulated evolution in the lab?”
We do. Read a biology journal. We simulate it and observe it from virtually every angle imaginable. People that deny this are simply working off a different set of facts than biologists.
Good grief: we not only simulate it in the lab, we use it as a matter of fact in commercial development of things like new plant strains, bacteria enhancement, and so forth.
Here’s a basic experiment. Take one particular bacteria. Genetically destroy the part of it that allows it to process lactose, one of its main sources of sustenance. Put it in a high-lactose environment. Watch what happens as it reproduces. And what did happen? After countless strains emerge and die out, the bacteria that survived is found to have three genetic point mutations that have allowed it to process lactose in an entirely novel manner: a new metabolic pathway as it were.
If you want to pretend that experiments like that don’t happen, or that they don’t mean what they obviously do, ok. But you’ll be living in a fantasy world, and in that case I can understand why you might think that evolution is some giant put-on in that case, but it will be your problem with reality, not anyone else’s that is to blame.
“Oh please, evolution IS a theory of origins.”
Actually, though I’m not sure who you are responding to, it by definition cannot be. Evolutionary processes require as pre-requisites all the basic characteristics of life. Without them, you are talking about something else (generally referred to as abiogenesis). Abiogenesis may have some things in common with evolution, but it cannot be evolution, because it involves the start of the very mechanisms that evolution requires in the first place.
“Evolutionists take great pains to write God out of existence.”
And now we come to the real concern: not a scientific one, but rather a fear that evolution weakens your particular belief system.
There was a time when people believed that all manner of scientific findings would weaken their beliefs. It didn’t, and faith always comes out find in the end, but that fear sells a lot of screechy, alarmist books in the meantime!
“its not about science its about faith. it is a very religious doctrine, try reading Dawkins sometines.”
You know, as nasty and anti-religious as someone like Dawkins is, I still haven’t seen anyone justify the claim that what he does is actualy about “faith” or a “religious doctrine.” You make those charges, sure, because you have to play the game and try to make others look like they are operating on the same principles as creationists. But you can’t really back these charges up. They are, in fact, ironically post-modernist.
“And yes, it is used a great deal in politics and economics.”
??? I suppose, in the sense that economics is the study of how an essentially undirected and unplanned organization still produces efficiencies. If you can accept capitalism, then evolution is really not that different of a concept to grasp.
“Hitler followed this theory to its bloody logical end. You can ignore it and pretend he didn’t but it is undeniable.”
Actually, if anything Hitler followed the writings of Martin Luther to their bloody end. “On the Jews and their Lies” by Luther is virtually the playbook of the Holocaust, and Mein Kampf would be almost plagaristic of Luther if Hitler hadn’t cited Luther’s authority directly so many times. Hitler and some of his close advisors may have eventually developed into quasi-pagans, but his open appeals were decidedly to the ugliest side of an anti-Semetism that Christianity had harbored and tolerated for millenia.
However, I don’t think you can blame Christianity for Hitler anymore than you can blame, say, the idea of having a strong patriotic military or a sense of manifest destiny for Hitler. And the fact that Christianity has largely repudiated anti-Semetism as a perversion is one of the many extremely positive things about modern Christianity over the ancient sort. Nor can you blame Darwin or evolution for Hitler. You can’t even blame Neitzsche. Hitler was his own special brand of asshole who mangled all sorts of things into a drive to power and destruction.
Regardless, whether or not you like evolution, whether or not some crackpot was inspired to do horrible things based on their understanding of it, that is irrelevant to the question of whether or not evolution is a biological reality in the history of life on Earth. Of course, most sensible people realize that what is is not a guide to what ought to be.
8:51 pm
“plunge: Why don’t you ask Richard Sternberg what happens when the god of evolution is questioned??”
If you tell the story of supposed martyr Sternberg by 1) leaving out all sorts of pertinent facts 2) leaving out all the stuff he did that was shady, then I suppose it could look as if he was hard done upon. But then, if I narrated a boxing match by only telling you about the punches thrown by one side and not the other, it might seem like assault. What that proves is anyone’s guess.
“Why do evolutionists go to court, as in Pennsylvania, to stop any mention of any HERESY towards the god of evolution??”
Because when people say “hey, let’s teach kids a bunch of babbling nonsense and call it science” other people say “er, no.”
“In Kansas, when the evolutionists were invited to debate before the school board, not one showed up?”
Because the format for the “debate” was rigged and dishonest. Regardless, putting on a showboating public event for publicity is not the same thing as seriously debating claims. The claims have all been dealt with, and any new claims will be dealt with. We can do that without giving crackpots or preening politicians special publicity.
“I see no answers coming from evolutionists, just an effort to silence critics.”
The critics seem to be yammering on just fine despite this “silencing” so we must not be doing a very good job of it.
“Since the fossil record doesn’t show evolution, especially given the cambrian explosion, we now have ‘punctuated equilibrium’.”
You can put these words in a sentance as an accusation, but I bet you don’t even know what they mean. The fossil record is perfectly consistent with evolution in every respect. Citing the “cambrian explosion” as proof against evolution just a buzzword that creationists use: there’s nothing anti-evolutionary about it.
“Once the universe was discovered not to be eternal, and given that life cannot possibly have arisen by ‘evolution’ (ie chance) in that time, we have ‘panspermia’.”
Again, evolution is not “chance.” Not even abiogenesis is really “chance.” If you continue to insist that it is, then you are simply attacking a straw man. Your account of “panspermia” is just as ill-informed as the rest. Biologists haven’t concluded any such thing about the possibilities of abiogenesis.
“As a science it has collapsed, as a faith it’ll keep going…keep the faith!!”
Again, you can make these accusations, but you can’t back them up with anything. Any believer can accuse mainstream science of refusing to consider their ideas based on some dogmatic faith. It’s a charge that’s easy to make. But so what? Screaming about it isn’t going to make the evidence go away, or make experimental results proving a young earth, or ID detection magically burst into existence.
9:03 pm
again, DARWINIACS have no answers, just try to silence the critics..
Um, genius, my insinuating that you are stupid is in no way silencing you, no more than pointing out that Michael Moore is obese would be silencing the moonbats.
Rather, let’s call it “stating the obvious.”
I still hold out some hope that you’re actually one of us just trying to make creationists look even sillier than they usually do, but I admit that my hope is waning.
9:05 pm
He’s Never Heard of the Cylons?
Throughout my travels, travails, and trials in the blogosphere, when it comes to the so-called Culture War, I’ve run across more than one unapologetically stupid creationist. However, I think “tom,” commenting over at Right Wing Nut House, has surpa…
9:33 pm
Andy: you’re a typical darwiniac jackazz….couldn’t answer my question now, could you? typical wacko
if you wonder who is stupid, look in the mirror.
9:42 pm
you’re a typical darwiniac jackazz…
If the other choice is being a creationist nitwit, well, then guilty as charged!
couldn’t answer my question now, could you?
Your question is meaningless. It’s akin to asking why we don’t find the Krebs cycle in asphalt.
What is required for evolution that living things have that, say, a computer or steel does not?
If nothing else, you have confirmed the worries of both Rick Moran and PZ Myers: regardless of the root cause, science education is in trouble.
typical wacko if you wonder who is stupid, look in the mirror.
I don’t mean to sound all Quantum Leap, but I look just like you!
9:50 pm
I don’t have time to answer every point, I’d like to go to bed sometimes tonight!
’ we can point to countless major mutations in just the last few generations that beneficial: from increased bone mass (which virtually prevents osteperosis or fracture) to immunity to LDH cholesterol to four-color vision in women.
’
more bone mass is a ‘mutation’??? couldn’t it be just better nutrition? seriously, you type quite a bit, but it doesn’t make much sense.
‘The fossil record is perfectly consistent with evolution in every respect. Citing the “cambrian explosion†as proof against evolution just a buzzword that creationists use: there’s nothing anti-evolutionary about it.’
I know, NOTHING IS INCONSISTENT WITH EVOLUTION
evolution morphs and twist to meet every new fact that comes along. of course the gradual ‘genesis’ of new forms is perfectly consistent with the sudden appearance of a great many creatures…...ah yeah… its OBVIOUS that nothing can disprove evolution. and if nothing can disprove it, its not science….duhhhh….and if you can’t measure it, its not science….and your so-called formulas aren’t for evolution…but in your mind everthing is evolution, evolution is god…yadaydaydyayyady
‘And now we come to the real concern: not a scientific one, but rather a fear that evolution weakens your particular belief system.’
Clowns from Voltaire to Marx have been trying to destroy christianity, and Darwin and YOU won’t have any more luck…what a joke!! I have a real fear of what darwin does to a society, the ‘brave new hellish world’ it produces.
‘Because the format for the “debate†was rigged and dishonest’
Of course, those poor evolutionists
everything is against them WAAAHHHHH….oh please. I thought since you darwiniacs were so far superior in every way, more ‘evolved’ than us ‘crationists’ that you’d have no problems with any arguments with us!!
‘Because when people say “hey, let’s teach kids a bunch of babbling nonsense and call it science†other people say “er, no.‒
because its hey kids, we’re going to ram our god (evolution) down your throat, like it or not. again if your arguments were so superior you would welcome this. but you darwiniacs don’t. and its easy to see why.
‘Again, evolution is not “chance.†Not even abiogenesis is really “chance.†If you continue to insist that it is, then you are simply attacking a straw man. Your account of “panspermia†is just as ill-informed as the rest. Biologists haven’t concluded any such thing about the possibilities of abiogenesis.’
well what is it? its not a force, you say, and it DEFINATELY is arbitrary, so what is it?? admit it, its god.
‘panspermia’ is just an example of the outlandish things people come up with to try to confirm evolution…..nothing can every be against evolution….yeah
9:51 pm
Andy: notice who started calling names, you darwiniacs guess you need to ‘evolve’ a little more HAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHA
little insecure in our ‘god’ now aren’t we??? HAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH
9:52 pm
‘I’ve run across more than one unapologetically stupid creationist. However, I think “tom,†’
I’m glad to see how open and ‘tolerant’ you darwiniacs are to debate!! HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAH
10:31 pm
“more bone mass is a ‘mutation’??? couldn’t it be just better nutrition? seriously, you type quite a bit, but it doesn’t make much sense.”
Yes, it is a mutation: a mutation that has been identified in their genes and which is being studied in the hopes that it could help us cure osteoperosis. We’re not talking strong bones. The family in Connecticut with this mutation has EXTREMELY strong bones, to the point where they do not break under conditions that would shatter normal bones.
“I know, NOTHING IS INCONSISTENT WITH EVOLUTION evolution morphs and twist to meet every new fact that comes along.”
No, in fact. The basic requirements for evolution to be true are, in fact, very exacting, to the point where imagining something that would disprove something like common descent would in fact be quite easy to do. It’s just that, in practice, we never come across anything like that.
Your complaint about how nothing is inconsistent with evolution is yet another baseless accusation that you could make about anything. “Yes, nothing is inconsistent with gravity. You even claim that balloons, which float up, are consistent with gravity, which says they fall down! You’ll say anything!”
“of course the gradual ‘genesis’ of new forms is perfectly consistent with the sudden appearance of a great many creatures…...ah yeah… its OBVIOUS that nothing can disprove evolution. and if nothing can disprove it, its not science….duhhhh….and if you can’t measure it, its not science….and your so-called formulas aren’t for evolution…but in your mind everthing is evolution, evolution is god…yadaydaydyayyady”
Whatever. You can say this stuff. But you can’t support it or justify it. Anyone can make stupid accusations.
“Clowns from Voltaire to Marx have been trying to destroy christianity, and Darwin and YOU won’t have any more luck…what a joke!!”
Tell it to all the Christian biologists: I think they’ll be really amused at this one. It’s YOUR paranoid fears that make evolution out to be about destroying Christianity. And thus, you’ll believe any lie or nonsense about it, because you think it’s a threat to your faith.
“I have a real fear of what darwin does to a society, the ‘brave new hellish world’ it produces.”
Again, even if it were true that evolution produces bad results, that has nothing to do with whether or not it is true. Of course, the claim that it causes bad things for society is pretty suspect anyway.
“Of course, those poor evolutionists everything is against them WAAAHHHHH….”
No, they weren’t going to give a bunch of nutcases a platform to preen on. If you want to have a debate, then debate. If you want a bunch of scientists to lend credibility to your press conference, then sorry, we don’t have to play along.
“you’d have no problems with any arguments with us!!”
We didn’t have any problems with your arguements. We just aren’t going to help you play your goofy games.
“because its hey kids, we’re going to ram our god (evolution) down your throat, like it or not.”
No, in science class, we’re going to teach mainstream science, just like we teach astronomy and physics instead of astrology and Dungeons and Dragons.
“again if your arguments were so superior you would welcome this.”
Welcome what? If you want to teach something in a basic science class, then it had better be a well supported scientific theory. You don’t get to just toss in any old nonsense because you happen to believe it. What goes into an official curriculumn as something you need to learn to be educated about science is a very different thing from debating an issue with a fringe group. We’ll debate all you want. But we’re not just going to hand over signs of legitimacy to your view unearned just because you whine a lot.
“well what is it? its not a force, you say, and it DEFINATELY is arbitrary, so what is it??”
It’s a process, a logical outgrowth of some basic conditions like a descending heredity with variation and an observed process in nature.
“admit it, its god.”
Blah blah blah. Again, you can keep making dumb accusations like this all you want if it makes you feel better.
“I’m glad to see how open and ‘tolerant’ you darwiniacs are to debate!!”
Nothing says that we have to be nice to people that argue dishonestly and out of a careless ignorance. Once we’ve easily refuted your litany of bad arguments, we are perfectly free to characterize what the use of those arguments says about you.
