Evolution vs. Creation

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Originally Posted by water lily

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Originally Posted by Xamonas Chegwe

Which 'other scientist'? Again evidence please?

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Xamonas Chegwe, Theshizznigg, is not totally unfounded in this declaration. Darwin had been developing his theory and gathering evidence for it. By 1844, he had written a short summary of his views, but didn't publish, because he didn't beleive he had sufficient data. Furthermore, he was disturbed, becuase his wife, Emma, saw his ideas as counter her strong religious views and knew that his thoery would cause controversy. So he hesitated.

Meanwhile, Alfred Russel Wallace, a man intent on collecting plant and animal specimen, who had gone on several voyages to the Amazon and other parts of the world, independly came up with the theory of Natural Selection as well. In 1855, Wallace published a paper expressing his views. This spurred Darwin's friends to encourage him to publish. Darwin quickly put together a paper of his own, and then in 1859, Darwin published the origin of species.

Darwin is mostly credited with the idea of NAtural SElection, because he had a more comprehensive collection of data to back up his ideas. And technically he came up with the idea first even though he didn't publish first.

I don't know either way about a research grant. Hope that this info was helpful.

-water lily

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Thank you WaterLily, but I really wasn't questioning Thistleneck's facts, more the way he stated them with nothing to back them up. Had he explained it like you just did, I would have been quite satisfied that he was at least partially right on this point (having checked the details, of course.) Darwin's deathbed confession is most likely complete hokum though. Here is Wikipedia's version:

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Charles Darwin recounted in his biography of his grandfather Erasmus Darwin how false stories were circulated claiming that Erasmus had called for Jesus on his deathbed. Charles concluded by writing "Such was the state of Christian feeling in this country [in 1802].... We may at least hope that nothing of the kind now prevails." Despite this hope, very similar stories were circulated following Darwin's own death, most prominently the "Lady Hope Story", published in 1915 which claimed he had converted on his sickbed. Such stories have been heavily propagated by some Christian groups, to the extent of becoming urban legends, though the claims were refuted by Darwin's children and have been dismissed as false by historians.

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I know which version I favour.

Ooo, very interesting. By the way, Im in love with the name "Erasmus". But that is beside the point.

I feel inclined to side with you, Xamonas, because as I understand it, Darwin was never particulary religious. I've read that he was rather indifferent to religion in fact, despite the fact that he did study theology at Christ's College, Cambridge (actually his emphasis during his Cambridge years was in botany and natural science). But I don't think it really matters if the deathbed story is true or not to either support or refute Evolution. Darwin's evidence was in fact very limited at the time (for example he didn't know where new variation came from on which natural selection acted. Which today's scientists account for through mutation), so that it was natural for him to doubt himself. Rather I think we should examine the evidence of today, rather that that of the 1800's.

I will not retract my statement about the pine it was just and the feelings true. I feel nothing but pride that these little guys managed to beat the odds. ;)

And I also have the information concerning the Jurassic Pine
which are now being raised for sale in the UK.

"The young specimen at the botanic garden is no more than 18 inches tall. Its needles look more like blades of grass, deep green and packed close together. Its trunk and branches are green, but will one day grow into a dark, mottled brown. It looks more like a fern than a pine tree.
However, nobody knew what it looked like, or that it was even alive, until 1994. Before that, it was just a fossilized imprint, known only to paleontologists and presumed extinct for at least 2 million years. But when a park ranger in New South Wales ventured into an undisturbed canyon in Australia's Blue Mountains, about 100 miles west of Sydney, he came upon a tree that neither he nor anyone else had ever seen."
"A lot of people sort of think there's nothing new," said Christine Flanagan, botanic garden public programs manager. "Everything's been done, everything's been seen, except for what happens, maybe, in a test tube. But here, this thing's growing in the wild within two hours of 4.5 million people, and nobody knew it was there."

"Scientists later confirmed that the newly discovered plant was of a species that dated back at least 90 million years - and possibly even further, into the Jurassic Period - and was thought to have been extinct. They regarded it as having found a dinosaur still roaming around in the backyard."

"It is truly a living fossil," Flanagan said. "You'd think with that kind of proximity to Sydney, Australia, it'd have been found."

"The tree's rarity and isolated location prevented that. Fewer than 100 adult trees exist in the wild, all of them in Wollemi National Park, a preserved area with hundreds of remote, untouched canyons. The trees' exact location has been kept secret for fear that visitors would cause damage or introduce pathogens to which the trees have never been exposed."

