Then let us observe and not be afraid, garbonzo. Three of the four examples above illustrate an inability to breed, or the effective inability to breed. Mammals are a slightly more complex thing, seemingly: there is probably less advantage to reproductive exclusivity at low taxonomic levels. These results were achieved over short terms in-lab - against thousands of generations (or more) and innumerable individuals in the wild. And their techniques were not in any way magical, such as an omnipotent Creator has been alleged to employ. They were simple selection and recombination. Nothing special. But surely your insistence on a form of Special Creation (see below, and the OP) implies the necessity of magical, omnipresent regulation. How do you explain this contrast? Are the scientists perhaps in league with the Devil? "Epigentics [sic] prove original sin!" Does that ring a bell? How about this? How indeed? Your devotion to a stance you now try to recuse yourself from is unmistakeable. You are not suggesting such a thing, you are insisting upon it. Well, you are not kidding me, that's for sure. And this confuses you? Life is extremely improbable - and has had a long, long time in which to work, leaving aside the fact that one scientist produced 20 amino acids just by throwing elements in a hot jar for two weeks. You perceive no correlation between a thing being unlikely and taking a long time to come about? I'm sorry, but your oblique attack on the mathematics you have yet to present comes to nothing. And no one has taken up such a position. You say you read all my links with more than a passing interest, yet you failed to notice the Miller-Urey experiment. Amino acids were apparently completely integral to the early Earth, for one thing, and easily 'created'. A good point! Perhaps Miller was in league with the Devil? Or perhaps the conditions of the early Earth favoured the production of amino acids and other important organics. Seems like all the ingredients were there. Interestingly, misrepresenting the conditions of an experiment is a form of mathematical cheating. A self-replicating identity such as a simple membrane is relatively easy to come by. After that, one only needs simple self-replicating RNA and the eventual production of DNA seems a simple enough transition, if marked. Mind you, I'm only a humble quantitative geneticist.
Is it worth pointing out that the claims of human change since the "fall" are far more dramatic than any that have been shown by the study of epigenetics? I mean humans were supposed to live for 900 years and not get diseases or anything.
Right, conveniently ignore the odds i state which undermine the very basis of your religion (essentially spontaneous generation invited to a fancy dress party), defaulting to slandering our Creator again. One deck of cards – remember that. Satan had invented a string of religions after the Flood beginning with worship of a deified Nimrod. Obviously he would attribute qualities and credit belonging to Jehovah to these new gods. So with your biased look in the rear view mirror, you don’t which came first. That’s only your ignorance showing, but couch it in intellectual-speak and it sounds like you really know what you’re talking about – you don’t. hahahahaha! thank you for the laugh. ‘Fireproofed’ eh? As fireproof as the library at Alexandria i suppose. If you didn’t laugh while writing that, i really fear for your sanity. Speaking of souls, are you also an evolutionary scientist? Perhaps one of the multitudes who have sold their soul to the academic god of tenure? Best tow the line or lose your check boy! So how did the Apostle Paul and his contemporaries get along without him? I know, you’ll attribute all their writings to inventions of Constantine or something similar….there really is no hope for you then, living in a prison of your professor’s creation. Hope you can break out someday…bro. Hey, we actually completely agree on something. Cheers. So you’ll paint me with the color of your choosing come hell or high water – i get it. Yes, abortion is murder but what people of the world alienated from Jehovah do is their own business. We don’t encourage or condone violence against doctors etc, “for man’s anger does not bring about God’s righteousness”. But i’m sure if your mother was attempting to abort you, Lil Embryo Aqueous would be very much in agreement that you were a viable life if you could have talked. That’s what your bias limits you to understand. Clade-jumping chromosomal anomalies havn’t been proven to create new species, only variations – you only assume it has and state it as fact. That’s the MO of evolutionists – great leaps of assumption to bridge the gaps. As i’ve pointed out prior, science’ own definition of ‘species’ is open to “heated debate”. When you can’t bring to bear any real proofs of one species becoming another then might as well dissolve the boundaries – i get it. You see variation inherent in species leading to gradual changes in isolated groups then IMAGINE they lead to the eventual creation of entirely new whatevers quite different from the original right? You HAVE NO PROOF. It is pure conjecture. You believe such a process lead ‘some’ chimps to eventually become humans. You’re a child looking at clouds imagining animals from the different shapes. No different. I can understand the imagination leading one to such conclusions when the bias is that there is no Creator. But when one, as i do, believe in a Creator then the evidence makes sense through that lens as well – even better sense because it explains why there would be missing links, gaps…gorges really and why there were “explosions” of new species in certain epochs. Your “gradualism” can’t explain that. Again, the odds of life forming by blind chance can’t be anywhere near as good the odds mentioned re. shuffling a deck of cards into a certain order. To sidestep the problem, some of you evolutionists are now kicking the problematic ‘can’ down the road saying initial life probably came from an asteroid. I don’t mean to paint you with this brush, as you may not belong to that sect of evolutionists. Do you? http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblo...net-has-entered-a-new-phase-of-evolution.html there was an article in sciam.com but i can’t find it at present
OK, if you don't accept the scientific definition of species, we can just say that all creatures are just variations due to evolution. The evidence all points in favor of this, we share the same basic body plan, bilateral symmetry, a spine, a head with a mouth, even most of the same bones. And by the way, you calculated those odds wrong, creationists always do. They also love to hang their hook on the Cambrian explosion. Even this was gradual, albeit less gradual than was typical.