11:01 pm
‘Yes, it is a mutation: a mutation that has been identified in their genes and which is being studied in the hopes that it could help us cure osteoperosis’
so everything is a mutation now? kind of like Andre the giant was a ‘mutation’....now with this ‘mutation’ what do we end up with? a bone, and thats ‘evolution’...do you ever step back and realize how ridiculous this sounds? what isn’t evolution?
‘No, in fact. The basic requirements for evolution to be true are, in fact, very exacting, to the point where imagining something that would disprove something like common descent would in fact be quite easy to do. It’s just that, in practice, we never come across anything like that.’
then you ignore history. lets see the universe used to be thought of as eternal, which would give time for anything to happen, but now it had a start, which was thought to be a body blow to evolution, but NO, nothing is, and nothing can ever be because of how you interpret what you see. I look at the immense complexity of a cell and see the hand of God, you see ‘chance’ and this mysterious, unmeasurable, ARBITRARY, but all-powerful, force of ‘evolution’.
‘Whatever. You can say this stuff. But you can’t support it or justify it. Anyone can make stupid accusations.’
MY THOUGHTS EXACTLY
‘Welcome what? If you want to teach something in a basic science class, then it had better be a well supported scientific theory. You don’t get to just toss in any old nonsense because you happen to believe it.’
you do if its evolution.
‘It’s a process, a logical outgrowth of some basic conditions like a descending heredity with variation and an observed process in nature.’
a ‘process’ oh yeah that explains everything!! HAHHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH
‘Nothing says that we have to be nice to people that argue dishonestly and out of a careless ignorance. Once we’ve easily refuted your litany of bad arguments, we are perfectly free to characterize what the use of those arguments says about you.’
no one would ever accuse darwinists of having an ‘evolved’ sense of etiquette
we’ve seen the results of your ‘darwinist’ society, in Auschwitz and the Gulag…..
11:12 pm
thanks darwiniacs for demonstrating your intolerance, and hate, toward anyone who dares disagree with your god…...KEEP THE FAITH
HA>HA>HA>HA>AHA>AHA>AHA>AHA
8:30 am
An honest man, armed with all the knowledge available to us now, could only state that, in some sense, the origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle—Francis Crick
In fact, the probability of the formation of a protein and a nucleic acid (DNA-RNA) is a probability way beyond estimating. Furthermore, the chance of the emergence of a certain protein chain is so slight as to be called astronomic.—Ali Demirsoy
Organisms either appeared on the earth fully developed or they did not. If they did not, they must have developed from pre-existing species by some process of modification. If they did appear in a fully developed state, they must indeed have been created by some omnipotent intelligence—Douglas Futuyma
Despite more than a hundred years of intense collecting efforts since the time of Darwin’s death, the fossil record still does not yield the picture of infinitely numerous transitional links that he expected—-Robert Carroll
And certainly, there’s no doubt about it, that in the past, and I think also in the present, for many evolutionists, evolution has functioned as something with elements which are, let us say, akin to being a secular religion … And it seems to me very clear that at some very basic level, evolution as a scientific theory makes a commitment to a kind of naturalism.—-Michael Ruse
Together with Marx’s materialistic theory of history… Darwin’s theory of evolution was a crucial plank in the platform of mechanism and materialism—Douglas Futuyma
Darwin applied a consistent philosophy of materialism to his interpretation of nature—Stephen J. Gould
No one has ever produced a species by mechanisms of natural selection. No one has ever got near it and most of the current argument in neo-Darwinism is about this question—Colin Patterson
First, genuine mutations are very rare in nature. Secondly, most mutations are harmful since they are random, rather than orderly changes in the structure of genes; any random change in a highly ordered system will be for the worse, not for the better. For example, if an earthquake were to shake a highly ordered structure such as a building, there would not be a random change in the framework of the building which, in all probability, would not be an improvement—B.G. Ranganathan
It is a striking, but not much mentioned fact that, though geneticists have been breeding fruit-flies for sixty years or more in labs all around the world-flies which produce a new generation every eleven days-they have never yet seen the emergence of a new species or even a new enzyme—Gordon Taylor
of course all these quotes are ‘taken out of context’....KEEP THE FAITH
!
9:30 am
“so everything is a mutation now?”
No. If you would like me to spend some time introducing the subject of genetics and how it relates to development, I would be happy to do so. But I doubt you would really listen.
“kind of like Andre the giant was a ‘mutation’”
I don’t know if his size was genetic or not. According to wikipedia, his size was because of excessive growth hormone, but that can be either genetic or environmental.
“....now with this ‘mutation’ what do we end up with? a bone,”
Your problem is that you don’t know enough about what a “bone” is to recognize what it really is composed of and how that can change. You see things in terms of vague abstractions that you think are fundamental. In reality, the substrate of these things is far more similar and fluid that you are imagining.
” and thats ‘evolution’...do you ever step back and realize how ridiculous this sounds? what isn’t evolution?”
Well, lots and lots of things. Computers aren’t. Acquired traits aren’t. Inorganic materials aren’t. Genetic modification of things isn’t.
“then you ignore history. lets see the universe used to be thought of as eternal, which would give time for anything to happen, but now it had a start,”
Well sort of, though it’s hardly that simple. Some people thought of the universe as eternal, some didn’t, and no one really knew for sure. And actually, what’s really striking is that people used to think that the universe was SMALL. I mean, really small. The standard view was not far off from the Biblical idea that the earth was set at the center of a firmament (behind which were waters) and things like the sun and the moon and the stars were set in great spheres. It was, in fact, less than a century ago that we even realized that the universe was much bigger than the Milky Way: we thought that this was all there was. But then someone saw galaxies for what they were, and our idea of its size expanded to an almost unimaginable degree.
“which was thought to be a body blow to evolution,”
No it wasn’t. Again, this is something in your imagination, not history. First of all, the age of the universe has nothing to do with evolution. It might impact the chances of abiogenesis happening in a universe, but the current age of the earth and the universe seem pretty much perfectly possible for that, though that’s all we can say since we don’t really know exactly what we are looking for.
“but NO, nothing is, and nothing can ever be because of how you interpret what you see. I look at the immense complexity of a cell and see the hand of God, you see ‘chance’ and this mysterious, unmeasurable, ARBITRARY, but all-powerful, force of ‘evolution’.”
No again, you’re just spinning out wild hyberbole. It’s not an interpretation to look at a cell and see how it is an example of adaptation run wild. Every element down to its genetic code is precisely the sort of thing we might expect if it had evolved. If it had been designed, it would be trivially easy to show that it could not possibly have evolved. There are thousands of things that a designer could and can do that evolution cannot do. There are many things human designers are doing with genetic code right now that evolution cannot do. And yet, we never see any of these things in nature. Why is that?
“no one would ever accuse darwinists of having an ‘evolved’ sense of etiquette”
It would be perverse to regard folks who lie and proudly accuse vast majority of honest people of a vile conspiracy to be deserving of polite treatment. You insult countless Christians who are also scientists by alleging that they are traitors to their religion. You besmirch the honesty and integrity of countless scientists by alleging that they are covering up the weaknesses of evolutionary theory or being less than honest about how certain a reality it is.
“we’ve seen the results of your ‘darwinist’ society, in Auschwitz and the Gulag…..”
There is no such thing as a “darwinist” society in the sense of one evolution proscribes. Evolution proscribes nothing. It is not a guide to morality, but a description of biological history. You might as well allege that we have seen what a “hurricanist society” does to coastal towns, and therefore we should not believe in hurricanes.
As for your copy and paste-fest: let me ask you: have you actually read the books and articles from which those quotes were taken? You pre-empitively try to pretend that it would be illegitimate to point out that you misunderstand them, but in that case: are you honest enough to have even tried to read them in context in the first place? I highly doubt it.
Regardless, a collection of quotes yanked off a creationist website doesn’t demonstrate anything of interest to this discussion. Lots of people have all sorts of opinions about this and that, some good, some lousy, some in between. But single sentances are not what make up science: it’s articles and evidence that build scientific consensus, not quotes.
Like everything else, you want this to be simple: to be able to simply toss out evolutionary theory without ever having to actually understand it in the first place. That’s, if I may say so, truly intellectually lazy.
10:47 am
plunge – You have remarkable patience.
12:56 pm
‘No. If you would like me to spend some time introducing the subject of genetics and how it relates to development, I would be happy to do so. But I doubt you would really listen.’
Oh I understand genetics a little, perhaps enough to know when I’m being taken for a ride.
It recognizes several mechanisms of evolution in addition to natural selection. One of these, random genetic drift, may be as important as natural selection.
It recognizes that characteristics are inherited as discrete entities called genes. Variation within a population is due to the presence of multiple alleles of a gene.
It postulates that speciation is (usually) due to the gradual accumulation of small genetic changes. This is equivalent to saying that macroevolution is simply a lot of microevolution.
you are basically saying that small genetic changes add up to ‘evolution’ a new creature. it doesn’t, plain and simple. Like my example of the fruit flies. They have a new generation every 11 days, and after decades, nothing…do I need to reproduce the above quote on fruit flies? Genetics only go so far, before they stop.
its really simple, take that fruit fly, and over the generations, make it ‘xidshfw’ whats that?? SOMETHING NEW…but you can’t. because ‘evolution’ does not exist. all that you see are variations within species, and you hope and pray that somehow you’ll get a new creatore (ie hopeful monster) please.
as far as the age of the universe, its obvious, but of course you don’t see it. with an eternal universe, then anything becomes possible, but now the mathematics of proteins happening by chance make it impossible for life to have arisen by chance…oh and I know darwinism doesn’t deal with origins….yeah, thats why darwin wrote the ORIGIN of the species…..come on…..
you see what you want to see. you see a cell and you see the ABITRARY force (or whatever it is) of evolution….others that are more intelligent than you or I see it a bit differently:
‘The likelihood of the spontaneous formation of life from inanimate matter is one to a number with 40,000 noughts after it… It is big enough to bury Darwin and the whole theory of evolution. There was no primeval soup, neither on this planet nor on any other, and if the beginnings of life were not random, they must therefore have been the product of purposeful intelligence.’——Chandra Wickramasinghe
‘….no one has ever satisfactorily explained how the widely distributed ingredients linked up into proteins. Presumed conditions of primordial Earth would have driven the amino acids toward lonely isolation’——Sarah Simpson
but like Dawkins, you take evolution as a matter of FAITH:
‘So the sort of lucky event we are looking at could be so wildly improbable that the chances of its happening, somewhere in the universe, could be as low as one in a billion billion billion in any one year. If it did happen on only one planet, anywhere in the universe, that planet has to be our planet-because here we are talking about it.’——-Richard Dawkins
As far as evolution and society there is no doubt that Hitler was trying to create the ‘master race’ and the soviets, the ‘new socialist man’. Didn’t Marx want to write the forward for Darwin’s book?
The German Führer, as I have consistently maintained, is an evolutionist; he has consciously sought to make the practice of Germany conform to the theory of evolution.’—-Sir Arthur Keith
you’ve already made up your mind….but PROVE IT…like I said make a new form of life from a fruit fly!! Or even better come up with a new form of life from a bunch of chemicals, go ahead and add a little electricity, like frankenstein!! this should be SO SIMPLE given all we know about genetics….but you can’t.
keep trying to baffle us with darwinist bullshit…won’t work, sorry
1:27 pm
For anyone with an open mind, ie non-darwiniacs, check out:
Shattering the Myths of Darwinism
by Richard Milton
“I am not a creationist and do not hold an religious convictions. I can find no scientific or logical reason to believe or disbelieve in a creator and I remain open-minded on the question” (p 233). He lists his reason for writing the book as being “to sound a cautionary note about the extent to which ideological Darwinism has replaces scientific Darwinism in our educational system. My message is that the world is full of people who want you to believe in their ‘ism’—Darwinism, Marxism, Freudianism, and the rest. Don’t accept anything they say unless they can substantiate it with scientific evidence, however persuasive their arguments” (p 235-6).
4:23 pm
tom, I notice that you never did define the Cambrian Explosion, suggestign that andy’s charge that you don’t actually know what it is has merit.
By the wat: the reason steel does not evolve is because it has no DNA, and nothing to serve in its place, and does not engage in any form of reproduction. The same answer holds true for all other forms of inanimate matter. If nanotechnology ever produces steel girders that reproduce (especially if they clatter around in yards engaging in sexual reproduction), I would expect them to undergo evolution, possibly with very interesting results.
Also: it’s a small but significant point that Darwin’s little book was not titled “Origin of the Species” but “On the Origin of Species”.
You’re right that both Hitler and Stalin invoked evolution to justify their policies. If you read a little further, you will realize that neither of them understood evolution any better than you did (which is why Stalin was taken in by the charlatan Lysenko, and Hitler by the charlatan Mengele). If only evolution had been better taught and better explained to lay persons, honest people would not have been fooled by the sophistries of the tyrants.
No, tom, not everything is a mutation. But a mutation is, in fact, a mutation. It seems as though your arguments are morphing to evade each new fact.
What really continues to puzzle me is why people like tom think biology is a threat to God. Most Christians don’t have a problem with evolution, so what’s with tom?
I think there’s a real possibility that creationism is a tool of Satan. Really, just picture a demon whispering in tom’s ear, “If dogs are related to coyotes, then there is no God!” The absurdity of the non sequitur, when bluntly stated, just reeks of the illogic and disordered thinking typical of the fallen angels.
4:35 pm
My strongest objection to creationism, though, is the wayit depends on blind, random chance.
“Tom, why do all vertebrates have four limbs (or vestigial remnants of them)?”
“No reason. God just happened to make them that way.”