:banana:

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Originally Posted by water lily

I feel inclined to side with you, Xamonas, because as I understand it, Darwin was never particulary religious. I've read that he was rather indifferent to religion in fact, despite the fact that he did study theology at Christ's College, Cambridge (actually his emphasis during his Cambridge years was in botany and natural science). But I don't think it really matters if the deathbed story is true or not to either support or refute Evolution. Darwin's evidence was in fact very limited at the time (for example he didn't know where new variation came from on which natural selection acted. Which today's scientists account for through mutation), so that it was natural for him to doubt himself. Rather I think we should examine the evidence of today, rather that that of the 1800's.

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Exactly.

Darwin's theory is an absolutely incredible leap of intuition.

Nowadays we know the mechanism of genetics. We understand chromosones and DNA, genes and heredity. Darwin, we must remember, did not.

In fact, in his time, his theories and those of Gregor Mendel (founder of genetic theory) were considered contradictory. Both ideas developed independently, in isolation, at around the same time (Darwin's "Origin of species" published in 1859, Mendel's "Experiments on Plant Hybridization" in 1865). Chromosones were not proved to be the mechanism of heredity until 1902. In the intervening 40 odd years, scientists argued the toss between the 2 theories, not realising that one (Mendel's) was describing the fine detail of the other (Darwin's).

Darwin's evidence was limited but he managed to infer his theory of evolution without knowing the details of molecular biology that we take for granted today. This is tantamount to inferring Einstein's theory of relativity without knowing Newton's laws of motion. The man was without a doubt a genius of the highest order (and they lampooned him as an ape!)

The difference between Einstein's theory and that of Darwin, is that the theory behind Einstein's was proven without question by the bomb that dropped on Hiroshima - it can't be denied. Alas, the timescales in genetics are far longer, making the evidence less immediate.

Realistically though, evolution can be seen in process in the adaptation of bacteria to resist antibiotics. New strains evolve much faster than with higher species such as mammals, because the time-span of a generation is much shorter - minutes rather than years. The genome (genetic code) for such microbes is known and can be seen to be changing and evolving by the simple process of resistant bacteria surviving exposure to antibiotics and passing on their resistance to the next generation.

Why is the same process so difficult to accept when played against the far longer timescales of human development? To me, it is obvious. Take the time to really understand the underlying principles and it is impossible to deny, at least not without recourse to assertions involving God interfering with the available evidence so as to conceal his presence (like the way he deliberately planted fossils to confuse the faithless!)

Evolution does not conflict with the existence of God. Many believe quite happily in both. What it does conflict with is the dogmatic belief in every single word in the Bible, Qu'ran and other holy books describing creation in terms of divine intervention.

The existence of God can neither be proven nor disproved, it is a matter of faith. The absolute truth of holy books is another matter. I submit that it has been disproved already, to the satisfaction of all but the deliberately dogmatic.

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Originally Posted by Theshizznigg

zoliaon asmikarliaons

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There is a difference between speaking in tongues and spouting gibberish. Neither impresses me.

How constructive of you all.

"Welcome all to the new united church of voodoism, my name is Tenbo"
Bill The Galactic Hero

Jesus is the Christ, the Messiah, the Savior of the world.
He died for our sins, and was raised to life for our justification.

There are times on this thread when I am convinced that regardless of evidence produced and what it might portend to either argument, it will be basically of the same value as a roschet test. In other words, to the hard-core evolutionist, it will be absolute proof of no Inteligent Design. To the hard-core creationist, it will be absolute proof that any form of evolution is complete nonsense. Each will see what they expect to see, just as with a roschet test, each person finds something personal in the inky blots. The question I have to ask is this: If you go into an investigation with your mind already made up as to what the outcome is going to be, do you have an open or closed mind? http://www.smileyville.net/mellow/mf_sherlock.gif

Theshinzznig,

Firstly, did you realise that you posted the second half of 'your' argument first? Probably not, because it is copied wholesale from the website that you linked to a few threads back (and without credit, I might add). There is a point made about such activities in the rules of this section of the forum. Mods please note!

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No you cannot copy and paste huge tracts of text, you shouldn't need more than a few sentences, or maybe one paragraph in reference to the discussion.

If you are going to refer to or use content from other sites, you must include a link for it. You cannot copy and paste entire articles from other sites as that is copyright infringement, and contributes nothing to discussion. Posts or topics doing such will be edited, deleted, closed, or removed, not always with warning.

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I seriously doubt that you actually bothered to understand the concepts behind what you say. You certainly didn't take the time to rephrase them in your own words. You were not even particularly selective in the parts you cut and pasted. As an example (one of many):

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Originally Posted by Theshizznigg

Pliocene - the period that from about 2-5 million years ago.
All of the well-known fossils believed to be missing links for humans come from Pleistocene layers.

