Hi, here's a thread for evolution vs. intelligent design discussion

What's interesting is that evolutionary psychologists have suggested that there is a predisposition for humans to spontaneously form belief systems, as they provide a comparative advantage over humans which do not. Thus, when humans accept the scientific method and the catalog of theories which are encompassed by science, they do so in the same way that the dogmas of religions are accepted.

The fundamental difference, of course, is that the scientific belief system is based on principles which are testable, repeatable, and mutable, even if a single individual will never have the opportunity to do so.

~Ulrika~

Thank you. You have just given another example of the misunderstanding. The belief in science books is not science. Kids being taught that the earth is round is not science. It is a belief that has been arrived at through the use of science. Science is teaching a student to take two chemicals, mix them together, and then observe the outcome. Science is having a child drop two balls of different weight at the same time and observe the effect. You still are confusing the beliefs science has created and science itself which never uses belief.

If intelligent design advocates presented their argument purely off of observable evidence, then there should be no problem with them teaching in a science class. They would be using evidence that could be reproduced by anyone who had the proper tools or the original material tested. The second they start talking about a bible passage, they leave the realm of science. The bible is not based off of experiments that can be reproduced.

Contact me sometime. I'm curious what turned you so heavily against me when I used to think we were friends. Certainly you can't think this sort of attitude helps your case any. I must have pressed some serious button on you to get you raging so much over a point about the dangers of orthodoxy. Perhaps it's time you went and did some first-hand, empirical observation of the world yourself?

I'm not trying to help my case any as it isn't my case and I'm well aware of the dangers of orthodoxy, that's why I have read many texts on all sides of the so-called controversy no matter how odious and poorly written the creationist pseudo-science is.

The point you are failing to understand is that whereas your fossils may increase *your* confidence in a scientific corpus carefully built and rebuilt over centuries by multitudes, your fossils of themselves are of no value to the science. Had you used the fossils for something other than increasing your own confidence (which is an admirable thing in itself, sincerely) then they could conceivably be called science. For example, if your fossils had shown something never before seen and you were able to use that evidence to convince your scientific peers that you have added something new, that would be science; of course it would be subject to being overturned by later findings, but that's how science operates.

And, incidentally, at risk of being accused of throwing genitalia-oid credentials on the table, but since you asked, I have in fact done "some first-hand, empirical observation of the world" and had it published in peer-reviewed professional journals.

Just because I am being dismissive of your seemingly poorly-informed understanding of science, has everything to do with what you are asserting regarding the operation of science and nothing to do with you or our old friendship (which is unaltered as far as I'm concerned). As a poor analogy, if you posted here that the SL sky was green, I'd likely contradict you as well. Fortunately, what someone believes about the SL sky isn't of much consequence. However, the misconception of science that is so prevalent in the world and I think damaging to humanity (e.g. my John Snow cholera posting above) that I am quite vociferous on the subject, especially among people who I believe to be otherwise thoughtful and incisive. In short, my arguing with you here is because I hold your intellect in high regard. You are right, my last reply to you was rude though, for which I apologize.

You are absolutely right, blind cave fish are still fish, or put more precisely, they share a common ancestor with the group of organisms that we have (arbitrarily) named fish. Here's a definition: "species" are a real thing as the definition of "species" is "interfertility producing fertile offspring"*; every other cladistic grouping: Genus, Order, Phylum, Kingdom, sub-species, etc. is a purely human construction to help impose some order of the staggeringly large tree of life.

Thus defined, the blind cave fish Astyanax fasciatus may certainly be a fish, but it is not able to reproduce with other members of Genus Astyanax so it is indeed its own species. Neither is the blind cave fish interfertile with other fish. Now the reason that it has been put in the genus Astyanax by the taxonomists is that based on our best ability to determine such, the blind cave fish *did* share a common ancestor with the other tetras, most of which are not blind.

That we don't see speciation happening amongst macroscopic organisms is because speciation takes huge timescales well beyond our ability to observe. For example, our beloved Homo sapiens - a true newcomer to the scene - is currently believed to have speciated from it's contemporaries somewhere about 1 million years ago. As we've only had an inkling of evolution for under 200 years, we've only been aware of the existence of speciation for two human lifetimes or 0.02% of the time that it takes for a very rapid speciation to occur. Speciation from our closest living cousins (the chimpanzees) is currently believed to have happened around 6 million years ago. Watching for speciation is truly not the recreation for the impatient.