“Tom, why do all mammals have seven neckbones, from the seven tiny bones of a pygmy shrew to the seven elongated bones of a giraffe? Why never five or nine?”
“Happenstance.”
“Tom, why do gorillas and humans have allof the same blood types?”
shrug
And so on.
Sorry, I look at the world around me and just can’t accept the idea that the world just exists any old way. There must be some set of principles that can explain the unfolding events of this complex, yet seamlessly unified world. We could call it, I dunno…science?
6:53 pm
“It recognizes several mechanisms of evolution in addition to natural selection. One of these, random genetic drift, may be as important as natural selection.”
Important to what? Genetic drift is an important macro-level determinant of what sorts of niches and patterns are available, but it doesn’t do any real heavy lifting.
“you are basically saying that small genetic changes add up to ‘evolution’ a new creature. it doesn’t, plain and simple.”
But it so clearly does. You only need to look at the genomes of two distinct but not far distant species to see . You act as if there is some mysterious barrier separating species. But there isn’t. The separation is a small genetic change just like all the rest, and it isn’t particularly mysterious. In many cases, the exact genetic changes that led to the diverisification of like can be traced and triangulated. How would that even be possible if evolution wasn’t valid?
Here, answer me this one question.
Why is it that when we use fossils and geographical distribution to construct a sort of “tree of life” of heirarchical relation over time that we get pretty much exactly the same tree that we get when we examine the genetics of creatures? Why would those things match up? If all creatures were specially created, why would this distinct pattern that ties them to a very distinct past set of ancestral history be found in virtually every way we know to look at them? How do you account for that?
“Like my example of the fruit flies. They have a new generation every 11 days, and after decades, nothing…do I need to reproduce the above quote on fruit flies?”
No, because the quotation is like, decades behind the times. There hasn’t been “nothing.” Fruit flies have speciated in both in the lab and in the wild. You just can’t admit it. And as I explained, you don’t even understand what evolution predicts. If you believe that evolution expects any descendants of fruit flies to STOP being fruit flies, then you are simply mistaken as to what evolution expects. If we lived millions of years ago and watched the evolution of flies from then until now, you’d probably still be saying the same dumb thing: “well, sure flies are of all different species now, with different characteristics, but they are all still FLIES”
“Genetics only go so far, before they stop.”
Really? How? What stops it? What is this myterious force that prevents species from every becoming genetically incompatible and henceforth developing in different directions?
“its really simple, take that fruit fly, and over the generations, make it ‘xidshfw’ whats that?? SOMETHING NEW…but you can’t. because ‘evolution’ does not exist. all that you see are variations within species, and you hope and pray that somehow you’ll get a new creatore (ie hopeful monster) please.”
All speciation is essentially variations within a species group. If you don’t understand that, then you are working from a faulty understanding of how evolution works.
“as far as the age of the universe, its obvious, but of course you don’t see it. with an eternal universe, then anything becomes possible, but now the mathematics of proteins happening by chance make it impossible for life to have arisen by chance…”
Again, this is what creationists say. But what they say, and what reality is like are very very often different things.
“oh and I know darwinism doesn’t deal with origins….yeah, thats why darwin wrote the ORIGIN of the species…..come on…..”
Have you actually READ the origin of species? If so, then why would you say something so ignorant of what it’s about. The title is the origin of species, not “the origin of life.” Darwin showed how life became diverse, not how it began.
you see what you want to see. you see a cell and you see the ABITRARY force (or whatever it is) of evolution….others that are more intelligent than you or I see it a bit differently:
“‘The likelihood of the spontaneous formation of life from inanimate matter is one to a number with 40,000 noughts after it…”
Anyone claiming to be able to calculate odds is flat out lying. There is no way to do such a calculation. If you think there is, then lets see the math.
“As far as evolution and society there is no doubt that Hitler was trying to create the ‘master race’ and the soviets, the ‘new socialist man’. Didn’t Marx want to write the forward for Darwin’s book?”
I dunno. Did Darwin convert back to Christianity on his deathbed? Did all the Jews get warned about 9/11? What does that have to do with anything anyway? If Einstein was a rapist, would that mean that relativity is de facto wrong?
8:08 pm
‘By the wat: the reason steel does not evolve is because it has no DNA, and nothing to serve in its place, and does not engage in any form of reproduction. The same answer holds true for all other forms of inanimate matter. If nanotechnology ever produces steel girders that reproduce ’
you really can’t see the forest for the trees. Before there was life there was what cargon, inanimate matter? correct? But, somehow, evolution worked on this inanimate matter, and created life, correct? It could not have been God, perish the Thought. So if evolution could ‘evolve’ this inanimate matter into something as complex as life, why couldn’t it ‘evolve’ inanimate matter into something far simpler, than life? Does Gravity just work on living things? so why should evolution, which as everyone knows, is all powerful, just work on living things?
‘Also: it’s a small but significant point that Darwin’s little book was not titled “Origin of the Species†but “On the Origin of Speciesâ€.’
isn’t that nice? Now when darwin was asked about how life started, didn’t he say something about a ‘nice warm pond’? Did he mention God? I know, he was ‘misquoted’ and ‘taken out of context’ thats it!
‘You’re right that both Hitler and Stalin invoked evolution to justify their policies. If you read a little further, you will realize that neither of them understood evolution any better than you did (which is why Stalin was taken in by the charlatan Lysenko, and Hitler by the charlatan Mengele). If only evolution had been better taught and better explained to lay persons’
Thank you for having the honesty to admit that. The ‘neither understood’ part is kind of like what the supporteres of communism (that never had to live under it) used to say about communism. Stalin and Moa, never really understood communism, or practiced it in the right way. But of course, NEXT TIME, we’ll get it right….of course they didn’t add ‘whatever the price in human lives and suffering’.
‘No, tom, not everything is a mutation. But a mutation is, in fact, a mutation. It seems as though your arguments are morphing to evade each new fact’
really? so tell me how darwinism ‘morphed’ into neo-darwinism. Darwinism has added ‘panspermia’ and ‘punctuated equilibrium’ and whatever to fit any new fact….so I must defer to the experts (darwiniacs) about morphing!
‘What really continues to puzzle me is why people like tom think biology is a threat to God. Most Christians don’t have a problem with evolution, so what’s with tom?’
Please post the quote from my above posts that you think demonstrate this. Didn’t you notice my mention of voltaire and marx? lets see, the mightiest empire in the history of the world tried to destroy christianity, and they failed. Islam has tried to destroy christianity for 1300 years, and they have failed. Marxism killed millions of christians, in an effort to destroy it, and failed. Christianity is the largest religion in the world and is growing by leaps and bounds. get a clue, christianity will not be destroyed by a bunch of punk-ass professors HA
shrug
how did life come from non-life?
evolution
shrug
doesn’t the second law of thermodynamics make evolution impossible?
no, evolution is much more powerful…all powerful
doesn’t the lack of fossil evidence doom evolution?
no, evolution is correct, facts are ‘malleable’
shrug
like I said, put your money where your mouth is, and PROVE IT! take a fruit fly and make it something else….should be easy, given all we know about genetics, and evolution is a just a blind watchmaker! put a few chemicals together in the lab and create a new life form, and then evolve it! simple stuff.
8:30 pm
‘Sorry, I look at the world around me and just can’t accept the idea that the world just exists any old way. There must be some set of principles that can explain the unfolding events of this complex, yet seamlessly unified world. We could call it, I dunno…science?’
This is what I find so interesting. you say the world is ‘complex’ and ‘seamlessly unified’ and yet you beleive that all this happened by chance. and there no great mind behind the order. You think that order ‘just happened’ by chance…..and you insist that what you beleive is not faith. wow, you have far more faith than I do.
Einstein thought much the same way and he said:
‘I want to know God’s thoughts – the rest are mere details’
I guess he was too dumb to understand evolution.
ps:
‘I think there’s a real possibility that creationism is a tool of Satan. Really, just picture a demon whispering in tom’s ear, ’
you would know your master’s thoughts much better than I.
8:39 pm
Did tom just invoke SLOT as evidence against evolution?
Wow, this truly is like watching Dumb and Dumberer and Dumbererest and, uh, More Most Dumbereresterest.
C’mon, tom, admit it: you’re one of us. This tomfoolery has gone too far; people might really begin to believe you’re this nuts!
8:46 pm
oh and why is darwinism sooooooo threatened by christianity, and never misses an opportunity to attack it? Dawkins, for example, hates christians. Why does ‘science’ have to fight against faith? hmmmmmmmm?
I know, its all taken out of context, and you darwiniacs won’t answer this question any more than you are capable of ansering any of my other questions…..
11:25 pm
“you really can’t see the forest for the trees. Before there was life there was what cargon, inanimate matter? correct? But, somehow, evolution worked on this inanimate matter, and created life, correct?”
No, not correct. Again, you very clearly do not understand what you think you are criticizing. Evolution, at least as we mean it in biology, cannot be the process that began life. Evolution REQUIRES the basic elements of life (reproduction with heredity plus variation) in order to function.
“It could not have been God, perish the Thought.”
Plenty of evolutionary scientists do, in fact, believe that it was God that created life. This view is not science, but it is not precluded by science anymore than the knowledge about how/why it rains precludes the belief that God can make it rain.
“So if evolution could ‘evolve’ this inanimate matter into something as complex as life, why couldn’t it ‘evolve’ inanimate matter into something far simpler, than life?”
This sentence contains so many misconceptions that it stands in testament to its own foolishness.
“Does Gravity just work on living things? so why should evolution, which as everyone knows, is all powerful, just work on living things?”
If you actually understood the basic process then it would be obvious why it can only work on living things. Fire can only work when there is oxygen.
“isn’t that nice? Now when darwin was asked about how life started, didn’t he say something about a ‘nice warm pond’?”
Yes, but this wasn’t in his published work and he made no claim about it being something he could demonstrate in the same way that he could evolution. It was a speculation in a private letter.
“really? so tell me how darwinism ‘morphed’ into neo-darwinism.”
Pretty simple actually. Darwin didn’t know anything about genetics when he and Wallace first proposed the idea. In other words, they didn’t understand heredity (Darwin, in fact, got it quite wrong, thinking that heredity happened via a blending of traits). Genetics first really became understood on just last century, and with it came powerful new tools to determine things like common ancestry, family trees, population dynamics, model the actul speed of transmission of traits and so on. This was such a powerful new insight into life that it vastly enriched the basic evolutionary idea. Not only did it confirm evolution in a rather spectacularly precise manner, but it allowed us to discover the twin-nested heirarchy, which is one of the centerpieces of the evidence for common descent.
“Darwinism has added ‘panspermia’ and ‘punctuated equilibrium’ and whatever to fit any new fact….so I must defer to the experts (darwiniacs) about morphing!”
First of all, panspermia is not a part of neo-darwinism. It’s a speculation about how life might have begun on earth, which isn’t about evolution, and it isn’t anything more than speculation about one possible way life could have come to this planet. If you read journals about evolution you aren’t going to find it mentioned. If you read journals dealing with abiogenesis, you might hear it mentioned, but only rarely. In short, your obsession with it is simply a sign that you are quite unfamiliar with what you are talking about.
Punctuated equilibrium is a principle about the pace of speciation and change. I’m not sure how observations that make evolution more specific and applicable are somehow bad things. The whole point of science is that it is ever correcting its own misconceptions and improving its theories.
I doubt you could even define PE or explain its place in evolutionary history. Just like Cambrian Explosion, its a buzzword you’ve heard that you think has something to do with evolution being wrong, but you don’t really know much about it.
“Please post the quote from my above posts that you think demonstrate this. Christianity is the largest religion in the world and is growing by leaps and bounds. get a clue, christianity will not be destroyed by a bunch of punk-ass professors HA”
You didn’t read what was said. What was said is that it is a minority of Christians that believe that evolution is a threat to their beliefs. It is mostly only evangelicals and mostly only those in the U.S., where science education is weakest. It is YOU who is claiming that evolution is trying to destroy Christianity.
“doesn’t the second law of thermodynamics make evolution impossible?”
No. But if you think it does, then please, do enlighten us. I can almost guarantee that in doing so, you will badly misstate what the 2nd law even is.
“doesn’t the lack of fossil evidence doom evolution?”
What lack are you talking about, exactly?
“like I said, put your money where your mouth is, and PROVE IT! take a fruit fly and make it something else….”
The really ironic thing is that you are so ignorant of what evolution even is that you don’t realize that if something like this happened, it would be strong evidence against evolution. The neo-darwinian synthesis is inherently anti-saltationist.
“put a few chemicals together in the lab and create a new life form, and then evolve it! simple stuff.”
Nope, it’s not. We don’t know what early life was like, and so we have no idea how to reproduce the conditions that might have brought it about. Or, for that matter, calculate anything about its properties or likihood.
“oh and why is darwinism sooooooo threatened by christianity, and never misses an opportunity to attack it?”
Just because you can say this lie doesn’t make it true. Many biologists are Christians. Most of what they and everyone else attacks are not Christians, but a particular fundamentalist movement called creationism. And they attack it because it promulgates all sorts of falsehoods.
“Dawkins, for example, hates christians. Why does ‘science’ have to fight against faith? hmmmmmmmm?”
Dawkins does hate Christians. But then, so what? Dawkins is not “darwinism.”
“I know, its all taken out of context, and you darwiniacs won’t answer this question any more than you are capable of ansering any of my other questions…..”
I asked you a pretty simple question: I don’t remember you answering it.
Again: how do you explain the twin-nested heirarchy? How come lateral gene transfer, which is something that even the dumbest designer could accomplish, never shows up in higher life?