Nope, I'm just ignoring the nonsense in your claim that probability supports intelligent design. Go calculate the probability of the fertilization which produced you and according to your logic you do not exist. Meaningless nonsense. We are not created. We randomly pop up out of trillions of possible combinations of DNA (. . .well why don't you calculate it . . .) That only accounts for 1 random draw in 52. Add about 12-15 zeroes to that . . . or whatever you come up with. That would have to include yours, since the only one before that was the one that worshipped Ea and Enlil and the rest of the Elohim. Of course, you get off teh hook on this one since Satan was invented in Persian about 1000 years later. Nope, Nimrod isn't mentioned at all in connection with the Flood Myth. Oh, you mean the revised flood myth, adapted to the ancient Hebrew lore. But so what? It's just another fairy tale. You have it backwards. The pantheons came first-- esp. the Elohim -- then the Hebrews decided to upgrade to Genesis 2.0, which required the invention of a new especially powerful god of their own. It's was nothing more than the flags and heraldry of later nations. It's just that way back then they threatened enemies with the gods, not their pennants. Please don't be a Nimrod. It's very clear that dozens of cultures preceded the Hebrews. And it's very clear which religious claims came first -- and they weren't Hebrews'. Compare to the tripe you're posting, I'm becoming proud of my ignorance. Sorry if I'm using big words. I'll try to cut you some slack. Well so far I've trumped all of your nonsense, or else you would be responding with evidence right now. So QED. No, the halls of academia are impervious to your bunk. You can at best throw stink bombs in the little boy's room, but you'll never burn the school down. You can only gnash teeth and rend garments that A Mighty Fortress Is Our School. Sure you do. Which is why religiosity is on the Pathology Checklist. That's not speaking of souls. There are no souls, never were. And no, I am not neither a biologist nor a paleontologist. No, souls are like leprechauns. They only pop into your head when you've been locked in the dungeon too long. And no, I never had to sell myself to gain recognition in my work. I only had to be able to have the right answers, which is why I'm here. You so need some correction. You sound like a blue collar worker. I'll crucify Paul of Tarsus momentarily. But you simply evaded my point: Constantine -- and the people who called themselves Catholics -- are the ones who collected and preserved the patchwork of documents which became the book that you worship. It's simply ludicrous to attack the people who created the legends you obsess over. All of the writings were assembled for you by Catholics, and Constantine was the figure who assured that you would receive them in the context the Catholics wished for you to receive them. So it's ridiculous to attack him or any of the Catholic scholars. But no, Jerome is the principal instigator of what to leave in and what to leave out. And Pope Urban ought to be your best friend, since he sent Jerome on his journey to rescue the scraps for you. Eusebius played a role but it remains to be shown how he influenced you. So nothing short of ignorance and indoctrination could possibly leave you believing these people are worthy of your scorn. Wrong again. My last post-sheepskin courses were decades ago (except for audits). I was never in. And besides, I figured this shit out when I was a kid, years before I ever had a professor. Oh no you don't. I'm taking you to the shed for rejecting "hellfire" for the wrong reason. I'm chastising you for failing in exegesis, or else you would understand that the entire premise of the Bible is myth, legend and fable. Treating it literally is the worst possible abortion of common sense. Uhhh... so that's your answer to my retort that I never accused primitivists of harassing abortion patients. IOW you have nothing else meaningful to say. Got it. I'll take that as an admission that you admit you wrongly accused me of blaming your sect for bothering those poor women. Then you have just contradicted yourself. Earlier you were gloating that no "breath of life" accompanies fertilization. Gawd isn't that pathetic. Let's just stick to the fact that you now admit that your sect believes in the breath of life at conception. Save the theatrics for when I really nail you for subterfuge and equivocation.
