Observable fact my ass. Where can I to to observe all these intermediate stages of evolution? Actual ones. Not drawings in a book of what some scientist is guessing. Or can I just sit and watch as my gecko morphs into a bird? Observable fact? Says who?
[quote]lothario1132 wrote:
Cognitive dissonance is a bitch.[/quote]
Both extremes of this argument are guilty of this.
You have it set as an either/or proposition.
Just because you may be a Dallas Cowboys fan does not mean that all ther other teams are guilty of cognative dissonance. It just shows how maniacal you are about the Cowboys.
[quote]Professor X wrote:
Nice use of a bunch of facts to come to a possible conclusion that hasn’t been proven. There is a word for that…I used to know what that word was…it rhymed with eerie.
[/quote]
This begs the question of what would constitute proof for you. One may wax Popler-like and say that a theory can only be falsified, never proven, an argument of some value in the philosophy department, but only of passing curiousity in the sciences. In an exercise of reductio ad absurdum, the falsification of a theory is itself a theory, which can only be falsified, and so on, ad nauseam.
Clearly, we cannot go back in time to observe evolution. Are you arguing that thus it can never be proven? By extension, that would apply to geological and stellar evolution, probably to other things as well.
I like to take a common sense approach to this subject. In a strictly theoretical sense, you can’t prove anything. So then, why discuss anything?
My approach is, there are observable facts, fossils, DNA sequences, morphological similarities, etc. Use logic and infer conclusions. Does that constitue “proof”? Not to a philosopher, but as Stephen Weinberg put it: “The best thing that philosophy has done for science was to stay out of its way.”
[quote]btm62 wrote:
Observable fact my ass. Where can I to to observe all these intermediate stages of evolution? Actual ones. Not drawings in a book of what some scientist is guessing. Or can I just sit and watch as my gecko morphs into a bird? Observable fact? Says who? [/quote]
Where can you go to observe an atom? A quasar? A god? Truly idiotic.
[quote]danweltmann wrote:
Professor X wrote:
Nice use of a bunch of facts to come to a possible conclusion that hasn’t been proven. There is a word for that…I used to know what that word was…it rhymed with eerie.
This begs the question of what would constitute proof for you. [/quote]
In terms of evolution, gradual development of features…like feathers, including “hit or miss” species that may not have survived for very long in an effort to get it right. We don’t have anything like that. Contrary to the picture you are painting, what we do have are fossils of VERY developed species with specific traits that helped it survive for that period of time. We don’t have any fossils of the “almost feathered bird” with “not quite a feather” sticking out of its arm. We go from wingless…to wings. WTF? This planet should be literally LITTERED with failures like deformed butterflies that were all butter with no fly. I want to see the 5 armed panda simply because “oops” happened. Where is the kangaroo with 15 penises in some failed effort to procreate an entire world full of jumping furry creatures?
What you seem to fail to grasp is that it takes just as much FAITH in science to believe that shit just happened as it does a belief in God. You simply hold that yours makes you superior.
Bullshit. Your goal was to act as if anyone who believes in a higher power lacks any sense of science. While evolution may very well be what happened, it does not explain creation nor can it be proven as absolute fact. Why are you stating otherwise?
Bottom line, it isn’t proof. Wishing it were won’t make it so.
The Babel Fish
The Babel fish… is small, yellow and leechlike, and probably the oddest thing in the Universe. It feeds on the brainwave energy received not from its own carrier but from those around it. It absorbs all unconscious mental frequencies from this brainwave energy to nourish itself with. It then excretes into the mind of its carrier a telepathic matrix formed by combining the conscious thought frequencies with nerve signals picked up from the speech centers of the brain which has supplied them.
The practical upshot of all this is that if you stick a Babel fish in your ear you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language. The speech patterns you actually hear decode the brainwave matrix which has been fed into your mind by your Babel fish.
Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mind-bogglingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see it as a final and clinching proof of the non-existence of God. The argument goes something like this:
“I refuse to prove that I exist,” says God, “for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing.”
“But,” says Man, “the Babel fish is a dead giveaway, isn’t it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don’t. QED.”
“Oh dear,” says God, “I hadn’t thought of that,” and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.
“Oh, that was easy,” says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white and gets himself killed at the next zebra crossing.
Most leading theologians claim that this argument is a load of dingo’s kidneys, but that didn’t stop Oolon Colluphid making a small fortune when he used it as the central theme of his best-selling book, ‘Well That About Wraps It Up for God.’
Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation.
That’s pretty interesting actually. There are some things that might limit this though:
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Apparently, significant genetic defects often are not allowed. There is some error checking going on and frankly there are cancellations when things go wrong.