I could ask a million questions you can’t answer, really. How come, if humans are not apes and are not related to apes, they have particular sorts of molars which are unique to apes, of all living things? How come humans are sometimes born with tails? How come dolphins and whales are sometimes born with legs, and in fact their embryos actually form legs, just like all tetrapods, but then later reabsorb them?
And how come we never see the opposite? Why are ape atavisms like tails only ever seen in apes and not in, say, birds? Or dolphins?
12:32 pm
‘No, not correct. Again, you very clearly do not understand what you think you are criticizing. Evolution, at least as we mean it in biology, cannot be the process that began life. Evolution REQUIRES the basic elements of life (reproduction with heredity plus variation) in order to function.’
so all I was taught in school was a lie? looks like more ‘morphing’ from evolutionists. so you take it on FAITH that somehow, just somehow, life started….then of course, this vast, all powerful force of evolution takes over!! I doubt dawkins would agree with you….but evolution sure is a slippery target….it means everything, and nothing….ok
‘Plenty of evolutionary scientists do, in fact, believe that it was God that created life. This view is not science, ’
only if you define science if purely materialistic terms, which is what evolution does. This is one of the problems with science is general. They want to be purely about ‘science’ but then they define it to encompass a purely materialistic philosophy which is hostile to christianity, or any religion other than their own…and then of course they deny they are religious.
‘Yes, but this wasn’t in his published work and he made no claim about it being something he could demonstrate in the same way that he could evolution’
when has that ever stopped evolutionists? Plain and simply genetic changes within species is not evolution. if you want to say that ‘micro evolution’ is all that evolution is, then its not the traditional meaning of evolution…but apparently evolution is whatever anyone wants it to mean.
‘If you actually understood the basic process then it would be obvious why it can only work on living things. Fire can only work when there is oxygen.’
again only if you can change the definition of evolution to mean whatever you want it to mean, and you do. I’m talking about the traditional definition of evolution, not your personal definition. its this grand force that shapes all of our lives and everything…and its of course ARBITARY. For some reason we can talk about the EVOLUTION of the universe….so somehow it affects non-living things in that case, but it can’t ‘evolve’ non-living things into more complex forms….this makes no sense, sorry…..but I know, whatever it takes to defend your ‘god’
the whole point of panspermia and punctuated equilibrium is to demonstrate how far afield the defenders of darwinism will go to defend their theory….as you are amply demonstrating.
‘I doubt you could even define PE or explain its place in evolutionary history. Just like Cambrian Explosion, its a buzzword you’ve heard that you think has something to do with evolution being wrong, but you don’t really know much about it.’
tell me, do you know much about evolution? are YOU the official evolution spokesman to define what it is and is not?
‘You didn’t read what was said. What was said is that it is a minority of Christians that believe that evolution is a threat to their beliefs. It is mostly only evangelicals and mostly only those in the U.S., where science education is weakest. It is YOU who is claiming that evolution is trying to destroy Christianity.’
to say that darwinism is not a primary component of the materialistic world-view is just ignorant….again you can’t define things as you wish they would be. tell me Dawkins would not like to see christianity destroyed, and it is he, not YOU, that is the foremost evolutionist in the world today….like it or not.
‘No. But if you think it does, then please, do enlighten us. I can almost guarantee that in doing so, you will badly misstate what the 2nd law even is.’
enlighten you? that would be like casting pearls before swine. I know anything that challenges darwinism is ‘taken out of context’...yeah….ok.
‘The really ironic thing is that you are so ignorant of what evolution even is that you don’t realize that if something like this happened, it would be strong evidence against evolution. The neo-darwinian synthesis is inherently anti-saltationist.’
again, then you may as well say evolution is dead, evolution is really genetics.
’ fundamentalist movement called creationism. And they attack it because it promulgates all sorts of falsehoods.’
really? you mean its like darwinism? tell me about these falsehoods, like God created the earth and life? and you have a better explanation? and what about consciousness, death, sin, right, wrong, morals, etc (oops sin doesn’t exist now does it?). You attack christianity because it is diametrically opposed to the materialistic gospel of evolution, which has to write God out of existence. You know it, and I know it…you can say its ‘taken out of context’ or whatever else BS you want.
‘Dawkins does hate Christians. But then, so what? Dawkins is not “darwinism.‒
come on, how stupid are you? do you think YOU are the face of darwinism? no, dawkins is, whether you beleive it, or like it. Sorry if Tiger Woods was doing steroids, then golf would look bad….thats just the way it is….duhhhhhhhhh
all your questions are explained by either evolution or creation. you get to pick and choose….at least for now, until you darwiniacs send anyone who disagrees to ‘re-education’ camps or the gulag.
12:41 pm
‘C’mon, tom, admit it: you’re one of us’
sorry, I’m not a brain-washed lying stooge!!
12:57 pm
I’m going to assume for the moment that you ARE the spokesman for evolution. it really shows how creationists and critics of evolution are winning the arguments.
When I was in school LIFE EVOLVED period, end of story….now we don’t know how life started, evolution only works on living things, but we don’t know how they got here.
I remember the little fairy story about how some animal kept reaching higher and higher for food, and it became a giraffe…..evolution was caused by external forces….not its purely internal, purely genetics, now the changes are very small and minor.
The fruit fly example does hold up. if evolution now rules out large changes, then its only left with small changes, or its nothing. If evolution cannot change a creature into something else, gradually over time, and we’ve had thousands of generations of fruit flies to attempt this, then what is it? its nothing, just a plank of a religion called materialism, that must be defended at all costs.
1:41 pm
“I’m going to assume for the moment that you ARE the spokesman for evolution.”
Well, that would be stupid. I’m not even a biologist. I’m a layperson who happens to have read and understood enough to know that your arguments are lousy. But I can’t even diagram a Krebs cycle. Treating me as an authority on evolution isn’t just silly: it smacks of delusional thinking, as if you a random blog commenter were addressing the NAS somehow by posting.
“When I was in school LIFE EVOLVED period, end of story….now we don’t know how life started, evolution only works on living things, but we don’t know how they got here.”
I am willing to bet that if you are claiming your school taught you that rocks evolved, then you are either lying, crazy, or you grew up in some sort of bizarre new age cult sect and not a public school (as lousy as those are).
Or maybe, far more likely, you just misunderstood what you were taught then as badly as you misunderstand the issues before you now.
Our understanding of abiogenesis has improved over the last couple of decades, not failed.
“I remember the little fairy story about how some animal kept reaching higher and higher for food, and it became a giraffe…..”
Well see, you proved my point. What you are describing is not evolution, but rather Lamarkism. We often teach kids about Lamarkism as a CONTRAST to how evolution actually works. You got confused then, and you remain confused now.
“evolution was caused by external forces….not its purely internal, purely genetics, now the changes are very small and minor.”
At each individual step, yes. But over time lots of small changes inevitably make large differences. And once speciation happens, then two populations will not develop in the same direction, because there is no transmission of genes.
Are you ever going to answer any of my questions by the way? How come we never see in nature what any designer could do easily: how come we only see genes passed ancestrally rather than, say from a cat to a dog? Why does nature obey a rule of genetics that only makes sense in terms of evolutionary ancestry?
“The fruit fly example does hold up. if evolution now rules out large changes, then its only left with small changes, or its nothing.”
No, you still aren’t grasping the concept here. Large changes are perfectly possible. But no matter how large a change is, it still is very unlikely to ever become something “entirely” new, and certainly not suddenly: it’s always a modification of what came before. Human cells are still eukaryotic. Our basic bodyplan is still vertebrate. Evolution does not and never has predicted anything different.
“If evolution cannot change a creature into something else, gradually over time, and we’ve had thousands of generations of fruit flies to attempt this, then what is it? its nothing, just a plank of a religion called materialism, that must be defended at all costs.”
No, you still just aren’t getting the concept. The problem is with your understanding of what “something else” is. Gerbils are very very different from the early tetrapods (the first sizeable land animals, which were something like a cross between lobed-fishes and amphibious lizards). However, they are not something “new”: they aren’t a new group on the same level as tetrapods. They ARE tetrapods: they are a subset of tetrapods. Gerbils are also eukaryotic. Now, if you looked at a single celled eukaryote and a gerbil, I think you’d probably agree that they are quite different. But gerbils are still not something radically new on the same level as eukaryotes. They are eukaryotic, and they are a subset of eukaryotes.
3:32 pm
“so all I was taught in school was a lie?”
No, chances are you didn’t study very hard or listen very clearly, because you have a lot of very simplified, mangled ideas about what evolutionary biology is about.
“looks like more ‘morphing’ from evolutionists. so you take it on FAITH that somehow, just somehow, life started….”
Nope. We search for information on how life started. The major issue right now is that there is no good guide to exactly what of many many different possibilities and paths might actually have been taken. We know that in general the idea is plausible, but its hard to nail down specifics.
“then of course, this vast, all powerful force of evolution takes over!! I doubt dawkins would agree with you….but evolution sure is a slippery target….it means everything, and nothing….ok”
Dawkins and virtually every other biologist would agree with me.
But again, the only person claiming that evolution is a “vast, all-powerful force” is you.
“only if you define science if purely materialistic terms, which is what evolution does.”
No: only if you define science as being based on testible evidence, which it must. Anything else is basically just faith, and we all have different faiths but no way to establish whose faith is correct. So instead, in science, we focus only on those things we have some ability to think about testing and finding evidence for. You can gab on about “materialism” all you want, but unless you can explain how science could work any other way, it’s just a lot of hot air.
“This is one of the problems with science is general. They want to be purely about ‘science’ but then they define it to encompass a purely materialistic philosophy which is hostile to christianity, or any religion other than their own…and then of course they deny they are religious.”
If something isn’t religious, then yes: it’s not religious. If you call it “religious” as some sort of insult, then you denigrate both religion as well as showing a poor grasp of english.
“when has that ever stopped evolutionists? Plain and simply genetic changes within species is not evolution.”
Of course it is.
“if you want to say that ‘micro evolution’ is all that evolution is, then its not the traditional meaning of evolution…but apparently evolution is whatever anyone wants it to mean.”
Nope. Evolution is quite well defined. The problem you are having is that it isn’t simple: understanding evolution requires understanding a lot about genetics and biology and a whole host of other things. It’s not some simple concept like “things morph.” That doesn’t mean anything.
“again only if you can change the definition of evolution to mean whatever you want it to mean, and you do.”
No, I’m using the normal standard definition of the word as used in biology.
“I’m talking about the traditional definition of evolution, not your personal definition. its this grand force that shapes all of our lives and everything…and its of course ARBITARY. For some reason we can talk about the EVOLUTION of the universe….”
That’s using the term “evolution” in a non-biological, almost poetic, sense. That’s not what anyone means when they talk about the evolution of life on earth. In english, words have different meanings. But biologists have been consistent. The only one confusing the different meanings is, again, yourself.
“so somehow it affects non-living things in that case, but it can’t ‘evolve’ non-living things into more complex forms….”
Right, because the basic components of biological evolution are not there. If you take “evolution” to mean simply “change over time” then that’s a valid use of the word, but it really isn’t what a biologist is talking about, or what a creationist objects to. Again, this seems to be your personal confusion over the usage of terms.
“the whole point of panspermia and punctuated equilibrium is to demonstrate how far afield the defenders of darwinism will go to defend their theory….as you are amply demonstrating.”
Again, as I pointed out, neither of those things are what you claim they are. PE, for instance, is not “going far afield” because it doesn’t mean what you think it means (of course, I asked you to define or explain it, and you haven’t bothered to even try, despite using it in sentances as if you knew what it meant). PE is a refutation of phyletic gradualism. Do you even know what THAT is?
“tell me, do you know much about evolution? are YOU the official evolution spokesman to define what it is and is not?”
No: I’m someone that can read. What evolution is, what these terms mean, what all these different concepts are: they aren’t some interpretative dance. They are well established and intelligible terms that anyone can understand. The problem is that understanding them takes a tiny bit of effort and care about getting things right. You don’t seem to be willing to put in that effort, and you are extremely careless: you’ll say or believe anything regardless of how flawed, nonsensical, or self-contradictory it might be, as long as you think it shows that evolution is naughty and evil.
“to say that darwinism is not a primary component of the materialistic world-view is just ignorant….”
Why? Why would Christians have a “materialistic world view”? I’m not a Christian, and I don’t have a “materialistic world-view.” Science is about what physically testible and detectable things we can verify, indeed, but it isn’t by itself a worldview. People that have all sorts of different theologies and ontological convictions can handle science just fine.
“again you can’t define things as you wish they would be. tell me Dawkins would not like to see christianity destroyed, and it is he, not YOU, that is the foremost evolutionist in the world today….like it or not.”
He’s certainly a popular figure, but calling anyone “the foremost” anything in science displays a real ignorance of what science is. Science isn’t about celebrity or any single person’s views about this or that. Dawkins is a popular speaker and educator on evolution, but he’s not a particularly notable figure in evolutionary biology proper. That he thinks Christianity is bad for society is his own opinion and he’s welcome to share it just as you are to disagree with him.
“enlighten you? that would be like casting pearls before swine. I know anything that challenges darwinism is ‘taken out of context’...yeah….ok.”
Well, what do you want us to say? If you lie and misstate things, are we not allowed to point this out? The practice of dishonest “quote-mining” isn’t something we just reflexivly toss out without thought. We can prove that it’s done, and done dishonestly, time and time again by creationists. The real problem is that creationists have no serious interest in biology. They don’t bother to learn anything about it. So they scan through texts without really reading anything for things that they think will sound troubling as a few sentances.
But really honest people read the whole papers/books/whathave you. Trying to think you can be informed about something just from a handful of quotes of dubious context is just plain lazy.
“again, then you may as well say evolution is dead, evolution is really genetics.”
