[quote]throttle132 wrote:
Not so much of a conspiracy as a mass consumption of Kool Aid. [/quote]
Isn’t that your side’s department? 
j/k
[quote]Xvim wrote:
throttle132 wrote:
Xvim wrote:
throttle132 wrote:
Xvim wrote:
Wait a minute, BBC, National Geographic, New Scientist… they must all be part of the Church of Evolution?
You got that right.
Tin foil hat time.
I don’t know about the BBC (we could safely speculate though) but the two publications you mention would have no problem whatsoever issuing a statement that they support the hypothesis of evolution. I subscribe to N.G. so I KNOW how they feel on this subject. You don’t think N.G. and N.S. are biased in favor of evolution? If not then tin foil hat time for you, pard.
Actually I’m inclined to think they support scientific theory based on the evidence. If that supported the existance of a creator then so be it, but it does not.[/quote]
Seems that sometime back after I posted a long list of scientists that supported the creation theory I got chastised. I was hearing stuff like, “Who cares who supports your theory. It doesn’t make any difference. It’s the truth that matters.” Now lo and behold, you trot out the names of some supporters (publications and news networks) of your hypothesis and we’re supposed to gasp and say “Wow”.
[quote]Xvim wrote:
Lemmings don’t head for cliffs, that’s a myth popularized by that film of them leaping into the ocean. The camera crew was CHASING them off the cliff for dramatic effect. And you consider Time, Newsweek, BBC, CNN, National Geographic and the like to be ‘lemmings’ but you yourself are not?[/quote]
You get the point though, right?
[quote]pushharder wrote:
Yikes. This thread has more posts than the Brunette and Best Rack threads and has over one-third of the posts of the AW thread. Wow. We’re getting windy over here![/quote]
Yes.
Fear the dark scientific power of the Dissecting ID thread…
BRUHUUHUUUHAHAHAHAAA!!!
I just want to pipe up and say “Gud-Aaauumm”. I can’t believe how naughtily large this thread has become in my absence. I just finished catching up with all of the fun submissions everybody has made, and I wish I hadn’t been away for so long because there were so many times I wished to have been involved in the debate here.
Anyway, lots of chuckles all around… good work, everybody. And you know what… I’ve learned something today:
Declaring a thread dead is sometimes a way to make it struggle back to its feet and then breakdance. I think throttle may have been one of those guys that did the “robot”.
Loth (and others), now i’m not jumping sides here but obviously we can reach middle ground. I personally have no problem having a science teacher use the analogy of the easter island stones and the DNA structure. Explain that some or many or however he wants to say it, scientists wonder if the DNA structure is “natural” or if it were in fact “created” or “engineered” by something other than random chance.
Example:
If I went to stonehenge, there would be a very scientific aspect to me stating that those rocks were placed there by “something” to this day, nobody knows how the rocks were put there. It doesn’t seem possible that men of that era could move such rocks in such a way without modern technology. So we say something put the rocks there but we don’t know who or what. We can say however that we are 99.9% sure of the fact that the stones were not left there naturally by some glacier or some other random force. They are too organized to be created naturally.
My question, as long as “who” created DNA is left out of the “answer portion” of ID; is teaching that DNA is very very very complex and it is possible that it was not randomly created but rather intelligently created ok. Again, this would be more along the lines of asking the question, and not drawing the full conclusion that many IDers want with a “god” answer. Would you have any problems with this in a biology curriculum.
V
[quote]Xvim wrote:
http://www.utexas.edu/courses/wilson/ant304/projects/projects97/weimanp/fossils.html
And for those who have issues with Australopithicus…
In 1950, Wilfred Le Gros Clark published a paper which definitively settled the question of whether the australopithecines were apes or not. He performed a morphological study (based on the shape and function) of teeth and jaws, since these formed most of the fossil evidence. By studying human and modern ape fossils, Le Gros Clark came up with a list of eleven consistent differences between humans and apes. Looking at A. africanus and robustus (the only australopithecine species then known), he found that they were humanlike rather than apelike in every characteristic. Judged by the same criteria, A. afarensis falls somewhere between humans and apes, and possibly closer to the apes (Johanson and Edey 1981). White et al. (1994) did not judge A. ramidus by these criteria, but it is clear that ramidus is even more chimpanzee-like than afarensis. The ramidus arm bones also display a mixture of hominid and ape characteristics.
Solly Zuckerman attempted to prove with biometrical studies (based on measurements) that the australopithecines were apes. Zuckerman lost this debate in the 1950’s, and his position was abandoned by everyone else (Johanson and Edey 1981). Creationists like to quote his opinions as if they were still a scientifically acceptable viewpoint.