However, if you talk to a microbiologist, whose objects of study have generation times on the order of hours instead of decades, they do indeed see speciation all the time. This is part of the reason we need new influenza vaccines every year, because we are gunning for a new organism. Which also brings me to the above, for asexual species the definition of "species" is more complicated and way beyond the size of this text box.

Finally, science questions its own edifices continually. Indeed, the best way for a young scientist to make her mark in a field is to succesfully challenge a prior finding, so the deck is actually stacked toward overturning "orthodoxy". But the young turk must have some compelling *evidence* in order to get the old farts to reject their old beliefs which they indeed do when the evidence shows them to have been mistaken.

More Americans, perhaps. But from a world-wide perpspective I would say that it's
likely that Christians are probably outnumbered overall by other religions, which all have a variety of deities who claim to be the Creator.

Meet Bob the bichir - not a very good picture, but I've never managed to photograph fish very well.

He lives in my aquarium, but unfortunately sometimes manages to escape. He is a fish, but his swim bladder has evolved to become a dual-purpose organ. While he is in the water, it remains a swim bladder; when he escapes it becomes a pair of lungs. He can live out of the aquarium for a period of two hours.

You will see his two fins at the front, which he uses for propelling himself through the water. They also act as legs when he is on land. He doesn't get along very well, but he can drag himself over the ground suprisingly far.

I read about another person who kept a bichir, and came downstairs in the morning to find it on the carpet having a confrontation with his cat. The bichir lunged towards the cat who beat a hasty retreat.

Now I am not saying that he is an intermediate form or anything - he is not, because in fact the bichir is a very primitive form that has remained unchanged for a very long period of time. But he does serve to illustrate that a fish might be a fish, but also might have very pronounced amphibian characteristics. There are fish, like Bob, with amphibian characteristics and there are also amphibians with fishlike characteristics.

There were feathered dinosaurs. There were also 12ft high predatory birds, who were very dinosaur like. There are duck-billed platypuses. As soon as you look into things it becomes apparent that the lines between species, genus, family and even order are not as immutable as might first appear.

Oh dear, I may finally actually die laughing, from this sentence! (This post being all that I've read of the thread.)

coco

Coco,

I said 'confrontation', not 'tryst'.

For someone who is so anti-science and who seems to lack any understanding of what science is or how it works, you may as well be an ID supporter.

Chip, this is for you.... This is 10 questions and answers that show how the teaching of "evolution" has been twisted to fit the religion of Evolution.

http://www.arn.org/docs/wells/jw_inheritthespin.htm

That's the best you come up with? Congratulations on your rhetorical mediocrity.

That page shows nothing of the kind. It shows one person who thinks evolution is bunk who asked what he thought were relevant questions to the NCSE and who would have spun any answers provided to him to suit his purposes, which was a very deliberate anti-evolution agenda. Evolution is an incomplete theory. It doesn't have all the answers. No one claims that it does. To try and claim that evolution is bunk on the basis that it can't answer every question or that there's evidence that seems contradictory is moronic. Evolution, like all scientific theory, is a work in progress. We aren't dealing in absolutes here. If you take any one area of evolutionary theory where our understanding is incomplete and use that as a basis to reject all of it, it shows your own bias far more than it shows that evolution is wrong. We know evolution is "wrong" in so much as it doesn't have all the answers yet. It is, however, the best theory we have backed by far more evidence (including the ability to make accurate and testable predictions), than any competing theory on the origins of life. Now, where is the evidence for ID again? Oh, right... there isn't any.

Well I'm here to discuss the merits or lack thereof of evolution and ID, not to snipe at someone with an obvious attitude problem whose only goal seems to be to take potshots at those you disagree with. Would it make you feel better if I said I think it's amusing you accuse others of being arrogant when you are by far the least pleasant, most confrontational, and most obnoxiously arrogant person in the thread? Well there you have it.

I would also like to congratulate you on further contributing to the forum cesspool.

The entire article appears to be a series of straw-man arguments. The straw-man rhetorical technique is the practice of refuting weaker arguments than one's opponents actually offer. To "set up a straw man" or "set up a straw-man argument" is to create a position that is easy to refute, then attribute that position to your opponent.

In this case, brief and technically accurate answers were given and were attacked as being insufficient or inaccurate. At the end of the article the sum of these arguments is used to question the fundamental science behind the theory of natural selection and the origin of species. This is a standard straw-man argument.