Evolution is really genetics. But it doesn’t predict that cats will give birth to dogs. If something like that happened, it would be a real problem for evolution.
“You attack christianity”
I don’t attack christianity at all. I attack dishonesty as practiced by creationists.
“come on, how stupid are you? do you think YOU are the face of darwinism?”
Nobody is the face of any discipline of science. That’s not how science works. And only creationists talk about “darwinism.”
“no, dawkins is, whether you beleive it, or like it.”
Again, what someone like dawkins believes about christians has next to nothing to do with whether the evidence for evolution is sound or not.
Your vision of science is almost like a child reading a tabloid. Dawkins has written a number of accessible and quite good books explaining evolution: you’d probably learn a lot if you sat down and read them. But whether or not evolution is true or not does not rest on Dawkin’s personal beliefs or his attitudes towards religion. Kenneth Miller is another popular biologist and author of books on evolution who is a devout Chrisitian and who disagrees with Dawkins quite strongly. I highly recommend “Finding Darwin’s God” as a response to both creationists and Dawkin’s views about religion.
“all your questions are explained by either evolution or creation.”
No, because you haven’t been able to answer any of my questions. That’s why you try to change the subject always away from the actual discussion of the evidence.
4:51 pm
‘I am willing to bet that if you are claiming your school taught you that rocks evolved, then you are either lying, crazy, or you grew up in some sort of bizarre new age cult sect and not a public school (as lousy as those are).’
besides being an arrogant asshole you’re full of shit, and you wouldn’t have the guts to call me a liar in person you punkazz pussy . I’m not going to waste anymore time with a jackazz, keep believing your fairy story, its BS. keep twisting what you think evolution is, doesn’t matter what some wacko on a message board says.
I’m not going to believe your BS, and fewer and fewer people are!!
4:55 pm
all your efforts toilet plunger, are for naught, polls show your lies aren’t working
haahaaahhahahahahahahahhahahahhahhahhahahahahahahhahah
6:09 pm
What, are there two of you?
Anyway, all of your arguments have failed, you can’t answer even simple questions about the evidence: all you can do is scream that it’s all a conspiracy and dogma and then run off cackling.
6:39 pm
all your efforts toilet plunger, are for naught, polls show your lies aren’t working
Polls also show that, despite it being nothing more than basic rote memorization, Americans are quite geographically ignorant. Hardly shocking, then, that they don’t put forth the effort to grasp the somewhat, just a slight, bit more complex topic of evolution.
Instead they struggle to find Iraq on a map and they ask dumb questions like “Why doesn’t steel evolve?”
This is more a sad comment on the ignorance of Americans than on the science of evolution.
8:02 pm
here andy, try thinking outside of your little darwiniac box. despite what toilet plunger says, evolution is a theory of origins, and in order to do that it had to take inorganic matter and make it organic. Duhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
The other point is very simple, but also seems to be appreciated only by more mathematically-oriented people. It is that to attribute the development of life on Earth to natural selection is to assign to it—and to it alone, of all known natural “forces”—the ability to violate the second law of thermodynamics and to cause order to arise from disorder. It is often argued that since the Earth is not a closed system—it receives energy from the Sun, for example—the second law is not applicable in this case. It is true that order can increase locally, if the local increase is compensated by a decrease elsewhere, ie, an open system can be taken to a less probable state by importing order from outside. For example, we could transport a truckload of encyclopedias and computers to the moon, thereby increasing the order on the moon, without violating the second law. But the second law of thermodynamics—at least the underlying principle behind this law—simply says that natural forces do not cause extremely improbable things to happen**, and it is absurd to argue that because the Earth receives energy from the Sun, this principle was not violated here when the original rearrangement of atoms into encyclopedias and computers occurred.
The biologist studies the details of natural history, and when he looks at the similarities between two species of butterflies, he is understandably reluctant to attribute the small differences to the supernatural. But the mathematician or physicist is likely to take the broader view. I imagine visiting the Earth when it was young and returning now to find highways with automobiles on them, airports with jet airplanes, and tall buildings full of complicated equipment, such as televisions, telephones and computers. Then I imagine the construction of a gigantic computer model which starts with the initial conditions on Earth 4 billion years ago and tries to simulate the effects that the four known forces of physics (the gravitational, electromagnetic and strong and weak nuclear forces) would have on every atom and every subatomic particle on our planet (perhaps using random number generators to model quantum uncertainties!). If we ran such a simulation out to the present day, would it predict that the basic forces of Nature would reorganize the basic particles of Nature into libraries full of encyclopedias, science texts and novels, nuclear power plants, aircraft carriers with supersonic jets parked on deck, and computers connected to laser printers, CRTs and keyboards? If we graphically displayed the positions of the atoms at the end of the simulation, would we find that cars and trucks had formed, or that supercomputers had arisen? Certainly we would not, and I do not believe that adding sunlight to the model would help much. Clearly something extremely improbable has happened here on our planet, with the origin and development of life, and especially with the development of human consciousness and creativity.
http://www.math.utep.edu/Faculty/sewell/articles/mathint.htm
9:12 pm
“despite what toilet plunger says, evolution is a theory of origins, and in order to do that it had to take inorganic matter and make it organic. Duhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh”
Look, no matter how many times you say this, it doesn’t make it true. The TOE does not and can not and does not claim to explain the origin of life. If you understand what evolution was or required, this would be extremely blindingly obvious. But you don’t, so you don’t realize it, and end up saying silly things like this.
“It is that to attribute the development of life on Earth to natural selection is to assign to it—and to it alone, of all known natural “forcesâ€â€”the ability to violate the second law of thermodynamics and to cause order to arise from disorder.”
Unfortunately, as I said, you have just misstated the 2nd law. If your account were true, then the formation of, for instance, ice would be impossible, along with any number of chemical reactions occuring all around and inside you right now. Thermodynamics is essentially the idea that you cannot be efficient: no matter what you do, you lose the use of some portion of useable energy from the system in doing it. Nature CAN create order in all sorts of ways. It just costs energy to do so.
THAT is why the earth not being a closed system is important. All manner of chemical reactions can continue without the earth’s surface running out of energy, because energy is constantly being added from elsewhere. None of this has anything to do with order. Macro-events like messing up your room or ordering your are not thermodynamics, except in the sense that they require energy to perform.
The argument being made is simply mathematically ignorant. You cannot model reality as the random positioning of atoms! Reality contains any number of macro processes that change the picture of what is and isn’t likely to happen dramatically. If you ignore the existence of gravity, for instance, and just model atoms in the universe moving randomly, then you will wrongly conclude that galaxies are wildly improbable. The person you are quoting is making the EXACT same sort of straw man argument.
Your link is, of course, broken.
And of course, you didn’t even attempt the simple question I’ve asked over and over: how do you explain the very very particular pattern of nested heirarchy appearing over and over again in nature no matter which way we examine things?
6:08 am
as far as the link….add the “L”.....
http://www.math.utep.edu/Faculty/sewell/articles/mathint.html
‘Look, no matter how many times you say this, it doesn’t make it true. The TOE does not and can not and does not claim to explain the origin of life’
you’re right, no matter how many times you say it, it doesn’t make it true
How did life begin? Biochemical evolution on mineral surfaces
How did life begin on Earth? University of Chicago geophysicist Joseph V. Smith, in a Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences paper published Tuesday, March 31, provides a theory for how small organic molecules may have been able to assemble on the surfaces of minerals into self-replicating biomolecules—the essential building blocks of life.
http://www-news.uchicago.edu/releases/98/980331.origin.of.life.shtml
the whole point that you darwiniacs refuse to see is that the same natural processes that gave us life, and this immense and incredible complexity of biological life, you totally believe.
but when I ask why these same natural processes that gave us this huge biological complexity, couldn’t have given us much simpler thinks like roads and bridges, you laugh…..just as we laugh at your ‘evolution’
6:10 am
oh yeah toilet plunger, when you publish something about the second law, maybe I’ll take YOUR word for it….until then…HAHAHHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
9:45 am
The bottom of the barrel (I hope)
As evidence supporting the contention that creationists are dangerously deluded, I offer some comments I found underneath a post at Rightwing Nuthouse. The subject of the post is the sorry state of public science education in the US, and a
10:01 am
I don’t need to publish anything about the 2nd law. Concepts like thermodynamics aren’t necessarily easy, but the general ideas are not out of the grasp of laypeople and you can understand them if you try. But you have to be willing to put in some effort. Your account of them is, however, convienient for me, because it is a nice and easy way to demonstrate that you are ignorant about the concepts you claim to be using.
“How did life begin? Biochemical evolution on mineral surfaces How did life begin on Earth? University of Chicago geophysicist Joseph V. Smith, in a Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences paper published Tuesday, March 31, provides a theory for how small organic molecules may have been able to assemble on the surfaces of minerals into self-replicating biomolecules—the essential building blocks of life.”
Okay, so you’ve read this paper, yes (it’s from 8 years ago so it’s a little out of date, but whatever: I’m just confused as to why you’d note the day of the week something was published for a paper almost a decade old)? Did you notice that it ISN’T talking about the mechanism of biological evolution at work? Did you? Or are you still just not getting it?
“but when I ask why these same natural processes that gave us this huge biological complexity, couldn’t have given us much simpler thinks like roads and bridges, you laugh…..”
If you actually understood what you were talking about: even if you had read the papers you are citing, the answer to such a dumb question would be obvious. The abiogenetic research you are citing concerns the formation of organic compounds under specific conditions that happen to have the property of self-replication. These are all very specific processes and events with specific sorts of outcomes (namely, some very simple organic complexes with little overall structure but some semblance of replicative descent with heredity). They don’t include “roads and bridges” anymore than the Krebs cycle involves vinyl siding.
Are you going to attempt any of my questions now?
7:57 pm
Rick Moran: Let’s Negotiate With Hitler?
Yeah. I don’t know either.
So I flip on good ol’ W.A.R. radio today, to hear Rick Moran of the Right Wing Nuthouse reading a copy of my post about why I’m not worried about Iran. Apparently, I’ve become a popular guy. Somebody remind me to use…
6:07 am
it blanked out the last word…try BS…bullchit…you get it
6:10 am
it blanked out the previous post…..
every hear of miller-urey??? its one of the icons of evolution…but you know whats funny? for supposedly representing ‘science’ toilet plunger…you POST NO REFERENCES
and your word isn’t enough hhahahhahahahhaha
6:10 am
Tom:
Your last comment was deleted due to its extraordinary childishness.
If all you can write is “hahahah…” go to the Sesame Street blog and leave a comment there. Don’t pollute this site with your idiotic rantings any longer.
6:10 am
rick, go yourself
6:11 am
don’t like anything that disagrees with your ‘god’....
don’t like freedom of speech, you piece of
6:16 am
I let you rant and rave for a week on this post without interference, making you a laughingstock on several websites, and now because I deleted a comment that could have been left by a 5 year old I’m suddenly against free speech?
Grow up kid. And get a grip.
10:07 am
“every hear of miller-urey??? its one of the icons of evolution…”
Yes I’ve heard of them, and no, Wells’ “Icons of Evolution” is not convincing. Wells tries to pretend that the Miller-Urey experiments were thought to prove more than they did, and then ignores the implications of what they did prove.
Before their work, most people didn’t think that the spontaneous formation of ANY of the basic organic compounds was very likely. M-U’s experiments, however, demonstrated that in fact given a few simple conditions, these basic building blocks WOULD form.
Wells tries to make a lot of hay out of the idea that this doesn’t prove that life did form this way and other irrelevant nonsense. Well, no, the experiments don’t prove any of that, but then no one ever claimed that they created life in a test tube: they just demonstrated that it wasn’t so unthinkable and that it may well have been pretty plausible.
1:31 pm
don’t like freedom of speech, you piece of
Given that freedom of speech does not mean that a private property owner must allow you to speak on his private property in any manner that you may wish, this would make ignorant/stupid misrepresentation #472 for tom.
I think that’s a blogospheric record.
5:04 pm
He really must believe that somewhere in the Constitution it says that Rick Moran must provide space and pay for the bandwidth for someone to call him childish names. I mean, anything less would violate his right to free speech!
5:39 pm
toilet plunger: the point of miller-urey is that evolution has always been about the EVOLUTION OF LIFE….ie you’re a liar. get it?
as far as a ‘laughingstock’ who cares. truth is truth, whether you laugh at it or not. I notice you darwiniacs don’t have any answers…not that it matters, faith is never swayed by logic.
mr. ‘scientist’ (toilet plunger) I notice you have ZERO ZIP NADA references. if you’ve ever been to college (doubtful) you would know about writing papers that require REFERENCES! its real easy, DO RESEARCH. You say things, define evolution, for example, but have nothing to back up what you say….but faith doesn’t require any ‘backup’ I’ve noticed!! I am derided as ‘anti-science’ but I have the quotes and references.
as far as ‘allowing me to speak’ who cares? I notice that I was called names first, and the owner of this site was not concerned about that….I laugh at the foolishness of a poster, and my post is deleted….it couldn’t be due to the bias of the proprietor now could it??
its simple: evolution doesn’t happen. random changes do not lead to new life forms. The information does not increase from mutations. Evolution is this supposed grand force that created life, and all the living animals today, but it cannot be measured, and it cannot be disproved…..the whole notion that something as complex as life can self-organize is as believable as computers can self-organize, whats laughable is you darwiniacs laugh at that notion, but totally believe life can self-organize.