Ok this piece was supposed to post first. Hope it doesn't show up as a duplication. Nope, I'm just ignoring the nonsense in your claim that probability supports intelligent design. Go calculate the probability of the fertilization which produced you and according to your logic you do not exist. Meaningless nonsense. We are not created. We randomly pop up out of trillions of possible combinations of DNA (. . .well why don't you calculate it . . .) That only accounts for 1 random draw in 52. Add about 12-15 zeroes to that . . . or whatever you come up with. That would have to include yours, since the only one before that was the one that worshipped Ea and Enlil and the rest of the Elohim. Of course, you get off teh hook on this one since Satan was invented in Persian about 1000 years later. Nope, Nimrod isn't mentioned at all in connection with the Flood Myth. Oh, you mean the revised flood myth, adapted to the ancient Hebrew lore. But so what? It's just another fairy tale. You have it backwards. The pantheons came first-- esp. the Elohim -- then the Hebrews decided to upgrade to Genesis 2.0, which required the invention of a new especially powerful god of their own. It's was nothing more than the flags and heraldry of later nations. It's just that way back then they threatened enemies with the gods, not their pennants. Please don't be a Nimrod. It's very clear that dozens of cultures preceded the Hebrews. And it's very clear which religious claims came first -- and they weren't Hebrews'. Compare to the tripe you're posting, I'm becoming proud of my ignorance. Sorry if I'm using big words. I'll try to cut you some slack. Well so far I've trumped all of your nonsense, or else you would be responding with evidence right now. So QED. No, the halls of academia are impervious to your bunk. You can at best throw stink bombs in the little boy's room, but you'll never burn the school down. You can only gnash teeth and rend garments that A Mighty Fortress Is Our School. Sure you do. Which is why religiosity is on the Pathology Checklist. That's not speaking of souls. There are no souls, never were. And no, I am not neither a biologist nor a paleontologist. No, souls are like leprechauns. They only pop into your head when you've been locked in the dungeon too long. And no, I never had to sell myself to gain recognition in my work. I only had to be able to have the right answers, which is why I'm here. You so need some correction. You sound like a blue collar worker. I'll crucify Paul of Tarsus momentarily. But you simply evaded my point: Constantine -- and the people who called themselves Catholics -- are the ones who collected and preserved the patchwork of documents which became the book that you worship. It's simply ludicrous to attack the people who created the legends you obsess over. All of the writings were assembled for you by Catholics, and Constantine was the figure who assured that you would receive them in the context the Catholics wished for you to receive them. So it's ridiculous to attack him or any of the Catholic scholars. But no, Jerome is the principal instigator of what to leave in and what to leave out. And Pope Urban ought to be your best friend, since he sent Jerome on his journey to rescue the scraps for you. Eusebius played a role but it remains to be shown how he influenced you. So nothing short of ignorance and indoctrination could possibly leave you believing these people are worthy of your scorn. Wrong again. My last post-sheepskin courses were decades ago (except for audits). I was never in. And besides, I figured this shit out when I was a kid, years before I ever had a professor. Oh no you don't. I'm taking you to the shed for rejecting "hellfire" for the wrong reason. I'm chastising you for failing in exegesis, or else you would understand that the entire premise of the Bible is myth, legend and fable. Treating it literally is the worst possible abortion of common sense. Uhhh... so that's your answer to my retort that I never accused primitivists of harassing abortion patients. IOW you have nothing else meaningful to say. Got it. I'll take that as an admission that you admit you wrongly accused me of blaming your sect for bothering those poor women. Then you have just contradicted yourself. Earlier you were gloating that no "breath of life" accompanies fertilization. Gawd isn't that pathetic. Let's just stick to the fact that you now admit that your sect believes in the breath of life at conception. Save the theatrics for when I really nail you for subterfuge and equivocation.
continued . . . . . . said the person so bent on literal interpretation of myth, legend and fable that he disparages the curators of the text he worships It was obviously a reference to large morphological differences. Geez. This is your 3rd disparagement of academia. 30 points off and 10 days with the dunce hat. No great assumptions were made about Galapagos. All of the facts fit tightly together. But then you have nothing to say about Galapagos, do you? Where? Cite? No, that's bullshit. You need to unwrap your brain from around the axle of creationism and retrace the experiences of Darwin as he haplessly stumbled onto the greatest scientific discovery of his lifetime. Instead of demanding that "one species becomes another" you need to begin with the evidence. You can't do that, can you? You are so heavily indoctrinated with brain numbing promises of immortality that you simply can't repeat back to the readers here what Darwin discovered and what conclusions he drew from it decades later, can you? Of course not. That requires the use of the intellect, which your handler, Charles Taze Russell, has obviously erased from whatever shallow collection you acquired by the time you dropped out of school. No that is not right. You see species on Galapagos which descended from single varieties of mainland plants and animals, but which then speciated on the islands, in diverse ways. That's just the tip of the iceberg -- but without examining that evidence, without using your own critical thinking skills (the ones you had until you were programmed according to Russell), then you are stuck down Ignorance Creek, without a paddle to get home. That's moronic. The evidence was/is on Galapagos. Now confront that evidence and stop whining like a spoiled child. Equally moronic. Prove that Darwin's explanation of Galapagos is "pure conjecture". Stop ranting and start using the 1% of your brain the Russell hasn't deprogrammed. No, that's not what the DNA evidence is telling you. Are you incapable of repeating back the facts coherently, or are you just trolling? As you've demonstrated only the people in the big boy's britches are able to explain the evidence at Galapagos. Also moronic. The fact of evolution is based on