Charles Oxnard (1975), in a paper that is widely cited by creationists, claimed, based on his multivariate analyses, that australopithecines are no more closely related, or more similar, to humans than modern apes are. Howell et al.(1978) criticized this conclusion on a number of grounds. Oxnard’s results were based on measurements of a few skeletal bones which were usually fragmentary and often poorly preserved. The measurements did not describe the complex shape of some bones, and did not distinguish between aspects which are important for understanding locomotion from those which were not. Finally, there is “an overwhelming body of evidence”, based on the work of nearly 30 scientists, which contradicts Oxnard’s work. These studies used a variety of techniques, including those used by Oxnard, and were based on many different body parts and joint complexes. They overwhelmingly indicate that australopithecines resemble humans more closely than the living apes.
Creationists often cite Oxnard’s qualifications, and use of computers to perform his calculations, with approval. This is special pleading; many other scientists are equally qualified, and also use computers. Gish (1993) states that “[a] computer doesn’t lie, [a] computer doesn’t have a bias”. True enough, but the results that come out of a computer are only as good as the data and assumptions that go in. In this case, the primary assumption would seem to be that Oxnard’s methods are the best method of determining relationships. This seems doubtful, given some of the other unusual results of Oxnard’s study (1987). For example, he places Ramapithecus as the ape closest to humans, and Sivapithecus as closely related to orang-utans, even though the two are so similar that they are now considered to be the same species of Sivapithecus.
Less controversially, Oxnard also claims that, while probably bipedal, australopithecines did not walk identically to modern humans. Creationists sometimes quote this conclusion in a highly misleading manner, saying Oxnard proved that australopithecines did not walk upright, and then adding, as an afterthought (or in Willis’ (1987) case, not at all) “at least, not in the human manner”.
Creationists are generally reluctant to accept that australopithecines, including Lucy, were bipedal. A statement by Weaver (1985) that “Australopithecus afarensis … demonstrates virtually complete adaptation to upright walking” is dismissed by Willis (1987) as “a preposterous claim”. Willis adds: “Many competent anthropologists have carefully examined these and other “Australopithicine” [sic] remains and concluded that Lucy could not walk upright.”
Willis’ evidence for this consists of a statement by Solly Zuckerman made in 1970; a 1971 statement from Richard Leakey that australopithecines “may have been knuckle-walkers”, and a quote from Charles Oxnard about the relationship between humans, australopithecines and the apes. In fact, none of these quotes refer to Lucy. Two of them were made before Lucy, and A. afarensis, was even discovered (and the third was made very soon afterwards, before Lucy had been studied).
Even in 1970, Zuckerman’s views had long since been largely abandoned. In what is obviously a fabrication, Willis says that Leakey “referred to Lucy as an ape who did not walk upright”, three years before Lucy was discovered. Leakey was merely making a suggestion (about robust australopithecines) which he soon retracted, not stating a firm opinion, and he has since stated (1994) that Lucy “undoubtedly was a biped”. Oxnard (1975; 1987) has some unorthodox opinions about the australopithecines, but the Oxnard quote supplied by Willis discusses neither bipedality nor A. afarensis. Elsewhere in the same paper that Willis refers to, Oxnard (1975) repeatedly mentions that australopithecines may have been bipedal, and he has since stated (1987) that the australopithecines, including Lucy, were bipedal.
Gish (1985) has a long discussion of the debate about Lucy’s locomotion. He quotes extensively from Stern and Susman (1983), who list many apelike features of A. afarensis and argue that it spent a significant amount of time in the trees. As Gish admits, none of the scientists he mentions deny that Lucy was bipedal, but he goes on to suggest, with no evidence or support, that A. afarensis may have been no more bipedal than living apes, which are well adapted to quadrupedality and only walk on two legs for short distances. By contrast, the feet, knees, legs and pelvises of australopithecines are strongly adapted to bipedality. Gish’s conclusion is strongly rejected by Stern and Susman, and, apparently, everyone else:
"That bipedality was a more fundamental part of australopithecine behavior than in any other living or extinct nonhuman primate is not in serious dispute."
"... we must emphasize that in no way do we dispute the claim that terrestrial bipedality was a far more significant component of the behavior of A. afarensis than in any living nonhuman primate." (Stern, Jr. and Susman 1983)
"The most significant features for bipedalism include shortened iliac blades, lumbar curve, knees approaching midline, distal articular surface of tiba nearly perpendicular to the shaft, robust metatarsal I with expanded head, convergent hallux (big toe), and proximal foot phalanges with dorsally oriented proximal articular surfaces. (McHenry 1994)
Gish writes as if showing that A. afarensis did not “walk upright in the human manner” is all that is needed to disqualify it as a human ancestor. But there is no reason that bipedality, when it first arose, had to be identical to human bipedality; that final step could have occurred later. As Stern and Susman (1983) state:
"In our opinion A. afarensis is very close to what can be called a "missing link". It possesses a combination of traits entirely appropriate for an animal that had traveled well down the road toward full-time bipedality ..."