Why? because Darwinism is the main plank of the religion of secularism. As Wald said:
The reasonable view was to believe in spontaneous generation; the only alternative, to believe in a single, primary act of supernatural creation. There is no third position. For this reason many scientists a century ago chose to regard the belief in spontaneous generation as a “philosophical necessity.” It is a symptom of the philosophical poverty of our time that this necessity is no longer appreciated. Most modern biologists, having reviewed with satisfaction the downfall of the spontaneous generation hypothesis, yet unwilling to accept the alternative belief in special creation, are left with nothing. “The origin of life” Scientific American August 1954 p.46
One has only to contemplate the magnitude of this task to concede that the spontaneous generation of a living organism is impossible. Yet here we are as a result, I believe, of spontaneous generation. “The origin of life” Scientific American August 1954 p.46
get a clue, anything that can’t be disproved isn’t science, its FAITH….duhhhhhhhh
go ahead and laugh at me all you want. I will state it plainly, the Bible is true, There is a God in Heaven who created all life forms, and the entire universe, and Darwin, and you darwiniacs are liars!!
and yes, this is a cultural and religious war, comparable to the war islam is waging upon the west right now. Darwinism serves as a basis for social values and morals, Hitler would not have slaughtered the jews, had he considered them created by the same God who created him, but darwinism gave him the justification to slaughter those he considered ‘sub-human’....yes you supporters of darwinism have much to answer for.
12:35 pm
“toilet plunger: the point of miller-urey is that evolution has always been about the EVOLUTION OF LIFE….ie you’re a liar. get it?”
No, because that doesn’t make any sense. Miller-Urey were scientists working on a scientific problem: the origin of organic compounds on the early earth. They discovered something really interesting. How that demonstrates that the “point” of evolution “has always been” the origin of life you haven’t made any sort of coherent case for.
“I notice you darwiniacs don’t have any answers…not that it matters, faith is never swayed by logic.”
lol. I’ve answered all of your questions and you just keep tossing out new scatterbrained ones at lightning speed. But so what? You can’t answer my questions with any sort of coherency.
“mr. ‘scientist’ (toilet plunger) I notice you have ZERO ZIP NADA references.”
If you want references, you could, I dunno, go like read a science textbook? Nothing I’m saying is in the least controversial or even all that challenging. If you want a specific citation for a specific claim, just ask and I’ll be happy to provide. But there’s no reason I should waste my time tracking down citations for such basic material unless you specifically require some.
“You say things, define evolution, for example, but have nothing to back up what you say…”
Well, that’s because, like anyone can type “evolution” into wikipedia or a dictionary or what have you and see that I’m correct. Do you really need me to do that for you? Okay:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution
http://www.webster.com/cgi-bin/dictionary?sourceid=Mozilla-search&va=evolution
(definition 4a is the one biologists use)
“I am derided as ‘anti-science’ but I have the quotes and references.”
What you have are known as copy-paste quote mines. They are, if anything, the exact opposite of references. You didn’t read all or probably even any of the things they are taken from. You have no idea what they are talking about, who said them, whether they are current or outdated, or whatever. That’s not the way scientists do research or anyone honestly supports arguments. Citations in science are to actual evidence, not to quips, quotes, and opinions.
“its simple: evolution doesn’t happen. random changes do not lead to new life forms.”
Not on their own, no. That’s what natural selection is all about.
“The information does not increase from mutations.”
It’s trivially easy to see that it must. If information can decrease because of mutation (and if you acknowledge that there are detrimental mutations, then you must agree to this) then it can increase in just the same way. Mutation is not biased towards only harmful mutations. It’s random.
“Evolution is this supposed grand force that created life, and all the living animals today, but it cannot be measured,”
Ever even HEARD of the field of population genetics? Ever actually READ a single journal article on evolution? This claim is just so laughable that it’s not even funny.
“and it cannot be disproved…”
There are a million different ways to disprove it. The problem for you is that they never end up happening in reality… which is exactly what you would expect from a theory that is accurate.
“..the whole notion that something as complex as life can self-organize is as believable as computers can self-organize, whats laughable is you darwiniacs laugh at that notion, but totally believe life can self-organize.”
Computers do not reproduce with differential heredity, so why would they evolve? (unless of course, you use a computer to simulate this, in which case we DO see virtual evolution happening just as predicted!).
You are trying to apply the idea to a case in which many of the key elements are missing. That just makes you look ignorant of what evolution even is in the first place.
“One has only to contemplate the magnitude of this task to concede that the spontaneous generation of a living organism is impossible. Yet here we are as a result, I believe, of spontaneous generation. “The origin of life†Scientific American August 1954 p.46”
The scientific american is not a science journal, but a popular magazine in which lots of different people state their opinions. It’s pretty laughable that you’d quote it, and no less, quote something from 1954: before we had any sort of good grasp of genetics, before Miller-Urey, etc. Are you really that desperate that this was the best you could find?
“go ahead and laugh at me all you want. I will state it plainly, the Bible is true, There is a God in Heaven who created all life forms, and the entire universe, and Darwin, and you darwiniacs are liars!!”
I don’t know what a darwiniac is, but I think that your outright disdain for critical thought and the sloppy careless way which you approach a subject is just as bad as lying, even if you aren’t knowingly lying.
“Darwinism serves as a basis for social values and morals, Hitler would not have slaughtered the jews, had he considered them created by the same God who created him, but darwinism gave him the justification to slaughter those he considered ‘sub-human’....yes you supporters of darwinism have much to answer for.”
As I already pointed out, just google Martin Luther’s “On the Jews and their Lies” Martin Luther founded the Protestant movement. His book is a virtual outline of the holocaust, and Hitler cited it far far more than he ever cited Darwin.
Again, this whole line of debate is pointless. Evolution isn’t a theory of morals, its a description of the biological world. If people tried to build a moral system out of it, then their understanding of evolution was just as poor as yours.
5:03 pm
G.A. Kerkut defined the ‘General Theory of Evolution’ in his 1960 book ‘Implications of Evolution’ as
“the theory that all the living forms in the world have arisen from a single source which itself came from an inorganic form.” Some dictionaries still define it similarly, such as the Oxford Concise Science Dictionary: “evolution: The gradual process by which the present diversity of plant and animal life arose from the earliest and most primitive organisms, which is believed to have been continuing for the past 3000 million years.”
evolution, concept that embodies the belief that existing animals and plants developed by a process of gradual, continuous change from previously existing forms. This theory, also known as descent with modification, constitutes organic evolution. Inorganic evolution, on the other hand, is concerned with the development of the physical universe from unorganized matter. Organic evolution, as opposed to belief in the special creation of each individual species as an immutable form, conceives of life as having had its beginnings in a simple primordial protoplasmic mass (probably originating in the sea) from which, through the long eras of time, arose all subsequent living forms.
http://www.infoplease.com/ce6/sci/A0817988.html
again you’re a liar. the depths to which you go to defend your faith are admirable! I’m sure if you were a muslim, you’d be yelling ‘allah akbar’ and holing a machete
5:12 pm
Evolution comprises all the stages of the development of the universe: the cosmic, biological, and human or cultural developments. Attempts to restrict the concept of evolution to biology are gratuitous. Life is a product of the evolution of inorganic nature, and man is a product of the evolution of life. In a sense, the discovery of evolution reinstates man in the station from which he was demoted by Copernicus: man is again the center of the stage—at least of the planetary, and quite possibly of the cosmic one. Most important of all, the stage and the actor not only have evolved but are evolving.
—Theodosius Dobzhansky, ``Changing Man,’’ Science, Vol. 155, No. 3761, p. 409, 1967
and I should believe you over Sir Arthur Keith, when it comes to Hitler and evolution…..yeah…..just like I believe you when you define ‘evolution’
to say that its just about ‘science’ shows how little you know.
5:14 pm
and it cannot be disproved…â€
There are a million different ways to disprove it
really? name one. All of science used to beleive the universe was eternal, and the big bang was thought to be a death blow to evolution, since there was not enough time for all of these ‘chance’ things to happen, to evolve life from inorganics and make it as complex as it is..but evolution ‘evolved’ just like it always does, to fit any fact that comes along and threatens it…..your reaction to a threat to your ‘god’ is just another example
5:18 pm
‘The scientific american is not a science journal, but a popular magazine in which lots of different people state their opinions. It’s pretty laughable that you’d quote it, and no less, quote something from 1954: before we had any sort of good grasp of genetics, before Miller-Urey, etc. Are you really that desperate that this was the best you could find?’
Funny that you would diss George wald:
George Wald
The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1967
http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/1967/wald-bio.html
When you get your nobel prize, let me know HAHHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAH
6:58 pm
The doubt that has infiltrated the previously smug confident certitude of evolutionary biology’s last twenty years has inflamed passions . . There has been a total lack of agreement even within the warring camps . . Things are really in an uproar these days . . Sometimes it seems as though there are as many variations on each [evolutionary] theme as there are individual biologists.”—*Niles Eldredge, “Evolutionary Housecleaning,” in Natural History, February 1982, pp. 78, 81.
looks like you can have your own private evolution! this makes evolution really new age! why don’t you stand at the seashore and yell I AM EVOLUTION at the top of your lungs…ala shirley mcclain!
An increasing number of scientists, most particularly a growing number of evolutionists . . argue that Darwinian evolutionary theory is no genuine scientific theory at all . . Many of the critics have the highest intellectual credentials.”—*Michael Ruse, “Darwin’s Theory: An Exercise in Science,” in New Scientist, June 25, 1981, p. 828.
not science? what COULD it be??
I found another quote from that ‘hick’ wald:
*George Wald stood up and explained that he had done extensive research on hemoglobin also,—and discovered that if just ONE mutational change of any kind was made in it, the hemoglobin would not function properly. For example, the change of one amino acid out of 287 in hemoglobin causes sickle-cell anemia. A glutamic acid unit has been changed to a valine unit—and, as a result, 25% of those suffering with this anemia die.
*Murray Eden showed that it would be impossible for even a single ordered pair of genes to be produced by DNA mutations in the bacteria, E. coli,—with 5 billion years in which to produce it! His estimate was based on 5 trillion tons of the bacteria covering the planet to a depth of nearly an inch during that 5 billion years. He then explained that the genes of E. coli contain over a trillion (1012) bits of data. That is the number 10 followed by 12 zeros. *Eden then showed the mathematical impossibility of protein forming by chance. He also reported on his extensive investigations into genetic data on hemoglobin (red blood cells).
another ‘hick’ there are a bunch of them! anti-science HERETICS….you need a good evolutionary JIHAD on em!
At this meeting, held at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, *Colin Patterson, senior paleontologist at the British Museum of Natural History, in a paper that he presented to the assembly, declared before his peers that evolution was “positively anti-knowledge,” and added that “all my life I had been duped into taking evolution as revealed truth.”
‘revealed truth’ why would evolution present itself like that? sounds like a religion!
To their chagrin [scientists] have no clear-cut answer, because chemists have never succeeded in reproducing nature’s experiments on the creation of life out of nonliving matter. Scientists do not know how that happened . . Scientists have no proof that life was not the result of an act of creation.”—*Robert Jastrow, The Enchanted Loom: Mind in the Universe (1981), p. 19.
“Darwinism removed the whole idea of God as the Creator of organisms from the sphere of rational discussion. Darwin pointed out that no supernatural designer was needed; since natural selection could account for any new form of life, there is no room for a supernatural agency in its evolution.”—*Julian Huxley, “At Random, A Television Preview,” in Evolution after Darwin (1960), p. 41.
Why would Huxley talk about getting rid of God? I thought evolution was science! HAHHAHAHAAHAHAH
7:35 pm
Furthermore, with the adoption of the evolutionary approach in non-biological fields, from cosmology to human affairs, we are beginning to realize that biological evolution is only one aspect of evolution in general. Evolution in the extended sense can be defined as a directional and essentially irreversible process occurring in time, which in its course gives rise to an increase of variety and an increasingly high level of organization, in its products. Our present knowledge indeed forces us to the view that the whole of reality is evolution—a single process of self-transformation. What is Science (1955) p.278 Julian Huxley
We cannot understand much of the history of late 19th and early 20th century anthropology, with its plethora of taxonomic names proposed for nearly every scrap of fossil bone, unless we appreciate its obsession with the identification and ranking of races. For many schemes of classification sought to tag the various fossils as ancestors of modern races and to use their relative age and apishness as a criterion for racial superiority. ~ Stephen Jay Gould
Origin of Species: The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life by Charles Darwin
Looking to the world at no very distant date, what an endless number of the lower races will have been eliminated by the higher civilized races throughout the world. ~ Charles Darwin
At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace, the savage races throughout the world. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes … will no doubt be exterminated. The break between man and his nearest allies will then be wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilised state, as we may hope, even than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as now, between the Negro or Australian and the gorilla. ~ Charles Darwin
No rational man, cognizant of the facts, believes that the average negro is the equal, still less the superior, of the white man. And if this be true, it is simply incredible that, when all his disabilities are removed, and our prognathous relative has a fair field and no favour, as well as no oppressor, he will be able to compete successfully with his bigger-brained and smaller-jawed rival, in a contest which is to be carried out by thoughts and not by bites. ~ Thomas Huxley
good scientific RACISM.
I began to speak of God, Joseph (Stalin) heard me out, and after a moment’s silence, said:
‘You know, they are fooling us, there is no God. . . .’
I was astonished at these words, I had never heard anything like it before.
‘How can you say such things, Soso?’ I exclaimed.
‘I’ll lend you a book to read; it will show you that the world and all living things are quite different from what you imagine, and all this talk about God is sheer nonsense,’ Joseph said.
‘What book is that?’ I enquired.
‘Darwin. You must read it,’ Joseph impressed on me. ~ G. Glurdjidze
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. ~ Adolf Hitler
National Socialism is nothing but applied biology. ~ Rudolph Hess
and finally to describe you darwiniacs:
“I wish I were younger. What inclines me now to think you may be right in regarding [evolution] as the central and radical lie in the whole web of falsehood that now governs our lives is not so much your arguments against it as the fanatical and twisted attitudes of its defenders.”