evidence, not religious belief. Go get the evidence from Galapagos and tell us where there is a grain of error in Darwin's theory. Otherwise you're just whining. It's not your belief in God which is hamstringing you -- Darwin believed in God. It's your insistence that the myths, legends and fables of the Bible must be interpreted as historical narrative -- that's your downfall. No it does not. As Darwin quickly realized -- because he actually bothered to study the sciences you are pontificating about -- the Galapagos islands arose from the ocean floor after the ancestral species had established themselves on the mainland. Darwin immediately recognized that he had biological evidence against catastrophism (your belief that God suspends the laws of Nature) which had already been disproved through the geologic record. You pretend to be arguing in favor of God, but that's a lie. You are arguing in favor of fundamentalism, which is an entirely different species of argument than the one you are admitting to. Nonsense. That's just an expression of ignorance, to shore up fundamentalism. But it failed in the 19th c. even before Darwin published. Catastrophism was independently discredited by the discovery of the geologic record. So stop pretending to know what you're talking about. No, that's not an argument against evolution. The Darwin's finches "exploded" on the Galapagos. So now tell us whay Darwin's explanation of that phenomenon is incorrect. Stop grousing and speak to the evidence. It's not mine, it's Darwin's. Speak to the evidence and stop pontificating. Bullshit. Speak to the evidence: what are the odds that the zygote that produced you would ever join that particular combination of DNA? Again, give us numbers. Speak to the evidence and stop griping. Cite? Evidence, man, get off the bullshit. Ok that's the fourth time. Now I'm going to hold your feet to the fire. A biologist has degrees in biology. A geologist has degrees in geology. And so forth. Now go get me the name of one university which offers a degree in Evolution. Otherwise I'm going nail you for trolling. The operative fact you oppose is this statement from Hawking But this will be done, Hawking believes, with intelligent machines based on mechanical and electronic components, rather than macromolecules, which could eventually replace DNA based life, just as DNA may have replaced an earlier form of life. Who cares? It has nothing to do with biological evolution. YOu have to read the disclaimer Hawking made prior to that: think it is legitimate to take a broader view, and include externally transmitted information, as well as DNA, in the evolution of the human race DNA is the only piece that referenced biological evolution. The "external" piece is not biological and it's artificial just like selective breeding is artificial. SO again: get off the nonsense. You will not find one shred of evidence to shore up your cause for fundamentalism. Let's just focus on Galapagos. That's where the evidence begins, and that's where you fail out of 8th or 9th grade. So let's limit this to the simplest stuff you haven't yet mastered. At least benefit from the free education afforded in these threads. Pull yourself out of Byzantine.
Not that it matters - you have far worse problems with your approach - but by including "mice" and "cichlids" as examples of "kind", a category within which you accept evolutionary variation, you have basically accepted evolution in all its glory: there are several genera covering many dozens of species of mice, and cichlids are a Family of fishes: a taxonomic category encompassing many genera and thousands of different species and worldwide distribution. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cichlid If Family level taxonomy is a "kind", and evolution is acceptable in your eyes within such "kinds", then evolution is acceptable to you as an explanation of how all these guys (all in the same Family) evolved from one common ancestor: http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Hominidae That is, if mice are still mice and cichlids are still cichlids then great apes are still great apes.
One thing about it, at least you’ve formed what you think are good reasons for believing the way you do – that’s commendable and far more effort than 99% are willing to make. Do you really think that between the time of the original Christian governing body as referenced in Acts 15 to the time of Constantine that the elders of the church were just sitting on their thumbs? They took the lead in safeguarding the letters and gospels. They weren’t left to scatter waiting for Constantine to send someone to gather them up 200 years later. That’s ludicrous. There were faithful men all through the ages that protected the Word of God. The apostles and Christ himself warned of the great apostasy that would occur after the death of the apostles. As time wore on, congregations became weaker until Constantine was able to expropriate the remainder for the Roman state and for his own purposes. His vision of the cross was a satanic intervention that proves who the real mastermind of the seizure was. Acts 20:29 I know that after my going away oppressive wolves will enter in among you and will not treat the flock with tenderness, and from among you yourselves men will rise and speak twisted things to draw away the disciples after themselves. 1 Tim 4:3 However, the inspired word* clearly says that in later times some will fall away from the faith, paying attention to misleading inspired statements*+ and teachings of demons, 2 by means of the hypocrisy of men who speak lies,+ whose conscience is seared as with a branding iron. 3 They forbid marriage+ and command people to abstain from foods+ that God created to be partaken of+ with thanksgiving You pretend to think that Constantine and the Catholic church were the saviors of the Bible yet they would only allow it to be printed in the dead language Latin, and hounded and killed those who tried to circumvent them. They didn’t want their own abuses to be exposed in light of scripture (such as forbidding priests to marry). The Catholic church was and is a counterfeit of genuine Christianity (and the Protestant offshoots aren’t any better). Constantine grafted a form of Christianity to the worldwide construct of false religion that already existed (and referred to in Revelation as Babylon the Great) bringing in the worship of triads, immortality of the human soul, eternal torment and idolatry (starting with the Cross) – facets of almost every religion known to man. As for the canon of recognized scripture, it was already in place and couldn’t be easily trifled with. Some have tried to incorporate apocryphal works that were indeed spurious creations but they didn’t make the cut. I’m sure Satan would have liked to have completely corrupted the bible but Jehovah wouldn’t allow it. (Psalm 12:6,7) God takes a keen interest in preserving his Word. The Galapagos Islands were easily connected to the mainland of SA at one time when sea levels were lower, via the Nazca Plate and Carnegie Ridge (think Bering Strait or Strait of Gibraltar…it’s not a leap of imagination, you can do it!). Not all of that geologic formation is the result of ‘recent’ volcanic activity. The unique VARIETIES (as in variation within species) found there are a result of their isolation from the mainland. They could have very well existed on the mainland but were wiped out by hunters and so to the doe-eyed observer (Darwin), the population was always and forever unique to those islands and formed spontaneously (albeit gradually) through evolution. DOH!