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If a change happened but was a failure in terms of precreation, then there would not be many examples of the new line. I mean, if you don’t have thousands of dead bodies, it’s hard to find them later when digging for fossils.
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Some changes are “soft”. By this I mean they don’t necessarily surivive to be found in fossilized form very easily. I know that sometimes fossils are also very well preserved. Even if they did get fossilized, would they be recognized.
Regardless, it’s a good and interesting question. It would be nice to pull out some examples along those lines in order to answer a few questions.
Prof.,
I don’t know the extent of what you’re envisioning as far as an “almost feathered bird with not quite a feather sticking out of its arm” but it sounds oddly like archeaopteryx. I could be misunderstanding you though.
vroom,
In addition to “soft changes” as you describe, most (if not all) of biology is “soft” in a geological frame of reference.
[quote]lucasa wrote:
Prof.,
I don’t know the extent of what you’re envisioning as far as an “almost feathered bird with not quite a feather sticking out of its arm” but it sounds oddly like archeaopteryx. I could be misunderstanding you though.
vroom,
In addition to “soft changes” as you describe, most (if not all) of biology is “soft” in a geological frame of reference.[/quote]
Yeah, in the ORIGINAL evolution and religion thread (the thread to which all other threads should be referred to) we discussed how few people, even in the camp of “evolution” actually agree with the archeaopteryx being the symbol of cross species evoluton. I wish I had a link to that thread…but it was a doozy.
[quote]danweltmann wrote:
btm62 wrote:
Observable fact my ass. Where can I to to observe all these intermediate stages of evolution? Actual ones. Not drawings in a book of what some scientist is guessing. Or can I just sit and watch as my gecko morphs into a bird? Observable fact? Says who?
Where can you go to observe an atom? A quasar? A god? Truly idiotic.[/quote]
I didn’t inquire about a quasar, an atom or a god did I? I was asking about proof of evolution. But to answer, I think I could go to someplace with a really big microscope for an atom. Probably have to be in the right place for a quasar. I see God working every day in my life. Idiotic to some perhaps. About how I feel about people who dismiss the Bible based on the scientific findings of men. Look at history. The earth is flat, bleeding w/ leeches, yes, science is fact and if you can’t use the scientific method on it, it must not be so. That to me is idiotic and closed minded. Ironically the very same traits you confer on to Christians. You have no claim to seek the truth. You only seek those answers that support your position.
As with most things I personally think the answer lies somewhere in between. Hell we’re only 50 years from getting a spaceship up. What makes you think all the sudden we can explain the universe? Can someone tell me how to get my VCR to stop blinking 12:00 now.
[quote]skor wrote:
Hopefully the last thread on evolution and church…:[/quote]
If only!!!
I hope you didn’t place any bets on this…
Science is an attempt at improving human understanding. It is not a religion, and it cannot incorporate God in its framework. That exclusion is not a relgious tenet, it’s a practical matter. If God is stirring in all the time and changing the rules, what’s the point of trying to figure out what the rules are? Maybe God is just going to change them next Wednesday. So the scientists all agreed that, while they wouldn’t make anyone say there wasn’t a God, they would try to keep God out of the science stories. Also genies, giants, leprechauns, fairies, wizards, and space aliens.
Science is an attempt at improving human understanding. It is not a dogma, nor a calculus for determining the truth. A work in progress, it is a way of finding out answers to certain kind of questions, plus some questions that have been answered in this fashion (called theories and laws) and an ever growing list of new questions that have not been answered. Science always has holes in it, if you look closely enough, even in the parts that are relatively settled. These tiny but significant holes are what scientists call the interesting parts. For example, the question of the pre-Cambrian explosion is very interesting, and nobody is trying to pretend there’s a successful explanation for it. You can point at that thing and yell “There’s a hole in Darwin’s theory” all day long if you like. Scientists don’t really care, they are too busy working to understand the hole to pay attention to you.
Science is an attempt at improving human understanding. It is not a debate. It is sometimes controversial when there are competing theories (“hypotheses”) to explain the same facts. But the controversies are settled in laboratories and observatories, and in the field, not in the lecture hall or at the polls. When there are competing hypotheses, scientists rub them against their field work, laboratories, and observatories until all but one of the theories yells ‘uncle’. Then they go back to trying to patch any holes in the survivor theory. Sometimes the necessary data for settling the dispute are not easily forthcoming and the controversy hangs on for a while. The penny usually drops at some point because scientists are careful to avoid making theories that cannot be disproved. Such theories can never help them understand anything, so they are a waste of time. Do you like to waste your time?