Creationist John Morris writes:
"From the neck down, certain clues suggested to Johanson that Lucy walked a little more erect than today's chimps. This conclusion, based on his interpretation of the partial hip bone and a knee bone, has been hotly contested by many paleoanthropologists." (Morris 1994)
Almost everything in this quote is a distortion (Johanson’s and Lucy’s names are about the only exceptions). “Certain clues suggested” doesn’t mention that the whole find screamed “bipedality” to every qualified scientist who looked at it. “a little more erect”, when everyone believes that Lucy was fully erect. “the partial hip bone and a knee bone”, when Lucy included almost a complete pelvis and leg (taking mirror imaging into account, and excluding the foot). “has been hotly contested”, when no reputable paleoanthropologist denies that Lucy was bipedal. The debates are about whether she was also arboreal, and about how similar the biomechanics of her locomotion was to that of humans. Given that we have most of Lucy’s leg and pelvis, one has to wonder what sort of fossil evidence it would take to convince creationists of australopithecine bipedality.
To support the idea that australopithecines are just apes, Parker says:
"In their critique of the Leakeys, Johanson and White (1980) noted: 'Modern chimpanzees, by this definition [Richard Leakey's] would be classified as A. africanus.' Apes after all?" (Morris and Parker 1982)
When the paper by Johanson and White is examined, it is apparent that Parker has taken their quote out of context in a way that almost reverses its meaning. Leakey did not call A. africanus a chimp, nor did Johanson and White accuse him of doing so. They criticized Leakey’s definition because it was imprecise enough to also include chimps. Of course, such a criticism only makes sense if A. africanus is not a chimp.
In 1987, creationist Tom Willis accused Donald Johanson of fraud, claiming that the skeleton known as “Lucy” consisted of bones that had been found at two sites about 2.5 km (1.5 miles) apart. Willis had actually confused two separate finds which belong to the same species. (This was in spite of the fact that a best-selling book (Johanson and Edey 1981) has photos of both fossils: AL 129-1 is a right knee, while Lucy has a right femur and a left tibia.) This was a spectacular error which could hardly have been made by anyone who had done the most elementary research, but that didn’t stop many other creationists from picking up the claim and repeating it. For a full history of this claim, read the talk.origins knee-joint FAQ file (Lippard 1997).
Creationists rarely address the issue of why australopithecines have a foramen magnum at the bottom of the skull. Gish (1985) criticizes Dart’s reasoning that the Taung baby walked upright, based on the position of its foramen magnum. Gish correctly states that the position of the foramen magnum is closer in juvenile apes and humans than it is in adults (in apes, it moves backwards during growth), and concludes that Dart was unjustified in analyzing this feature on a juvenile skull. This is the same criticism that Dart originally faced from scientists, but Gish fails to mention that later evidence proved Dart’s analysis correct and silenced his critics.
Creationists also rarely mention australopithecine teeth. Gish says that “[Dart] pointed out the many ape-like features of the skull, but believed that some features of the skull, and particularly of the teeth, were man-like”. (Note the misleading implication that the apelike features really exist, while the humanlike ones are a figment of Dart’s imagination.) Gish disputes this, pointing out that the molar teeth of africanus are extremely large. What Gish does not tell readers is that this is one of the few differences between them and human teeth. When the teeth of the Taung child could be properly examined, Dart’s claim was strongly confirmed, and is now generally accepted:
"In fact, though the molars were larger than is now normal, most of the teeth [of the Taung child] could have belonged to a child of today." (Campbell 1988) [/quote]
Good post. Even though it is used in defense of your position the post clearly illustrates the dissension in the ranks of ALL those who look at these fossils. The evidence in these situations is always viewed subjectively and goes back to the “glasses” analogy. No objective observer could come close to saying that conclusive proof of a missing link is found in this treasure box. That goes back to a contention that I made not long ago that the evolution model predicts many, many, many transitionary fossils in thousands if not millions of species but the bottom line is that even disputable fossils are in extremely short supply and the indisputable ones are nonexistent.
Also, take note of the quote excerpted above, [quote]True enough, but the results that come out of a computer are only as good as the data and assumptions that go in. [/quote] Now insert the word “theory” or “hypothesis” in place of “computer” and see if the statement still stands true. I say it does. What say you?
[quote]Vegita wrote:
Loth (and others), now i’m not jumping sides here but obviously we can reach middle ground. I personally have no problem having a science teacher use the analogy of the easter island stones and the DNA structure. Explain that some or many or however he wants to say it, scientists wonder if the DNA structure is “natural” or if it were in fact “created” or “engineered” by something other than random chance.