…..wrong!……next!? Again, the odds of life forming by blind chance can’t be anywhere near as good the odds mentioned re. shuffling a deck of cards into a certain order. Do you not understand the illustration? Let me help you. It’s talking about a particular order of cards REPEATED. Whatever particular shuffling of DNA that resulted in me only had to happen ONCE, not repeat. Likewise, whatever amount and mix of ingredients, chemicals, acidity, temperature, preexisting amino acids, polymers, etc etc etc that had to be present and ‘hook up’ for lack of a better term, for the first living single-celled organism to start the EXPLOOOOSIOOOON OF EVOLUUUUTIOOOON! couldn’t be in some random order could they? Isn’t it reasonable to expect they were several factors of complexity over that of what order a simple deck of cards are in. If not, then why haven’t you scientists made it happen in the lab? You’re the only troll here. There are scientists in many fields that ascribe partiality to various schools of thought, including that of evolution. You’re simply scraping for something to justify your anger – sorry chap, it’s your own Cult of Darwin to blame, not me. Your original quote is: Whoever “they” are, i wanted to make clear i shouldn’t be lumped in that group. And you’re offended by that? You must be the life of the party (i’m rolling my eyes now). So i’m supposed to automatically know how you split hairs with regard to primitivists? So, according to you no “primitivists” bomb abortion clinics or harass patients? How can you be so sure? Who knows what makes all those nuts tick? Are you an expert? Again, you’re simply looking for any odd reason to be offended. Me thinks you’ve jumped the shark, pal.
They were actively ferreting out heresies. Thus "they" became identified as the Universal Church (Katholikos). All of them -- before and after Constantine -- were busy putting down heresies. Otherwise the Jehovah's Witnesses -- as all Protestants -- would have descended from the Arianism, Docetism, Nestorianism, Gnosticism or any of the dozen such interpretations not considered by your founders as mainstream (universal). Hence there is a huge contradiction in primitivism. You mean the Catholics. Not the Gnostics, or any of the other heretics. It sounds like you have no idea how the Bible came into existence. Really? Does that include the men who preserved the Gospel of Thomas? How about the versions found in Ethiopia? Or how about Eusebius, as he culled out whatever he considered heretical? Are you loyal to him? In any case you're telling us you are loyal to Jerome, and the Pope who commissioned him, Damasus. The legend of Jesus is full of self immunizing remarks. This one was added while heresies were underway. What is that supposed to mean? Well he was an Emperor . . . but what are you even talking about? What is that supposed to mean? The seizure of what? Well that sure as hell couldn't include Constantine since he liberated the Christians! That also couldn't possible refer to Constantine, unless you mean to tell us it was written in the 4th c. Nor do you make any link to between this and Constantine or any other church leader. But that's how religions often works. People just make it up as they go. It's just strange to me that you admit to making an abortion of history, with no qualms about it. You really need to take some remedial history classes. Hebrew was the dead language, which is why, shortly after the conquests of Alexander, almost all of the subsequent literature collected by Jerome which the Catholics bound together for you -- were written in Greek. But Greek was not the second language of Western Europe -- Latin was. It was the primary language of scholars until English rose in prominence. Thus Newton's Principia Mathematica was written in Latin. So no, the Roman Empire was dead, but not the language. Cite? You're going to have to blame Paul for the emphasis on celibacy, not Constantine. Further, you have to blame the leaders of the Orthodox churches (besides Roman Catholics) for this as well. Again, you've simply been programmed to believe this. It has no basis in fact. That's just plain dumb. The Christians who organized under the label katholicos were representing opposition to the dozens of heresies that were popping up wherever Christianity took root. So make up your mind. You either support the mainstream, or you support the heretics. Evidently you don't even have you facts straight enough to settle as basic a question as this. What are you talking about -- you are a Protestant! What a ridiculous assertion. That is such a pile of moronic myths. Constantine liberated the Christians. And had he not done that, you would be following Wicca, or some Nordic God from the direct lineage of the early American colonists, rather than the Latin God that was indoctrinated into you -- to include the the texts you worship. That just displays ignorance of the various canons. And how and when they arose, and where. But to answer the above question about your Protestantism, ask yourself which canon you adopted. It's the canon established under Catholicism by Damasus (through his commission to Jerome) but then amended to throw out the Old Testament writings that were written in Greek, during the Reformation. So you adopted the Protestant canon, didn't you, and they adopted the Roman Catholic canon and altered it, didn't they. So that makes you a Reformed Roman Catholic, a.k.a. Protestant. You it backwards, The canon you dispute did not come into question until the Reformation. List for us all of the canons known to exist. List the oldest known codices of various canons and when they were written. Explain why your canon is different than Codex Vaticanus - the oldest extant canon - and the Vulgate, the longest surviving canon used by the majority of Christians throughout history. What a crock. Now you're pretending to have God on your side, as if to say God condones your ignorance of history.