Science is an attempt at improving human understanding. Where we are with respect to understanding speciation in plants and animals is that we currently have a single theory: the Theory of Evolution (not to be confused with the process of evolution, which is observed). It is a dilly of a theory. All the attempts to disprove it have only made it stronger, and it now has a long list of answered questions to its credit and demonstrated enormous predictive power for answering still others. It certainly has holes, places we don’t understand how the theory squares with the data. But none of these holes are big enough to disprove the theory. They all seem like the kind of thing you might find an explanation for, consistent with the theory. You can yell about the holes all that you like, but until somebody produces a second theory that has fewer holes in it than the Theory of Evolution, there is no scientific controversy about the Theory of Evolution because there is no competing hypothesis.
So should children be taught about the holes in the Theory of Evolution? Well of course they should. They deserve to share in the excitement of discovery. But they should understand that the holes don’t disprove the theory, but merely show its current incompleteness.
But should ID be included in that list of holes? For my money, not unless the ID folks’ facts and math get a lot better. See, a good ‘hole’ is one you can definitely prove, something that clearly exists and cannot be explained by the reigning theory in its current form. ID just isn’t there yet. Sure, all kinds of folks - even some scientists - believe such a hole should be there. Based on their belief in God.
Well when the ID hole can be clearly demonstrated to an atheist, teach it in class. It’ll be useful science at that point: a hole that most scientists can agree exists on the basis of demonstrated facts. Until then, ID is religion, or politics, and has no place in a science class. Regardless of how many other holes the Theory of Evolution has in it.
Sort of on the topic.
I just read in an article in National Geographic where a scientist eludes to the idea that rather than evolving in the traditional sense, we may have BEEN evolved by the trillions of micro-organisms that inhabit our bodies, all to make us better hosts for THEM. It points out that the the vast majority of the physical make-up of any organism is not actually unique to that organism (or species), i.e. water.
Like I said, barely on topic, but an interesting perspective.
“But to answer, I think I could go to someplace with a really big microscope for an atom. Probably have to be in the right place for a quasar.”
Really? You’d be the first on the planet. I think you just said “I don’t have the facts and don’t know how to get them.”
[quote]Professor X wrote:
danweltmann wrote:
Professor X wrote:
Nice use of a bunch of facts to come to a possible conclusion that hasn’t been proven. There is a word for that…I used to know what that word was…it rhymed with eerie.
This begs the question of what would constitute proof for you.
In terms of evolution, gradual development of features…like feathers, including “hit or miss” species that may not have survived for very long in an effort to get it right. We don’t have anything like that. Contrary to the picture you are painting, what we do have are fossils of VERY developed species with specific traits that helped it survive for that period of time. We don’t have any fossils of the “almost feathered bird” with “not quite a feather” sticking out of its arm. We go from wingless…to wings. WTF? This planet should be literally LITTERED with failures like deformed butterflies that were all butter with no fly. I want to see the 5 armed panda simply because “oops” happened. Where is the kangaroo with 15 penises in some failed effort to procreate an entire world full of jumping furry creatures?[/quote]
The stuff about VERY developed species shows such abject ignorance, I wonder if I should answer. It’s dead wrong, period. Inform yourself, then make claims. The only species that are glaringly missing are the ones that came (presumably) before single celled organisms. There are two theories that I’m aware of:
The weak one is that fosilizing anything smaller than a cell is difficult. Possible, but not likely.
The more likely explanation, in my opinion, is that the first organisms, archaebacteriae, came from Mars, since traces of them have been found in Mars rocks.
Also, it is estimated that more than 90% of species have never been fossilized. The reason is simply that it’s an extremely rare event. To give you an obvious example, the first chimp fossil was only discovered this year, though they’ve been around for millions of years. And if something does get fossilized, why would you expect a one in a million freak? That is statistically very unlikely.
As for the intermediate species, that is the classical creationist fallacy: find an intermediate species, now you got two missing links!
[quote]Clearly, we cannot go back in time to observe evolution. Are you arguing that thus it can never be proven? By extension, that would apply to geological and stellar evolution, probably to other things as well.
What you seem to fail to grasp is that it takes just as much FAITH in science to believe that shit just happened as it does a belief in God. You simply hold that yours makes you superior.[/quote]
Capitalizing something won’t make a moronic argument into an intelligent one. Telling me what I “fail to grasp” or that I feel superior is just plain rude. As for needing faith in science, look at the world around you, and tell me that your car, your cellphone etc. require faith.
[quote]I like to take a common sense approach to this subject. In a strictly theoretical sense, you can’t prove anything. So then, why discuss anything?