Example:
If I went to stonehenge, there would be a very scientific aspect to me stating that those rocks were placed there by “something” to this day, nobody knows how the rocks were put there. It doesn’t seem possible that men of that era could move such rocks in such a way without modern technology. So we say something put the rocks there but we don’t know who or what. We can say however that we are 99.9% sure of the fact that the stones were not left there naturally by some glacier or some other random force. They are too organized to be created naturally.
My question, as long as “who” created DNA is left out of the “answer portion” of ID; is teaching that DNA is very very very complex and it is possible that it was not randomly created but rather intelligently created ok. Again, this would be more along the lines of asking the question, and not drawing the full conclusion that many IDers want with a “god” answer. Would you have any problems with this in a biology curriculum.
V[/quote]
I certainly wouldn’t, as this is what I have been pushing and saying all along. If you look at it from physics/mathematical point of view, for DNA to evolve by chance or by outside direction or influence, the chances are much greater for the later. This is based on the current physics premise (objects at rest stay at rest and objects in motion stay in motion unless acted upon by an outside force). So the pond scum would stay scum unless acted upon by an outside force.
In any case, when you look at ID and evolution from a physics perspective and then calculate the odds, ID is much more plausible than evolution.
So given that the actual concept of evolution is contrary to other legitimate scientific disciplines, at the least ID should be discussed as just as plausible as evolution.
[quote]Lorisco wrote:
I certainly wouldn’t, as this is what I have been pushing and saying all along. If you look at it from physics/mathematical point of view, for DNA to evolve by chance or by outside direction or influence, the chances are much greater for the later. This is based on the current physics premise (objects at rest stay at rest and objects in motion stay in motion unless acted upon by an outside force). So the pond scum would stay scum unless acted upon by an outside force.
In any case, when you look at ID and evolution from a physics perspective and then calculate the odds, ID is much more plausible than evolution.
So given that the actual concept of evolution is contrary to other legitimate scientific disciplines, at the least ID should be discussed as just as plausible as evolution. [/quote]
Okay, what this is telling me is that you have a very superficial understanding of large chaotic systems which tend to order themselves. This scientific principle has been posted in this thread alone several times. Please Google “Miller-Urey Experiment” if you don’t care to go back through the hundred pages or so to find the links that I and others have posted about this. What I am trying to explain to you and Veg (I guess) is that not only is it NOT a freak occurence for life to exist on this planet given the conditions we have had here in an early Earth, it is a scientific CERTAINTY. This is quite a bit different than Easter Island. I will personally guarantee to both of you that every single time you duplicate the Miller-Urey experiment in a laboratory (or your house, whatever) you will discover that complex organic molecules form from inorganic simple ones. Every time. I will put money on it. A lot.
Leading US magazine exposes evolution?s tall tales!
January 5, 2001
The major American magazine The American Spectator in its current issue (December 2000 ? January 2001) devotes most of its pages to this theme: what American students often learn in their public schools is just plain wrong. In particular, the teaching of evolution as fact in science texts is singled out and receives 10 pages of coverage in this special edition.
Get our best-selling handbook countering the latest arguments for Evolution!
Refuting Evolution ?
Dr Jonathan Sarfati
A general critique of the most up-to-date arguments for evolution to challenge educators, students, and parents. It provides a good summary of the arguments against evolution and for creation.
More information/ purchase online
Although none of the four writers apparently accepts a literal reading of the Book of Genesis, they have nevertheless provided a useful public service in compiling a litany of fakes, frauds, and faulty science that still appear in highly used science textbooks that indoctrinate young people in ?molecules-to-man? evolution. Many of these texts are college-level, where one would think that the caliber of scholarship would certainly be a notch higher.
Survival of the fakest, not fittest
In a hard-hitting expos? (?Survival of the Fakest?) of evolutionists? gaffes and quackeries, Dr Jonathan Wells (Ph.D., Biology, U.C. Berkeley) lists seven ?pillars of Darwinian theory? that are featured in many science books today (including standard texts that have seen many printings*) yet are patently incorrect, and are KNOWN by the general scientific community to be wrong.
If you attended government schools anywhere in the world, you were probably wrongly taught that the following were facts, as Dr Wells debunks:
that the famous Miller/Urey experiment of 1953 supposedly produced the building blocks of life in a test tube.
The truth: Miller/Urey had to have a hydrogen-rich atmosphere for their experiment. Yet for almost 30 years, scientists involved in this field of research have concluded that the early atmosphere of Earth was quite different from this. So while their experiment does not work at all, some texts (e.g. Molecular Biology of the Cell by Alberts) continue to inform students that the first step to creating life was overcome by Miller and Urey. See also Q&A: Origin of Life.
that embryos in vertebrates are virtually identical in their early stages, which is evidence of descent from a common evolutionary ancestor.
The truth: this was an outright fraud first perpetrated over 100 years ago as ?science?. Incredibly, the doctored drawings of embryonic similarity have been known to be false for about 100 years, and yet Dr Wells reports that ?most current biology textbooks? feature the fake drawings as powerful evidence for evolution. See also Embryonic Fraud Rediscovered.