Is that the lie they teach you at the ICR or did you just make that up? This shows ignorance of a basic premise of geology, namely that the Galapagos are an archipelago. That's got to be the most profoundly stupid form of pseudoscience I've yet heard. Yes, Virginia, the Galapagos, whose official name is Archipiélago de Colón, are indeed an archipelago. Most archipelagoes are made of oceanic islands. This means the islands were formed by volcanoes erupting from the ocean floor. http://education.nationalgeographic.com/education/encyclopedia/archipelago/?ar_a=1 Another creationist pseudoscience lie. We are talking about distinct species of plants and animals that evolved on the Galapagos. That's dishonest. You prefer a lie to science, don't you. You will lie about anything in order to shore up your claims that the one canon you adhere to out of many available, and its bizarre primitivistic fundamentalist interpretation, should have all of the myth, legend and fable is contains converted into historical narrative. But it's a stupid lie, the kind you can only sell to naive vulnerable and dishonest minds. The hunters would have to select out only the animals endemic to the Galapagos, then they would have to pulverize all of their hard parts, and then go around pulling up all of the plants endemic to the Galapagos, and destroying all of their seeds and spores. You would stoop to this level of dishonesty to promote your version of God? And your entire sect stoops to this? It's insane. Darwin did not do the taxonomies. He left that task to the experts. And he wasn't doe-eyed when he concluded years later that this was a phenomenal discovery. He was grieving the grandchildren that would never be born to his young daughter, who your God butchered, since in those days their were no antibiotics and vaccines to treat common illnesses. In the course of realizing that this entire line of his family was wiped out, but the lines from his surviving children would not be wiped out, he realized that this natural selection was the only viable explanation for the many species endemic only to Galapagos, after ruling out selection by hunters who sterilize all evidence and also single out certain plants for sterilization, including "hunters" who sterilized the islands themselves, even though no humans had ever established themselves there. Who's doe-eyed now, Sherlock? No, as you see from your childish nonsensical pretense of an explanation, you're simply being dishonest. Said the primitivistic fundamentalist apologist who just insisted that the odds of wiping all the endemic species of Galapagos from S America, including all traces of their existence, is somewhere in the high 90% --- to include the wiping of species endemic to one island from the other, by humans who never established themselves there, on the islands formed from igneous rock which the apologist has pontificated [in absence of any pope to do this officially] that the islands did not form from lure volcanic eruptions. How many lies does it take to shore up the one that the religion centers on? Oh really? So if I give you a full deck of shuffled cards, and ask you the odds of drawing the ace of spades from the top, you're not going to tell me it's 1/52? So you never took any probability theory, no biology, no earth science, chemistry or physics -- and yet you have an answer better than some of the most heavily researched topics in science? And you have this just to shore up your primitivistic fundamentalism? And yet you claim the Jehovah's Witnesses are not political, even as they spread this bogus propaganda and infect the vulnerable minds that are too naive to know the difference between fact and fiction. Since that childish explanation has no bearing on the facts, and remains ignorant of the evidence, it answers itself: it's simply an invention. By that definition, the silicon and aluminum compounds in a rock should never have come into existence either. DNA has been artificially fabricated, Mr Know It All. No, rebutting your lies and propaganda with facts and evidence is the opposite of trolling. But the proof will come when the mods issue you a warning for insulting Darwin, insulting academia in general and posting deliberate false statements, contradicted by evidence. Indeed there are a few cases of dishonest people with science credentials. But they don't count. Only the authoritative works count, and in particular, only the evidence counts. Your bold attempt to discredit Galapagos falls flat on its face, so we are still at square one. You are confronted by the evidence of Galapagos, and you have to explain it. What are you going to do? Are you going to lie, just to shore up your storybook ideas about creation, or are you going to deal with the facts and evidence honestly, and deliver the best judgment about how those plants and animals ended up on the volcanoes which arose from the floor of the S Pacific after the ancestral species had established themselves on the mainland. You can't run from this in science. Only the blindest of religious ideation runs from the truth. You mean the Cult of Literacy, which turns out to be a more select group than I ever imagined, from my early years, when I thought everyone was going to school, and only a few were playing hooky. You did the hair splitting when you centered your religion around some childish attempt to blame Constantine for the decisions your founders made for their unique brand of fundamentalism. I didn't say that. I said they were creationists. Go to the math section and open a thread on Venn diagrams, and I'll be glad to catch you up on 4th grade math. I am certainly some kind of expert, although expertise has no bearing on this thread, unless you define 5th graders as experts. Nope, the tripe you are selling here is only an affront to your intellect and ethics. It has no bearing whatsoever on the world at large. And evolution goes on all around you even as you deny it. Remember that fact next time you catch a cold, flu or any other infection. BTW the existence of immune systems illustrates the essential facts of evolution.
That's one of the major arguments supporting evolutionary theories, especially the Darwinian theory. Blind chance doesn't well explain what we see around us, Darwinian theory does. The reason you are having trouble classifying things - species, varieties, "kinds", etc - is that you have no classification system of your own. Creationists cannot classify consistently because no classification system in agreement with reality allows them to deny evolutionary theory. Meanwhile, whatever you decide to mean by "varieties" or "kinds" this week, if you are willing to accept evolution on the Galapagos as producing the "varieties" we see there, and evolution in Lake Victoria as the explanation for the varieties of the "kinds" we see there, then you should have no trouble accepting evolution as the ordinary explanation of similar "varieties" in the "kinds" elsewhere, eh?