Additionally, an excellent way to spot straw-man arguments is that they almost always lack rebuttals, as is the case in that text.

~Ulrika~

You asked for it

Did Kevn as well?

Where was I impolite to Kevn? Disagreeing with someone's assertions is not a personal attack. I'm sorry you find it so uncomfortable that we don't all agree with each other.

Ban alts in the forum. They're only used as tools to anonymously insult.

Thank you Chip for ignoring the information and not even trying to argue any of the points presented. I am 100% sure you didn't have time to read it. It's part of the indoctrination that forces one to avoid reading information that disputes ones bias. We are all guilty of it, I'm sure. The points made in the question/answers/responses clearly show a bias within the "scientific" community. It's the sort of thing I expect of a religious faithful. This is why I suggest the theory is a replacement for a religion. If you want to discuss the points of the questions, I'm quite willing to debate. Posting a link to an obviously pro-evolution site doesn't prove anything other than the fact you accept everything you read on that site as fact. No need for experiments. Close one's mind to any question of this faith in evolution, exactly as Catholics close their mind to the notion the pope is just another guy. It's ok to believe what you are told by the evolutionists, just as it's ok to accept the notion the pope is always right in matters of faith.

If evolution is truly a science, then questioning it's tenets is a never ending process. To say evolution is fact is to take the theory out of the realm of scientific exploration and set it on a pillar, making it an unquestionable fact. Doing such a thing is harmful to those students who accept what is taught.

Thank you for not attacking me personally, you are a true gentleman in this thread

My two cents. At work we were having a debate cause one guy said they should ban the teaching of creationism and just teach "facts".

Well the fact of the matter is Science can tell you how, but not WHY.

My personal belief? I think the big bang etc happened like science said. I think physics works as science experiments prove it does. But maybe God had a hand in it. Maybe he's a methodical chap who wouldn't make a universe where stuff worked cause it is "magic". Maybe he carefully built the world to work in a nice, scientific manner. Maybe.

In any case, I think both creationism and science of creation should be taught just "as is" with no favouritism to either by the teacher. She should say "Two camps have opposing views on the creation of the universe. Neither have all the answers. People, make your own minds up".

Nobody has all the answers. Both sides of this must be taught without bias.

I wholeheartedly agree with Ulrika's summary of that page, which I did skim but did not read in its entirety (shall I quiz you on the speciation page? ). I don't accept everything I read as fact, scientific or otherwise. That page in particular was a festival of straw men written by someone with an obvious axe to grind.

You had commented earlier about lack of satisfactory evidence for evolution. The most common argument along those lines is that people don't deny that evolution takes place within species but don't believe there is evidence for speciation (a species splitting into two different evolutionary paths). I provided a rather exhaustive list of observed speciation events.



I agree with the above completely. I'm not sure you can blame bad teachers on the theory of evolution, however. Personally, I don't believe evolution provides a satisfactory explanation of the origin of life, and I struggle with the speciation bit also. That said, I appreciate it for what it is... the very best, most documented, most supported by evidence, explanation of these things anyone has managed to come up with. I do not accept it as canon. I will be happy to consider any theory that meets the same evidentiary standard, if and when a theory comes along that does. That has yet to happen. ID is not a competing theory because there is no evidence to support it. It's as simple as that.

This is a false statement. The scientific method is capable of revealing who, what, where, why, when, and how. For example the theory of natural selection address why organism change form (phenotype and genotype) over time.

This is evidence of one who has been persuaded by the repeatability of the scientific method is attempting to reconcile it with one's religious teaching. What's interesting is, that this revisionist take on religion is simultaneously blasphemous and unscientific. You're in the middle of the road, getting hit by traffic coming from both directions.

This is a non sequitur, meaning that your conclusion does not follow from your premise (which is arguably false anyway). You'll have to build a stronger argument than this to allow the teaching of Buddhist, Catholic, Islamic, Roman, Wiccan, etc. mythology in school.

~Ulrika~

Why did the big bang happen. Why do we exist. Why is there a world at all. Why did humans come about. Why are we here.

Answers please, science knows all...

Note: I don't want to hear about HOW it happened, or what forces made the big bang eventuall bang (that's HOW). I want to know WHY, i.e. WHY did the circumstances leading to the big bang happen at all? Why? Why not go some place else and big bang. Why here. Why the time it did happen. I thought science couldn't tell you the thinking behind something, the WHY, but apparently I'm wrong.