That peppered moths in an area of England, which went from being mostly light colored to dark colored in the overall moth population, are evidence for evolution occurring in the present.
The truth: even putting aside the obvious fact that the moths are still moths and thus no upward evolution could have occurred anyway, the whole episode was staged to begin with! (as was reported in detail in our Creation magazine)
Nevertheless, Dr Wells has discovered that the staged photographs of dead moths glued to tree trunks continues to appear in almost all biology texts and is supposed ?proof? of evolution working through the mechanism of natural selection.
The emperor’s evolutionary new clothes
In Dr Wells?s article, based on his new book Icons of Evolution, he examines four additional pillars that have also been knocked down (by evolutionists themselves) and yet continue to be paraded in science texts as evidence for macro-evolution. He writes that once ?the false ?evidence? is taken away, the case for Darwinian evolution, in the textbooks at least, is so thin it?s almost invisible.?
Why does the textbook charade continue? Dr Wells suspects ?that there?s an agenda other than pure science at work here.? He cites one motivation: adherence to atheism, which is expressed openly by evolutionary fundamentalist Dr Richard Dawkins, whom Wells cites as saying that evolution makes it ?possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.? Others hold to strictly naturalistic (i.e. no room for the supernatural in science) and materialistic view of the universe. Therefore, opines Dr Wells, philosophical, rather than scientific, views are what is motivating the science textbook writers.
[quote]lothario1132 wrote:
Lorisco wrote:
I certainly wouldn’t, as this is what I have been pushing and saying all along. If you look at it from physics/mathematical point of view, for DNA to evolve by chance or by outside direction or influence, the chances are much greater for the later. This is based on the current physics premise (objects at rest stay at rest and objects in motion stay in motion unless acted upon by an outside force). So the pond scum would stay scum unless acted upon by an outside force.
In any case, when you look at ID and evolution from a physics perspective and then calculate the odds, ID is much more plausible than evolution.
So given that the actual concept of evolution is contrary to other legitimate scientific disciplines, at the least ID should be discussed as just as plausible as evolution.
Okay, what this is telling me is that you have a very superficial understanding of large chaotic systems which tend to order themselves. This scientific principle has been posted in this thread alone several times. Please Google “Miller-Urey Experiment” if you don’t care to go back through the hundred pages or so to find the links that I and others have posted about this. What I am trying to explain to you and Veg (I guess) is that not only is it NOT a freak occurence for life to exist on this planet given the conditions we have had here in an early Earth, it is a scientific CERTAINTY. This is quite a bit different than Easter Island. I will personally guarantee to both of you that every single time you duplicate the Miller-Urey experiment in a laboratory (or your house, whatever) you will discover that complex organic molecules form from inorganic simple ones. Every time. I will put money on it. A lot.[/quote]
Loth, be careful not to put much stock in the M-U experiment.
"by Carl Wieland
Certain molecules come in both left and right-handed forms, mirror images of each other. This includes those sugars which form part of the sub-units that are then assembled into DNA and RNA strands. This is also true of the amino acids which are the building blocks of the long chains called proteins. For any of these substances by themselves, there is no chemical difference between the left and right-handed forms. Each takes part in chemical reactions with the same ease as the other.
In all living things, the proteins are made up entirely of left-handed amino acids, whereas the DNA/RNA is exclusively made up of right-handed sub-units. This property of life is called homochirality. Studies have shown that it is vital for life. Two complementary strands of DNA cannot bind with each other if they are in a ?natural? mixture (that is, one made up of a 50:50 mix of left and right-handed forms, which is what unaided [chance] chemistry produces).
A recent world conference on ?The Origin of Homochirality and Life? made it clear that the origin of this handedness is a complete mystery to evolutionists seeking to explain the origin of life in terms of chemistry.1
Theorists are divided as to what came first?some form of life which later became homochiral, or did some unknown process cause homochirality so that life could evolve? Stanley Miller is in the first camp. He is famous for the classic 1953 Miller-Urey experiment in which simple organic compounds were formed by electronically ?zapping? a mix of gases?an experimental direction which has basically gone nowhere since. He believes that life had to come first, based on some non-homochiral precursor of DNA?which then became homochiral later.
Organic chemist William Bonner, Stanford Professor Emeritus, strongly disagrees. He insists that you somehow have to explain chemical chirality first, and only then can you have life. He and others have hunted fruitlessly for 25 years for some such explanation on Earth, so they now speculate that the first homochiral molecules came from outer space. Perhaps a supernova explosion caused polarized light which caused an excess of one ?hand? in space, which was then carried by comets to Earth. In spite of all the huge problems with this idea, in the future NASA intends to look for homochiral molecules on a comet (and possibly on Mars). However, amino acids in meteorites have been shown to be ?racemic? (a 50:50 mix of both forms).