Garbonzo! I was feeling lonely. You're not going to ignore me, are you? Indeed, I imagine he has. We all have. But those odds seem quite good, based on Miller's work (see above). Two weeks and a dirty jar seem pretty adequate for many of the elements of life. Excuse me for asking something along this line: what the hell are you talking about? Interesting choice of simile here: I suppose that burning the repositories of knowledge is one way to win the day for superstition. Tell me that you weren't deliberately alluding to such a thing, please. Chromosomal anomalies and speciation in mammals (mice): http://www.academia.edu/2349561/Chromosomes_and_speciation_in_Mus_musculus_domesticus Chromosomal anomalies and speciation in mammals (deer): http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2148/14/40 Chromosomal anomalies and speciation in plants (angiosperms): http://download.bioon.com.cn/upload/month_1001/20100127_6f285772eba5518b4e25sNSMbYPQDTDJ.attach.pdf Chromosomal anomalies and speciation in insects (mosquitoes): http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0057887 Chromosomal anomalies and speciation in fish and amphibians (references at the start): http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1214124/pdf/961.pdf Others: http://www.els.net/WileyCDA/ElsArticle/refId-a0001753.html http://siteslab.byu.edu/Portals/25/docs/Publications/SitesReedHerp94.pdf Do you? You really don't seem to. No, what we do is test such inferences (see above). Imagination is not the only tool in our toolbox, unlike 'Christian science'. See above, or any of my previous posts for which you ignored the critical content. Faulty grammar aside, this illustrates your essential bias: your belief. You do not hypothesize a Creator, or postulate one. You believe in one. This is the essential difference between the construction of our respective positions. Mine requires no such belief. Instead, we use facts. We have explained it time and again. Whom are you blaming for your failure to read it? Again, the Miller experiment above illustrates that neither deck nor cards are required. Good luck to you.
Did you even sneak a peak of the sea floor? The topography of the sea floor between the Galapagos and the mainland would have served as a land bridge concurrent with the land bridge between Asia and N. America. Yes, there are distinct varieties of species present – you win the blue-footed booby-prize you booby! But BFB’s aren’t distinct to the Galapagos, do you still want the prize? The Galapagos are 600 miles from Ecuador so it’s to be expected there would be different varieties found. If you compared areas in S. America 600 miles apart you would find many different varieties (of the same species/kind – take your pick). As well, the islands don’t all share the same environment, some are flat and treeless, others are covered in forests and hence why they would have a different mix of species. Also the isolation would lead to variations to be expressed over time – again, that’s NOT A PROOF OF EVOLUTION – that’s variation within species. By this reasoning you should be saying Negroid is a different species from Caucasian…or Asian…or blondes in Scandinavia or red heads in Ireland. I’d imagine if Adolph had won the war, you probably would…oooh, that was below the belt – my bad. Environment will encourage the expression of different traits over time. For example, Nordic peoples are exposed to very little sunlight so over time they’ve lost melanin in order for more sunlight to be absorbed by the skin. They are in essence, a different variety of human. Now when it comes to animals you scream, NEW SPECIES!!! EVOLUTION! But it’s the same thing. Jehovah gave varietal potential to enable species to adapt for survival but also for the sake of beauty. Yes, flu virus adapt too = not evolution. You evolutionists are exactly like fundamentalist Christians in a way. Every time you see some adaptation you scream EVOLUTION akin to how they want to cry MIRACLE or WILL OF GOD for every common event. Is it weird to realize that in a roundabout way, you really are a “man of faith”? I apologize if i don’t follow exactly the expected liturgy according to your Cult of Darwin. I know i stray outside the very strict (anal) bounds of your elitist, intellectual mindset and i appreciate your bearing with me. I find it quite fitting you being a hardcore evolutionist and an ardent defender of the Catholic faith to boot – not a contradiction when it’s all boiled down – same father. “You are from your father the Devil, and you wish to do the desires of your father. That one was a murderer when he began, and he did not stand fast in the truth, because truth is not in him. When he speaks the lie, he speaks according to his own disposition, because he is a liar and the father of the lie.” Catholicism and Evolution – artfully contrived lies. I figured i’d left one of your replies without response and wanting to find it…. Plus, i’m one guy vs. a tag-team. And btw, I’ve seen a few grammatical errors on your parts too and not called you out on them but seeing that’s all you’ve got, i don’t fault you so much for pointing mine out. One quote from your second reference wraps up your exhaustive work in evolutionary sciences, “Most of the advances in chromosomal rearrangement, speciation and their relationship, have been theoretical, especially in mammals”…in a nutshell. You wrap yourselves in a garment of hypotheses, postulates and theories imagining yourself quite covered and yet your ass is hanging out while you criticize ‘BELIEF’ in God. Have you no shame man?! As they say, “If you repeat a lie often enough, it becomes the truth.” That’s human nature at work and you’re in the thick of it. Goebbels would be proud though. I ‘hear’ you saying this in the voice of that guy Vizzinni in The Princess Bride…can’t help it. You should begin saying things with ‘A-HAH!!!’ The shell game of taxonomy – what a handy tool it must be in your proselytization work.