Bullshit. Your goal was to act as if anyone who believes in a higher power lacks any sense of science. While evolution may very well be what happened, it does not explain creation nor can it be proven as absolute fact. Why are you stating otherwise?[/quote]
Moronic. 'Nuff said.
[quote]My approach is, there are observable facts, fossils, DNA sequences, morphological similarities, etc. Use logic and infer conclusions. Does that constitue “proof”? Not to a philosopher, but as Stephen Weinberg put it: “The best thing that philosophy has done for science was to stay out of its way.”
Bottom line, it isn’t proof. Wishing it were won’t make it so.
[/quote]
You’re certainly earning you moniker here…
endgamer711:
Beautifully said. My only qualification is that the theory doesn’t have holes, since that would imply the theory will have to change. I’d say our knowledge has holes.
It’s like having a perfect law for gravity, not knowing every body in the Solar System does not imply a hole in the theory, so, not knowing every species is not a hole in the Theory of Evolution.
[quote]danweltmann wrote:
endgamer711:
Beautifully said. My only qualification is that the theory doesn’t have holes, since that would imply the theory will have to change. I’d say our knowledge has holes.
It’s like having a perfect law for gravity, not knowing every body in the Solar System does not imply a hole in the theory, so, not knowing every species is not a hole in the Theory of Evolution.[/quote]
Ooops. Those weren’t the holes I meant. Those are holes in the fossil record, you are talking about. Maybe I should have used the word ‘shortfalls’. These are places where the Theory of Evolution, by itself, fails to predict the observed data. Like the pre-Cambrian explosion. There are numerous other such places where we can’t quite square vanilla evolution with what is observed. These are very exciting places to be doing research. The kind of topic that might, one day, be worth a Nobel prize.
[quote]danweltmann wrote:
The stuff about VERY developed species shows such abject ignorance, I wonder if I should answer. It’s dead wrong, period. Inform yourself, then make claims. The only species that are glaringly missing are the ones that came (presumably) before single celled organisms. There are two theories that I’m aware of:
The weak one is that fosilizing anything smaller than a cell is difficult. Possible, but not likely.
The more likely explanation, in my opinion, is that the first organisms, archaebacteriae, came from Mars, since traces of them have been found in Mars rocks.
Also, it is estimated that more than 90% of species have never been fossilized. The reason is simply that it’s an extremely rare event. To give you an obvious example, the first chimp fossil was only discovered this year, though they’ve been around for millions of years. And if something does get fossilized, why would you expect a one in a million freak? That is statistically very unlikely.
As for the intermediate species, that is the classical creationist fallacy: find an intermediate species, now you got two missing links![/quote]
The fact still stands that there ARE “missing links”. These are not just limited to the ones that came before single celled organisms. You are the one who originally implied that the theory of evolution was now more than a theory. It isn’t. Nothing you have written has changed that. Sorry. To even imply the glaring error of us not seeing the presence of “life” before a single celled stage should shine as a huge hole in the knowledge we do have in understanding what this force is or where it came from. Why do you assume a belief in God takes away the desire to understand the universe?
[quote]
Capitalizing something won’t make a moronic argument into an intelligent one. Telling me what I “fail to grasp” or that I feel superior is just plain rude. As for needing faith in science, look at the world around you, and tell me that your car, your cellphone etc. require faith.[/quote]
Telling you that you fail to grasp something is rude but using words like “moronic” and “ignorance” to describe my interaction with you isn’t? So now you are a hypocrite as well? Are you truly attempting to argue that evolution from a single celled organism is no longer a theory but fact? I am a scientist. I have done research on ailments of the human body. It is what I do and have done since I first learned what I was interested in. Many of the very same people who created that cell phone or designed the computer you are typing onto also believed in God. How is it you are suddenly above them all?
[quote]IagoMB wrote:
“But to answer, I think I could go to someplace with a really big microscope for an atom. Probably have to be in the right place for a quasar.”
Really? You’d be the first on the planet. I think you just said “I don’t have the facts and don’t know how to get them.”[/quote]
Actually, electron micrscopes see atoms all the time, have been for 50 yrs., and by microscope standards they’re kinda big. How is this at all relevant?
Professor X,
We agree that there are holes in the fossil record and that it require some belief for these holes to be “filled in”. If the holes were patched with actual fossils would you believe ID to be invalid? Also, the “statistics” and “irreducible complexity”, while accurate (or as accurate as we have for now), could possibly describe a myriad of phenomenon both intelligent and “other”. Aside from these two fundamentals is there other evidence of ID that you are aware of?
BTW-Are you under the impression that we (this forum and maybe even everyone) currently lack the vocabulary to engage in this conversation? I ask because I keep hearing/reading subtle “shades” of ID some of which I believe and some of which I don’t.