This huge expenditure of tax dollars is all based on fervent faith in evolution, and rejection of the obvious?that the machinery of life was originally created in a fully-functioning state.
Reference
Cohen, J., 1995. Getting all turned around over the origins of life on earth. Science, 267:1265?1266. Return to text.
[quote]throttle132 wrote:
In Dr Wells?s article, based on his new book Icons of Evolution, he examines four additional pillars that have also been knocked down (by evolutionists themselves) and yet continue to be paraded in science texts as evidence for macro-evolution. He writes that once ?the false ?evidence? is taken away, the case for Darwinian evolution, in the textbooks at least, is so thin it?s almost invisible.?[/quote]
http://www.ncseweb.org/icons/icon1millerurey.html
FYI Dr. Wells is not quite a good source to use when it comes to this stuff.
[quote]throttle132 wrote:
This huge expenditure of tax dollars is all based on fervent faith in evolution, and rejection of the obvious?that the machinery of life was originally created in a fully-functioning state.
[/quote]
Riiiight… That’s obvious. No, that’s obvious in the same way that little invisible leprechauns pull me back down to earth after I jump up from a trampoline. Duh!! They make rainbows too! That’s how they stash their pots of gold.
Dude, you’re never going to get anywhere with this until you let go of the supernatural crap you’ve been feeding yourself. This is classic “God of the Gaps” reasoning.
The homochirality of proteins is a question in science, just like many others. This is not proof of any kind in a supernatural creator, I’m sorry. All it shows is that we do not possess the necessary knowledge to explain this process yet. And that’s a big “yet”. What happens when we figure it out? Then you guys will have to cook up some other lame-brained excuse for how your belief in the supernatural somehow makes rational sense.
There are many other postulates for how organic life came into existence. I like to use the M-U experiment to show that complexity and order can arise from a sufficiently unbound chaotic system. And the fact that it was done back in 1953 is pretty cool too. This is old school stuff. If you want to see some more about organic origin and some differing theories, check out wikipedia:
I also like the Bubble theory. It helps to explain why lipid membranes are so important and even necessary for all forms of life down to the unicellular ones. The Wikipedia page has some pretty cool stuff in it, you should give it a shot.
What makes this field of biology even cooler, in my opinion, is the fact that it is relatively unexplored (compared to other biology fields), and holds such promise. I should think that there would be more and faster advances in our knowledge here if there was any decent money to be made in it. It seems like everybody always goes into medical research these days. Oh well.
[quote]lothario1132 wrote:
Riiiight… That’s obvious. No, that’s obvious in the same way that little invisible leprechauns pull me back down to earth after I jump up from a trampoline. Duh!! They make rainbows too! That’s how they stash their pots of gold.
Dude, you’re never going to get anywhere with this until you let go of the supernatural crap you’ve been feeding yourself. This is classic “God of the Gaps” reasoning.
[/quote]
Loth, I know you’re going to disregard this right off the bat and it has been said many times throughout this thread but it bears repeating. Many of us feel strongly, and rightfully so IMHO, that your “something from nothing” hypothesis’ are far more preposterous than the creation model. Your leprechauns analogy is far more appropriately used to describe the evolution model. The supernatural leap of faith that you must take is a far greater one in believing that inorganic molecules (where did they come from anyway?) bubbled their way into simple life forms and then changed and mutated and survived and developed and evolved into Tyra Banks and Shaquile O’Neal and Carl Sagan and … even Lothario. For that matter, it is far-fetched to the nth degree that they changed and mutated and survived and developed and evolved into … a simple bacteria cell. If you know as much about biology as you imply, then you know that a simple bacteria cell is infinitely complex. Heck, a DNA strand within a simple bacteria is so complex it is mind-staggering.
Anyway, I guy I know said this once and it applies here: “Dude, you’re never going to get anywhere with this until you let go of the supernatural crap you’ve been feeding yourself.”
Well said.
BTW, the incessant scoffing does NOT help you make your case. It works in reverse of your intentions. It reveals something in you that I know you will attempt to refute tenaciously and that is that YOU HAVE FAITH, a very strong one and you intend to hang on to it bulldoggedly in the face of ANY evidence or logic in favor of the creation model.
Also, in light of the above, none of my posts on this thread are posted in an attempt to convince Lothario or his buds that they should “convert”. When you have a faith as strong as his it probably isn’t going to happen. It is an attempt to show others that this evolution thing is not as cut and dried as modern society makes it out to be. The BBC, National Geographic, CNN, etc. may be on the bandwagon but history illustrates that bandwagons often lose their wheels after time.