-Dr. C.S. Lewis, in letter to Capt. Bernard Acworth of the Evolution Protest Movement, 1951.
7:51 pm
Lol. I guess you got pretty angry when I told you that a boatload of random quotes from things you’ve never bothered to read or learn yourself don’t mean anything, because you sure went crazy with the quotes!
“There are a million different ways to disprove it
really? name one.”
Okay. If bird fossils are conclusively shown to show up in the Cambrian era, evolution is disproven. If a cat reproductively gives birth to a dog, evolution is disproven. And so on.
“All of science used to beleive the universe was eternal,”
And then, guess what: that was disproven. See, it wasn’t so hard (though actually, it’s not that simple, since in the BB, time never really “starts”)
“and the big bang was thought to be a death blow to evolution, since there was not enough time for all of these ‘chance’ things to happen, to evolve life from inorganics and make it as complex as it is.”
Thought to by whom? Creationists? What difference does THAT make? You guys have been incoherently declaring that everything under the sun is a “death blow” to evolution for centuries now.
“Funny that you would diss George wald:George Wald
The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1967”
I’m not dissing the guy, though why you think he’s a relevant expert is beyond me, and why you think quoting his opinion in a magazine from 60 years ago is a convincing final word on the state of the field today is truly amusing.
“again you’re a liar. the depths to which you go to defend your faith are admirable! ”
Oh no, I cited a DICTIONARY and an ENCYCLOPEDIA and told you to READ A SCIENCE TEXTBOOK to get an idea of what evolution is instead of a random quote from a book published 4 decades ago. I’m so incredibly depraved and loony!
(next you’ll quote “I’m so incredibly depraved” all by itself and claim that I said this seriously)
“but evolution ‘evolved’ just like it always does, to fit any fact that comes along and threatens it….”
Well, if some aspect of evolution is shown to be wrong, then yes, that is tossed out and a better explanation is found. What could be more honest than that? Darwin was completely wrong about the mechanism of heredity. It was falsified. It was tossed out! And then genetics came along, and that fit evolutionary theory even better. So, what is your point exactly? That scientists are TOO honest?
If evidence is amassed showing that creatures didn’t evolve but were actually beamed in by the Enterprise and just made to LOOK like they evolved, then we’ll have to toss out evolution. But since you can’t seem to back up any of your fairy stories, we’ll stick with what the evidence shows, time and time again.
7:58 pm
and yes, this is a cultural and religious war, comparable to the war islam is waging upon the west right now.
Call me when you see Richard Dawkins fly a plane into a church, will you? Even though he thinks you’re a bunch of idiots, he’s not going to kill you for it (after all, no virgins for us atheists!).
Darwinism serves as a basis for social values and morals, Hitler would not have slaughtered the jews, had he considered them created by the same God who created him, but darwinism gave him the justification to slaughter those he considered ‘sub-human’
Crusades… Inquisition… Salem… The “Troubles”...
....yes you supporters of darwinism have much to answer for.
On the bright side, our answers will be chock full of reason and evidence, whereas yours will be irrational nonsense.
I have a question: how is it you function in normal society as an (apparently) sane individual?
8:09 pm
‘Call me when you see Richard Dawkins fly a plane into a church, will you? Even though he thinks you’re a bunch of idiots, he’s not going to kill you for it (after all, no virgins for us atheists!).’
Hitler and Stalin have shown what you darwiniacs are capable of.
I have a question: are you as stupid as your writings?
8:11 pm
“I wish I were younger. What inclines me now to think you may be right in regarding [evolution] as the central and radical lie in the whole web of falsehood that now governs our lives *is not so much your arguments against it as the fanatical and twisted attitudes of its defenders.â€*
-Dr. C.S. Lewis, in letter to Capt. Bernard Acworth of the Evolution Protest Movement, 1951.
you two darwiniacs prove Mr. Lewis right (as usual)
8:12 pm
*George Wald stood up and explained that he had done extensive research on hemoglobin also,—and discovered that if just ONE mutational change of any kind was made in it, the hemoglobin would not function properly. For example, the change of one amino acid out of 287 in hemoglobin causes sickle-cell anemia. A glutamic acid unit has been changed to a valine unit—and, as a result, 25% of those suffering with this anemia die.
*Murray Eden showed that it would be impossible for even a single ordered pair of genes to be produced by DNA mutations in the bacteria, E. coli,—with 5 billion years in which to produce it! His estimate was based on 5 trillion tons of the bacteria covering the planet to a depth of nearly an inch during that 5 billion years. He then explained that the genes of E. coli contain over a trillion (1012) bits of data. That is the number 10 followed by 12 zeros. *Eden then showed the mathematical impossibility of protein forming by chance. He also reported on his extensive investigations into genetic data on hemoglobin (red blood cells).
the above disproves evolution not that it matters to TRUE BELIEVERS!
8:17 pm
‘Crusades… Inquisition… Salem… The “Troublesâ€...’
tell me how many people were killed in those, compared to the TENS OF MILLIONS killed by just hitler and stalin?
8:20 pm
‘Oh no, I cited a DICTIONARY and an ENCYCLOPEDIA and told you to READ A SCIENCE TEXTBOOK to get an idea of what evolution is instead of a random quote from a book published 4 decades ago. I’m so incredibly depraved and loony!’
seriously, how stupid are you? you act as though evolution just ‘evolved’ a couple of years ago. it has a long history, which you ignore to serve your lies. really pathetic.
btw: where IS your paper on the Second Law? your words mean nothing! in fact I’m PROUD VERY PROUD to have wackos like uncle andy and toilet plunger laugh at me
a man is defined by his enemies as much as his friends, and you two I definately want to be on the other side!! hahahhahahahahahahhahahahahahah
8:34 pm
‘Okay. If bird fossils are conclusively shown to show up in the Cambrian era, evolution is disproven. If a cat reproductively gives birth to a dog, evolution is disproven. And so on.’
there are fossils that disprove evolution, but OF COURSE they are ‘fake’!!
hint: because a cat can’t reproduce with a dog, it shows the limits of genetics….in other words genetics will NEVER ‘evolve’ one life form into anything else….a dog WILL ALWAYS BE A DOG…...it willl NEVER EVER EVER ‘evolve’ into a ‘higher’ or ‘lower’ life form…..duhhhhhhhhhhhh
11:35 pm
“the above disproves evolution not that it matters to TRUE BELIEVERS!”
You can claim all sorts of things disprove evolution. But if they are lousy arguments, then they don’t. You can also laugh and scream and carry on and say this or that about things being dogma. But unfortunately, just saying it doesn’t make it so.
“there are fossils that disprove evolution, but OF COURSE they are ‘fake’!!”
If all you have are conspiracy theories and allegations that the reasons given are all lies, then hey, knock yourself out. Honest people can look at the evidence, and the evidence is all on our side.
“because a cat can’t reproduce with a dog, it shows the limits of genetics….in other words genetics will NEVER ‘evolve’ one life form into anything else….a dog WILL ALWAYS BE A DOG…...it willl NEVER EVER EVER ‘evolve’ into a ‘higher’ or ‘lower’ life form…..duhhhhhhhhhhhh”
The irony here is that this statment is 100% right: a dog will never have anything other than dog ancestors… and yet the fact that you think evolution says otherwise is a demonstration that you have no idea what you are talking about. All mammals have mammal descendants. all vertebrates have vertebrate descendants. That’s how evolution works: descent with modification. NOT saltation. Modern cats don’t evolve into modern dogs. It’s a primitive line of carnivores that diversified into both lines.
“seriously, how stupid are you? you act as though evolution just ‘evolved’ a couple of years ago. it has a long history, which you ignore to serve your lies. really pathetic.”
I don’t need to ignore it, especially not when you use it in a profoundly stupid and obviously misinformed manner. I pointed you to some pretty hard to argue with sources. How self-destructive do you have to be to still want to argue with that? That you can find some random quote about someone talking about evolution in the sense of “change” only serves to show everyone that you have no clue.
“btw: where IS your paper on the Second Law? your words mean nothing!”
You know, given that you’ve chickened out on all my questions to you, you’re hardly in a place to be demanding things from me. But I already said: I don’t need to cite anything on the Second Law: we’re talking about stuff so basic and so commonly understood that any layperson can grasp it if they put in the effort. Unfortunately, you have not. But here’s a primer:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_law_of_thermodynamics
You might even learn something if you bother to read and think about it. Check out the part “Complex systems and the Second Law” especially and then the section about self-organization.
11:56 am
I don’t know if anyone has directly addressed this particular little snarl of lunacy, but:
“why wouldn’t evolution work on non-living things?”
The answer here is very simple: Evolution in the darwinian sense takes place by reproduction, variation, and selection. Thus it only affects things that reproduce by themselves. Steel and computers do not reproduce by themselves. Thus, they do not evolve.
The fact that someone needed to explain this shows that Tom doesn’t have the faintest idea what evolution is apart from a brainstem response that it is “eevil”
9:49 pm
you give me the definition from a dictionary….you really are clueless when it comes to your own ‘god’
Unfortunately the common definitions of evolution outside of the scientific community are different. For example, in the Oxford Concise Science Dictionary we find the following definition:
“evolution: The gradual process by which the present diversity of plant and animal life arose from the earliest and most primitive organisms, which is believed to have been continuing for the past 3000 million years.”
This is inexcusable for a dictionary of science. Not only does this definition exclude prokaryotes, protozoa, and fungi, but it specifically includes a term “gradual process” which should not be part of the definition. More importantly the definition seems to refer more to the history of evolution than to evolution itself. Using this definition it is possible to debate whether evolution is still occurring, but the definition provides no easy way of distinguishing evolution from other processes. For example, is the increase in height among Caucasians over the past several hundred years an example of evolution? Are the color changes in the peppered moth population examples of evolution? This is not a scientific definition.
Standard dictionaries are even worse.
“evolution: ...the doctrine according to which higher forms of life have gradually arisen out of lower..” – Chambers
“evolution: ...the development of a species, organism, or organ from its original or primitive state to its present or specialized state; phylogeny or ontogeny” – Webster’s
These definitions are simply wrong. Unfortunately it is common for non-scientists to enter into a discussion about evolution with such a definition in mind. This often leads to fruitless debate since the experts are thinking about evolution from a different perspective. When someone claims that they don’t believe in evolution they cannot be referring to an acceptable scientific definition of evolution because that would be denying something which is easy to strate. It would be like saying that they don’t believe in gravity!
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/evolution-definition.html
as far ‘wikpedia’ come on, thats an open site, that anyone can write things in….and you’re the evolution ‘expert’ HAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHH
you’re a true believer, except I don’t beleive anything you say!!
and if you believe in evolution, then someday that dog will not be a dog…it will be something else, just like we all evolved from a single celled organism that ‘evolved’ from inorganic matter….thats evolution, not the BS you’re peddling! from ‘wikpedia’ HAHHAHAHAHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHAHAHAHAHAH
81Lamuella: so how did this life get here?? you darwiniacs are so fond of ‘given this’ then that…..life had to EVOLVE from non-living matter….and if life can self organize, why not something simpler…..duh…..
9:54 pm
from that same site:
One of the most respected evolutionary biologists has defined biological evolution as follows:
*”In the broadest sense, evolution is merely change, and so is all-pervasive; galaxies, languages, and political systems all evolve*. Biological evolution … is change in the properties of populations of organisms that transcend the lifetime of a single individual. The ontogeny of an individual is not considered evolution; individual organisms do not evolve. The changes in populations that are considered evolutionary are those that are inheritable via the genetic material from one generation to the next. Biological evolution may be slight or substantial; it embraces everything from slight changes in the proportion of different alleles within a population (such as those determining types) to the successive alterations that led from the earliest protoorganism to snails, bees, giraffes, and dandelions.” – Douglas J. Futuyma in Evolutionary Biology, Sinauer Associates 1986
since this evolution is all-pervasive, why doesn’t inorganic matter EVOLVE????
let me guess, he’s misquoted
ahhahahahhahahahahahahahahahahhaahahh
10:33 pm
how new species arise:
Evolutionary biologists have written extensively about how natural selection could produce new species. For instance, in the called allopatry, developed by Ernst Mayr of Harvard University, if a population of organisms were isolated from the rest of its species by geographical boundaries, it might be subjected to different selective pressures. Changes would accumulate in the isolated population. If those changes became so significant that the splinter group could not or routinely would not breed with the original stock, then the splinter group would be reproductively isolated and on its way toward becoming a new species.
Natural selection is the best studied of the evolutionary mechanisms, but biologists are open to other possibilities as well. Biologists are constantly assessing the potential of unusual genetic mechanisms for causing speciation or for producing complex features in organisms. Lynn Margulis of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and others have persuasively argued that some cellular organelles, such as the energy-generating mitochondria, evolved through the symbiotic merger of ancient organisms. Thus, science welcomes the possibility of evolution resulting from forces beyond natural selection. Yet those forces must be natural; they cannot be attributed to the actions of mysterious creative intelligences whose existence, in scientific terms, is unproved
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=000D4FEC-7D5B-1D07-8E49809EC588EEDF&pageNumber=5&catID=2
(I put in the bolds to see if it would work)
notice the use of the words ‘might’ ‘if’ and the pronouncement that the ‘forces must be natural’....can you imagine a physicist talking about gravity this way: IF you drop a ten lb weight on your foot, you MIGHT break it…..unbelievable….the state of ‘science’.....and why mention that those forces must be natural….I can see the evolution gritting his teeth, and saying THERE MUST NOT BE A GOD…..