Yes IT IS, it's the same thing. Variation is evolution. Human varieties are only superficially different because we invented boats. Same with dogs, there has been to much mixing and not enough isolation (due to human intervention) to create a new species. But on the Galapagos, it's a fact that new species emerged from it's ancestral population in South America.
Oh? And why is that, do you think? And why, also, are there birds in the same ecological niches in the Galapagos and Ecuador (fruit eaters, insect eaters, nut eaters), but less related to each other than to birds with different ecological roles in the same geographic area? Is there a reason for that, do you think? Or is it another of God's mysteries - or maybe the Devil's - that we explore only at the peril of our souls? How strange. Why should they have a different mix of species? Why should these species - some, very closely related - be different, and in different ecological niches? Which, given enough time - and a specific or rigid enough breeding system - leads to reproductive isolation, as several of my links illustrate, and which you ignored. Side-question: Why are so many of the anti-evolution cranks here also anti-Catholic? You must have missed all the refutations and rebuttals. You should look them up. They're in one of the posts above. Still, at this point, given what I've written and you've already avoided, I'd be amazed if you turned up so much as a typo. Very good! You read something from a posted reference! Now - did you read anything beyond that? Did you read the reference itself, which wasn't theoretical in content? How about the other articles? They weren't theoretical either. Did you not see them? How about the other points I made? Did you miss those during your misquote mining mission? Well, I have known shame enough to also know when someone is being deliberately obtuse or defensive, or when they avoid an issue. It's funny that you still call it theoretical no matter what kind of support we post. And where exactly have I criticized belief in God? I have, mind you, pointed out the innate hypocrisy in your demand to use epigenetics as a springboard to promote Creationism while deriding or simply ignoring the evidence we've brought to this thread. Pearls before swine? You avoid and avoid and avoid - you don't dare comment on the work I cite, preferring instead to take a quote out of context and simply stop reading. Why, garbonzo? Are you afraid you might find something that would break your presuppositions? What would that do to your beliefs? Are you referring to Creationism in general, or Christian Science in particular? The former seems more egregious to me, but that's just a question of taste. Yes, yes: the 'shell game' of the evidentiary process and refinement of hypotheses which you have done nothing at all to refute, let alone having tried or even comprehended it. Instead, we should just propose the abstract notion of "kind" off the top of our heads without any demonstrable, falsifiable - this means 'able to be refuted' rather than 'deliberately false', just for your edification - basis for saying so. Instead of comparing morphological features, estimating genetic distance and testing interspecific breeding ability - you know, like someone genuinely interested in the objective truth might do - we should just have declared that things were "kinds" or "not-kinds", put on our funnily-shaped hats and declared that all was safe: the arbitrary religious doctrine was seen in nature as in scripture! Without any supporting evidence of any kind. Like religio-scientists! The orthodox wear the funny hats, you know. Let me know when you get enough guts up to try refuting any of the substantive points that I made above, instead of cherry-picking off something you thought you could get a little traction on, cooking up some nonsense and seasoning it with a little self-pity before serving. Or: I don't care if you believe in God, garbonzo. Actually, scratch that: I'm impressed that you do. It's often a generally good thing. I know many religious people of good character. But keep it the hell out of science, please. Thanks.
Wow... Just.. Wow.. It is proof of evolution. Especially when you consider that on the Galapagos Islands, that isolation led to new species evolving on the islands themselves. Err no. We aren't different species. The differences are very superficial. Your level of stupidity would have resulted in your being gased. Hitler was not fond of people who were imperfect in any way. Low IQ and people suffering from mental illness were also slaughtered. Trying to insert your racism into your moronic argument is not going to win you any fans. This does not even make sense. So you are a quack and an anti-Catholic. Figures. When one considers that you do not have even a basic understanding of evolution, I don't think you are in any place to be screaming liar liar at scientists. It's called dodging and deflecting. Nice try though. On the one hand, you did not even understand what you just quoted. And on the other hand, aren't you the one who just insulted Catholics for their beliefs in God in this very thread? Not really. If you repeat the lie often enough, you just keep being a liar. Or crazy. Which one are you?
I still have your last message in my email box but have been extremely busy lately…i want to devote my full attention to it, believe me. I hope all is well with you….regards!
Variation within species is one of the cornerstones of Darwinian evolutionary theory. Selection - "expression" - of these variations over time (as a consequence of anything, including isolation) is the central event. Meanwhile: You continue to demonstrate that you cannot consistently label the taxonomic classifications you wish to use in argument. You cannot, yourself, consistently use words such as variety, variation, species, kind, "mix of species", and so forth. This has been noted before: and the reason given: the patterns created by every consistent classification system of the living beings on this planet fully support evolutionary theory, and create significant problems for all other theoretical approaches extant. That's why evolutionary theory was invented, why it spread so quickly and proved so persuasive and led to such complete abandonment of other approaches - as researchers began to spread around the planet classifying the living beings they found, their former theories began to break down. They couldn't square the classification of their observations with their theory, just as you can't.