[quote]throttle132 wrote:
Loth, I know you’re going to disregard this right off the bat and it has been said many times throughout this thread but it bears repeating. Many of us feel strongly, and rightfully so IMHO, that your “something from nothing” hypothesis’ are far more preposterous than the creation model. Your leprechauns analogy is far more appropriately used to describe the evolution model. The supernatural leap of faith that you must take is a far greater one in believing that inorganic molecules (where did they come from anyway?) bubbled their way into simple life forms and then changed and mutated and survived and developed and evolved into Tyra Banks and Shaquile O’Neal and Carl Sagan and … even Lothario. For that matter, it is far-fetched to the nth degree that they changed and mutated and survived and developed and evolved into … a simple bacteria cell. If you know as much about biology as you imply, then you know that a simple bacteria cell is infinitely complex. Heck, a DNA strand within a simple bacteria is so complex it is mind-staggering.[/quote]
So you see this complexity, and because our minds and imaginations are too small to grasp the concept of order from chaos developed over billions of years… that means that it was created, not piecemeal but “woop there it is” style? Do not underestimate the power of the force, man…
Think about this. We can’t even fathom a thousand things at once in our minds. In fact, experimentally, we humans cannot even hold the concept of more than five different distinct things in our minds at the exact same time. Try it.
Chemical reactions happen in the blink of an eye. Give such a thing as the conditions in the M-U experiment not two weeks, but a year. Better yet, a hundred years. Run that experiment for longer than a human lifespan. You saw the degree of sophisitication and order that happened in that chemical tank, didn’t you? That was only two weeks. We as humans cannot even begin to understand the degree of difference between two weeks and a hundred years, or a thousand years… OF COURSE it’s going to seem preposterous to us.
And what happens when we increase the volume of the M-U experiment to more than a few hundred gallons? Make that experiment happen over a few million gallons… not even the size of a few olympic swimming pools. I don’t know if you’ve looked outside lately, but our planet is friggin’ huge. And given such an enormously mind-bogglingly LOOOONG time to develop, well of course some freaky amount of order is going to arise. Not a small chance… a certainty.
And as was stated in that wikipedia page, that’s just the prebiotic conditions, the interaction of energy and matter in a crucial tempeerature range… what happens if other events occur to trigger spontaneous order? There are no leprechauns here. No mystical beings, no supernatural stuff… this does not force us to pretend that there is something out there that may not be.
[quote]Anyway, I guy I know said this once and it applies here: “Dude, you’re never going to get anywhere with this until you let go of the supernatural crap you’ve been feeding yourself.”
Well said.
BTW, the incessant scoffing does NOT help you make your case. It works in reverse of your intentions. It reveals something in you that I know you will attempt to refute tenaciously and that is that YOU HAVE FAITH, a very strong one and you intend to hang on to it bulldoggedly in the face of ANY evidence or logic in favor of the creation model.[/quote]
Sorry buddy, I am empty of your brand of faith. I have been for as long as I can remember. There is no logic in believing in magic. I understand why people pretend though, and I find it humorous. If I can make someone think twice about taking a fairy tale seriously by helping them see how ridiculous they are, then all the better. One way or another though, I will smile. That’s what this mental circle-jerking is all about anyway, remember?
You know what? I do have faith… it’s just not in anything supernatural. I believe in the power of personal liberty, and the concept of helping my fellow man. I have faith in the power and innate “goodness” (if you will) of self-sacrifice, kindness, speaking the truth, and love. These are all metaphorical things which I value quite highly, and are as real as any other kind of metaphorical thing can be.
Still… I also understand that this is just my evolved superego talking to me (and for me), and I’m not pretending that I don’t have to die or that I await some post-mortem punishment for my behavior in my life. Big difference.
[quote]pushharder wrote:
Wow! A response that wasn’t rife with ridicule and scoffing. (Now was that so hard?)
[/quote]
Don’t try that crap with me you Jesus-freak!!! I DID TOO scoff and ridicule!!!
Just not as much.
[quote]lothario1132 wrote:
Okay, what this is telling me is that you have a very superficial understanding of large chaotic systems which tend to order themselves. This scientific principle has been posted in this thread alone several times. Please Google “Miller-Urey Experiment” if you don’t care to go back through the hundred pages or so to find the links that I and others have posted about this. What I am trying to explain to you and Veg (I guess) is that not only is it NOT a freak occurence for life to exist on this planet given the conditions we have had here in an early Earth, it is a scientific CERTAINTY. This is quite a bit different than Easter Island. I will personally guarantee to both of you that every single time you duplicate the Miller-Urey experiment in a laboratory (or your house, whatever) you will discover that complex organic molecules form from inorganic simple ones. Every time. I will put money on it. A lot.[/quote]
Dude, you need to think a little deeper. Testing how a system works within a system proves only that the system works as designed. That is like saying that you can run a flashlight on batteries, but it is a certainty that at some point the light will go out when the battery dies. Why, because that is how it was designed.