‘open to other possibilities’ translation: we really don’t know. thats the state of modern evolution after 150 years of ‘science’ yeah
and you darwiniacs buy this hook, line and sinker…..I’ve got some swampland to sell ya!
10:40 pm
plain and simple: where is the mathematical formula for new species?
here’s a real simple equation for ya:
NO MATH = NO SCIENCE.
you darwiniacs unknowingly prove the truth of the Bible:
Romans 1:
20: Ever since the creation of the world his invisible nature, namely, his eternal power and deity, has been clearly perceived in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse;
21: for although they knew God they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking and their senseless minds were darkened.
22: Claiming to be wise, they became fools,
23: and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man or birds or animals or reptiles.
24: Therefore God gave them up in the s of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves,
25: because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed for ever! Amen.
11:41 am
Well no, the definitions in dictionaries aren’t perfect or exact, but that’s why I told you to check out a real science textbook. And if you are going to cite talk-origins as an authority, why not use their definition, which is quite robust?
“since this evolution is all-pervasive,”
Can yo not read? He defines evolution broadly, and THEN talks about biological evolution: which is what we are talking about.
“plain and simple: where is the mathematical formula for new species?”
That doesn’t even make any sense. That’s like asking “where is the mathematical formula for star formation.” You CAN model speciation entirely in math, but like any natural process, there is no one single example.
“here’s a real simple equation for ya:
NO MATH = NO SCIENCE.”
Did you do what I asked and actually read a biology journal? You’ll find that it’s filled with math.
You know, in the end, people like you just make me sad. You are woefully confused and ignorant of what you are talking about, and yet you aren’t even interested in learning or seriously reading anything. I could build a computer program that could make more convincing arguments than you (mostly, I’d just have to make it go hahahahahahahahahahahaahahahahahaha after saying some random nonsensical thing)
12:52 pm
I doubt you have the logic to build a computer program.
lets review:
1) evolution is not a ‘force’ like the strong, weak, electromagnetic, and gravity….the physicists (real scientists) don’t include ‘evolution’ in their fundamental forces.
2) the very definition of evolution is ‘evolving’ all the time, and is rather a mish-mash of whatever someone wants it to be.
4) if life did not ‘evolve’ how did it get here? if it did ‘evolve’ then evolution IS a force, and should be measured mathematically, and it should work on other inorganic things, since it ‘evolved’ life from inorganic carbon.
3) so now we’re just talking about ‘biological’ evolution….but if you can’t measure evolution…then all you have is CHANCE…so chance is evolution.
4) as far as how new species ‘evolve’ well we’re really not sure….we’re ‘open to other possibilities’
5) lets use mr. Futuyma’s definition:
Biological evolution may be slight or substantial; it embraces everything from slight changes in the proportion of different alleles within a population (such as those determining types) to the successive alterations that led from the earliest protoorganism to snails, bees, giraffes, and dandelions.†– Douglas J. Futuyma in Evolutionary Biology, Sinauer Associates 1986
6) so evolution ‘created’ ‘evolved’ all the species, but we’re really not sure how….we have theories though!! but they CANNNOT include God….heaven forbid….
I can see why you evolutionists are afraid to debate creationists. And I can see why REAL scientists (mathematicians and physicists) have so little to do with your ‘theory’ ie religion.
‘That doesn’t even make any sense. That’s like asking “where is the mathematical formula for star formation’
funny you should say that….guess you’re not up on science these days:
http://sciencematters.berkeley.edu/archives/volume3/issue22/story1.php
‘Did you do what I asked and actually read a biology journal? You’ll find that it’s filled with math.’
yeah, the mathematics of chance….which is all ‘evolution’ really is.
you know you really make me sad….you believe in something that doesn’t even exist.
5:14 pm
Tom wrote: “here’s a real simple equation for ya: NO MATH = NO SCIENCE.”
Plunge responded: “Did you do what I asked and actually read a biology journal? You’ll find that it’s filled with math.”
Tom responded: “yeah, the mathematics of chance….which is all ‘evolution’ really is.”
The astute reader will note two things:
First, that Tom has just admitted that he was aware that his claim of “NO MATH” in evolutionary biology was a falsehood—he admits that there is math in evolutionary biology, and yet he claimed that there wasn’t any. Not very honest of him, was it? Isn’t there some kind of commandment against bearing false witness?
Second, that Tom really hasn’t bothered to crack any biology textbooks or journals, because if he had he wouldn’t have been able to say anything as transparently false (and goofy) as declaring that the math therein is just “the mathematics of chance”. What’s especially ironic about Tom exposing his ignorance like this is his following childish taunt: “you know you really make me sad….you believe in something that doesn’t even exist.”
The irony here is that Tom, not just in this one instance but countless times throughout this thread, has confidently (even obnoxiously) made a great many declarations about things that he got only from his own imagination. Like all too may rabidly anti-evolution creationists, he makes the error of cocksurely mistaking his own notions of what he presumes about evolutionary biology, for the reality itself. He never once bothers to stop for a moment and go check his fantasies against the reality, by for example cracking open a biology textbook or reading science journals to learn what they’re really about.
Even when faced with a patient explainer like Plunge, who takes the time to explain things to Tom and let him know when his notions about science are way off base and how, Tom can’t deal with the disconnect between his beliefs and reality like an ordinary person, he instead can only 1) insult, 2) spew multiple other misguided attacks on science as red herrings and diversions, or 3) bray like a jackass (e.g. “HAHHAHAHAHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHAHAHAHAHAH”).
Now that’s sad. Clearly, the education system has grossly failed Tom, and so have his parents for not instilling in him the maturity he so lacks.
Plunge, you’ve done a great job on this thread, and your knowledge of this topic is both accurate and wide, unlike, um, someone else on this thread. You’ve also got a good knack for explaining complex topics quickly, and far more patience with a spoiled, arrogant, ignorant brat that I would have been able to muster. Your talents are wasted on Tom though (obviously), but there are other venues where you might be able to make a difference. Please email me at plunge.20.ichneumon@spamgourmet.com with your contact info, I’d like to discuss it with you. (And yes, that’s a working temporary email address, no need to tweak it before using it.)
6:55 pm
‘he admits that there is math in evolutionary biology, and yet he claimed that there wasn’t any. Not very honest of him, was it? Isn’t there some kind of commandment against bearing false witness?’
seriously, how stupid are you? don’t you know the difference between measuring evolution itself…ie the force of evolution (if it exists), compared to the mathematics for random genetic mutations? I mean seriously…pathetic.
‘“you know you really make me sad….you believe in something that doesn’t even exist.‒
so now you’re telling me evolution exists….where before it was a ‘process’ .....not very honest of you….Isn’t there some kind of commandment against bearing false witness?
‘rabidly anti-evolution creationists, he makes the error of cocksurely mistaking his own notions of what he presumes about evolutionary biology, for the reality itself. He never once bothers to stop for a moment and go check his fantasies against the reality, by for example cracking open a biology textbook or reading science journals to learn what they’re really about.’
now you’re delusional, I’m the one who has the quotes, and the references from the evolutionists themselves….while you have your own ‘definition’....really pathetic…shows a deeply disturbed individual
‘spoiled, arrogant, ignorant brat that I would have been able to muster.’
oh yes, you evolutionists are so much more ‘evolved’ than the rest of us HAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA jackazz!!
wish I were younger. What inclines me now to think you may be right in regarding [evolution] as the central and radical lie in the whole web of falsehood that now governs our lives is not so much your arguments against it as the fanatical and twisted attitudes of its defenders.â€
-Dr. C.S. Lewis, in letter to Capt. Bernard Acworth of the Evolution Protest Movement, 1951.
Dear Mr. Lewis is correct, you darwiniacs are wacko as hell….I’m outa here!!
just remember all your efforts (lies) are in vain….HAHAHHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAAH
11:18 pm
Now that tom’s spent, Moran’s article looks rather misdirected.
Clearly tom, if taught by the best education system in the world, would deny evolution, as would “Michael” in comment 4. Clearly tom has vast, easily available creationist resources (misdirections, lies, half-truths) to draw from.
Certainly, if US students were asked of atoms exist and atomic theory was correct, they’d ovewhelmingly agree, despite the mediocrity of science education for large percentages of them, and even though they understood little of it.
This is partly an education problem, but mostly the poor evolution education is due to its a being a cultural/religious/political problem.
Moran’s claim that “poverty and rotten schools have more to do with attitudes toward evolution than “Republican elites†or even God” is not accurate, albeit the “Republican” is an artifact of 23% of the pop who are xian right and happen to vote Republican.
9:08 pm
“1) evolution is not a ‘force’ like the strong, weak, electromagnetic, and gravity….the physicists (real scientists) don’t include ‘evolution’ in their fundamental forces.”
That you think it would be is simply mindbloggingly stunning in its sheer denseness. Evolution is a biological process, not a force.
“2) the very definition of evolution is ‘evolving’ all the time, and is rather a mish-mash of whatever someone wants it to be.”
The definition of evolution is generally pretty stable. It’s been pretty stable since the last major movement: the unification of genetics and population dynamics that’s called neo-Darwinism. Virtually every change to the discipline has been to make it more accurate. So?
“4) if life did not ‘evolve’ how did it get here?”
We don’t know exactly how life began.
“if it did ‘evolve’ then evolution IS a force,”
No. That makes no sense. Processes are something that happen given things like forces but it makes no sense to describe them AS forces. The Krebs cycle is not a force, it’s a biological process.
“and should be measured mathematically,”
it is, though there is no “one formula” for it as you seem to think there should be.
“and it should work on other inorganic things”
All evidence suggests that whatever processes began life, they were both particular to the environment of the early earth, and also of course required that there not be copius amounts of life all around ready to devour anything new that happens to crop up.
“3) so now we’re just talking about ‘biological’ evolution….but if you can’t measure evolution…then all you have is CHANCE…so chance is evolution.”
Nope.
“4) as far as how new species ‘evolve’ well we’re really not sure….we’re ‘open to other possibilities’”
There are many known ways for species to evolve: the debates to which you refer are mostly over additional methods which are controversial.
“Biological evolution may be slight or substantial; it embraces everything from slight changes in the proportion of different alleles within a population (such as those determining types) to the successive alterations that led from the earliest protoorganism to snails, bees, giraffes, and dandelions.†– Douglas J. Futuyma in Evolutionary Biology, Sinauer Associates 1986”
Decent enough.
6”) so evolution ‘created’ ‘evolved’ all the species, but we’re really not sure how….we have theories though!!”
Actually, we’re pretty darn certain that we have most of the general details nailed down. It’s the details that people argue about, but those are far less exciting.
” but they CANNNOT include God….heaven forbid….”
Well, more specifically, they cannot include any untestable claims about magic. They have to be solid testible explanations.
“I can see why you evolutionists are afraid to debate creationists. And I can see why REAL scientists (mathematicians and physicists) have so little to do with your ‘theory’ ie religion.”
Again, are you really so ignorant of biology as to think that it doesn’t involve math or that there aren’t mathematicians working on biological problems? Heck, there are whole FIELDS and subspecialities that are basically applied math to things like genetic algorymths and so forth.
“funny you should say that….guess you’re not up on science these days:”
Do you even bother to read your own citations? This is a paper about modeling star systems: it isn’t some “one equation” of star formation. You can model evolution too, and people do it, often.
“yeah, the mathematics of chance….which is all ‘evolution’ really is.”
In other words, no, you haven’t read a biology journal.
9:17 pm
As a reward for anyone that’s actually read this far, I present this gem:
On November 02, 2005, a new anti-evolution blog was begun by a retired physiologist named John A. Davidson:
Prescribed Evolution
http://prescribedevolution.blogspot.com/
It is possibly the funniest blog ever concieved… unintentionally.
You see, Mr. Davidson does not understand how blogs work. To him, creating a blog means posting exactly one post and then carrying on forevermore in that single comment thread. Mr. Davidson managed to respond to himself with more “posts” in that thread for days before other commenters showed up… many of whom he promptly deleted. All told, after months of operation, the blog managed to reach 881 comments before Mr. Davidson decided that this comment thread was “too cluttered.”
At this point, you’d think that any sane person might then, at the very least, create a new post to continue the comment madness in. But Mr. Davidson was no sane person. Instead, he created an entirely new blog consisting, again, of a single post:
New Prescribed Evolution
http://newprescribedevolution.blogspot.com/
It is now up to 639 gloriously insane comments.
Sadly, the trend cannot continue, as some spoilsport has already seen fit to nab newnewprescribedevolution for themselves.
12:15 pm
So, either the US has the second smartest population in the who study, who can see through the Darwinian lies – just not quite as clever as Islamic Turkey with its famous levels of education. Or people in the US, despite living in the richest nation in the world, are worryingly reactionary and ignorant compared to every single one of its western contemporaries (including many deeply religious and/or poor European states).
I wonder…
4:04 pm
I have bookmarked you yet
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2:41 am
Great response to PZ Meyers militant stance on education. Education in the United States was declining even during the Clinton years. And yes, it does have improving moments. My brother experienced a government college at it’s worse. Now he was studying to become a teacher, students were frustrated by the lack of organization. Here they were paying huge amounts of money, and they couldn’t even start a meeting on time, nothing was set-up. So normally each meeting started an hour after it was suppose to start. Many other problems occurred such as which student was going to which school to teach. One of his classes he had teachers who were forbidden to talk about their experience in class. Now you would think they would have something to contribute with their experience for future teachers. PZ has a bias, he has formated a model in which he always looks within it, rather than looking at other variables.
Maybe he should try to become a teacher all over again in my brother’s former college and see first hand the problems existing…lol