When you test an organic molecule and how it tends to be formed from inorganic ones you should be asking the questions; if it’s not a random occurrence, then how the hell does it know to do that? Where the hell did the inorganic material come from in the first place? How did a chaos to order system come about in the first place?
Order does not occur at random. If it did it wouldn’t be order, now would it? It would be chance. Not just one chance, put many millions of chances that just happen to occur in the correct sequence at the correct time. That is mathematically impossible.
So what you have done here by bringing this up is actually support ID. Complex systems don’t occur randomly, if they did it wouldn’t be random. Understand?
[quote]Lorisco wrote:
So what you have done here by bringing this up is actually support ID. Complex systems don’t occur randomly, if they did it wouldn’t be random. Understand?
[/quote]
What I understand, from your comments here are that again, you have little or no concept of how chaotic systems function and that no matter what argument is presented you’ll find a way to twist it to fit your religious convictions. If you insist that anything resembling order must have an original creator or that it must be functioning by ‘design’ then that implies that the designer, a presumably ordered, non-chaotic being, must also have had a designer/creator ad infinitum.
Ignorance of a subject doesn’t imply anything other than ignorance of a subject. Not knowing how complex systems come in to being only implies that you don’t know how that system came about it doesn’t imply that someone created it, it doesn’t prove that someone did not create, it only demonstrates that you don’t know. Introduce some/any evidence that there is a creator, other than ignorance (this word has a more negative connotation than I’d like, I simply mean ‘lack of knowledge’).
There is a great deal of evidence to suport the theory of evolution, even macroevolution, btw, evolutionists don’t draw a distinction between macro and micro, that’s only something creationists do because ‘micro evolution’ as they like to call it, is easily observable by the layperson. When I learned about the fossil record and the dating methods used to identify artifacts I was also informed of the potential fallability of those dating methods, in fact, in every class Ican remember where we discussed the subject, the methods by which the information presented might be falsified/tested were discussed as well. ‘Here are the facts, this is the theory, this is how the theory has been tested, these are the results of said tests, this is the margin of error, etc.’ You just don’t have that with ID, what you do have is exploitation of the potential falsifications of evolution theory (a valid arguement) follwed by the conclusion that God must have done it just like it says in Genesis (invalid conclusion.) Paring valid arguments that even evolutionists provide as potential falsifications, with religious zealotry is a poor substitute for any kind of real dialogue.
These kinds of threads are interesting mental excercises but in the end it’s science vs. superstition masqurading as pseudo-science and some of us will always fall on the side of science and others will always fall on the side of faith. To ‘win’ this discussion you have to convince the other person that God does, or does not exist depending on your persuasion and I have no interest in trying to do that.
[quote]Lorisco wrote:
So what you have done here by bringing this up is actually support ID. Complex systems don’t occur randomly, if they did it wouldn’t be random. Understand?
[/quote]
Close, Lorisco, you are very close. Remember that the theory of Intelligent Design relies on a supernatural “Intelligent Designer” who foils the chaotic universe, and makes order happen where it shouldn’t be. This is simply false. Order naturally belongs in our world, and in everything.
Just change gears for a second, because you are falling into the “order can’t happen” mindset that I wrote about a few posts ago. Order naturally arises from chaos. This is completely normal and the way of the universe. We have demonstrated this principle over and over and over… maybe because it’s counterintuitive and cool. Check out a snowflake and tell me that order and pattern-forming isn’t a natural thing. Nautilus shells, leaves, etc., etc., the list goes on and on because it is everywhere.
Now this is the crucial point in the argument, and I challenge you to consider this:
There is nothing wrong with assigning that order-forming tendency we see everywhere to the powers of an intelligent creator. Indeed, it would be as if the order is displayed in nature everywhere around us as a sign of the almighty power of this deity.
HOWEVER, this is not scientific, this is faith-based.
All we can say in a scientific way is that the order exists… we can’t draw the conclusion that there is an intelligent personality behind it. And really, why would we assign a personality to a force of nature to begin with? What would be the point? Is there an agenda being served here that has more to do with religion, and not necessarily a scientific truth?
Do you understand now? We’ve almost made it to 600 posts in this thread, and it’s becoming ponderous, to say the least… but this is the central problem with ID as I’ve stated from the very first post in this thread.
It quite simply is NOT science.
Maybe the fact that gravity happens in such a miraculous way… I mean, how is it possible that two masses exert an attractive force towards one another? Maybe THAT could be an indicator of an intelligence or a personality behind the laws of nature? Gravity is just as observable and preposterous of a condition as the order arising from chaos, is it not? Especially when gravity violates the simple physics premise of bodies at rest tending to stay at rest? I drop a motionless penny from the Empire state building, and it spontaneously gains momentum and falls to earth? WTF?
Seriously though, do you get it now?