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The Pliocene and Pleistocene are two different epochs (not periods, they are both contained in the noegene period in fact), the pleistocene epoch occurred roughly from 1.9 million years ago to about 10,000 years ago. Why you describe the timeframe of one epoch and then describe events from another can only be explained by either a lack of understanding, or an attempt to deliberately confuse the issue.

I, among others, have already made my feelings about this website known. Those opinions won't be changed by your quoting huge swathes of it.

For the record, my objections to this site include the following (with examples):
1. It is biased, deliberatly ignoring facts which don't fit it's pet theories (such as the incredible rarity of fossils of land based animals. The conditions for such fossils to be produced are so specific that it is a wonder that there are any at all. Using the absence of 'missing link' fossil evidence as an argument is thus disingenuous.)
2. It gives undue emphasis to others that do (the Coelocanth for example, a single species example of a once diverse group of fish that was believed to be completely extinct. In fact, they are very rare fish, living in waters that are not commercially fished.)
3. It distorts other facts. (Such as it's attack on carbon dating. This method is not as accurate as once thought but nowhere near as inaccurate as it would need to be for dinosaur fossils to really come from a flood only a few thousand years ago.)

Please have the courage to formulate your own arguments, not just copy those of others without checking the facts of them.

"After all, if the theory of evolution is correct, why should brain capacities (which presumably according to evolution, get larger as humans “evolve”), suddenly become smaller after Neanderthal?"

In the words of Arthur Koestler, from "The Ghost in the Machine:"

"The capacities of the computer inside the reptilian and mammalian skull are exploited to the full, and leave no scope for further learning. But the evolution of man.s brain has so wildly overshot man's immediate needs that he is still breathlessly catching up with its unexploited, unexplored possibilities."

"We have still only learned to utilize a very small fraction of the potentials of its estimated hundred thousand million circuits."

"It is entirely unprecedented that evolution should provide a species with an organ which it does not know how to use; a luxury organ far exceeding its owner's immediate primitive needs; an organ which will take the species millennia to learn to put to proper use - if it ever does."

Maybe where we are going is a more significant question than where we came from.

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Originally Posted by Pendragon

There are times on this thread when I am convinced that regardless of evidence produced and what it might portend to either argument, it will be basically of the same value as a roschet test. In other words, to the hard-core evolutionist, it will be absolute proof of no Inteligent Design. To the hard-core creationist, it will be absolute proof that any form of evolution is complete nonsense. Each will see what they expect to see, just as with a roschet test, each person finds something personal in the inky blots. The question I have to ask is this: If you go into an investigation with your mind already made up as to what the outcome is going to be, do you have an open or closed mind? http://www.smileyville.net/mellow/mf_sherlock.gif

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Mine is open.

I do however believe in the scientific method. Observation of available facts. Basing theories upon those facts. Testing those theories by experimentation. And most importantly, adapting (or even in extreme cases abandonning) the theory, if facts are discovered that do not fit the original model.

In my opinion, the evolutionary theory has undergone this process. It has been adapted over the years, although it's basic premise is still seen as sound.

Evolutionary theory per se is not to be confused with the exact evolutionary paths of individual species and groups of species. Evolution describes the process by which new species come into being, not the exact line of succession in specific cases. Curiously, most arguments against evolution attempt to pick holes in exactly that, usually in the specific evolutionary path of our own species.

The creation theory has not been subjected to any such rigour by it's advocates. They point to what they see as holes in evolution as if this proves their case, as if there were only the 2 choices to pick from - "It's not black, so it must be white!" - this ignores the full spectrum in between. What they never do is point to direct evidence for their own theory (except that it is contained in holy books - which is hardly rigourous proof by measurable experimentation).

I am open to persuasion on anything, but I believe that the burden of proof lies with the creationists.

Theshizznigg, please do not copy and paste any more material from clarifyingchristianity.com, unless you are actually Harold Joss to whom the site is registered to?

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Originally Posted by Pendragon

to the hard-core evolutionist, it will be absolute proof of no Inteligent Design.

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What is the difference between an evolutionist and a ‘hard-core’ evolutionist?

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Originally Posted by Pendragon

If you go into an investigation with your mind already made up as to what the outcome is going to be, do you have an open or closed mind?

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Does this apply to any investigation? Is the discussion an ‘investigation’? Does every idea deserve/require open-minded investigation? If I am unwilling to consider the possibility that the moon is made of magic cheese, does that mean I have a closed mind?

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Originally Posted by The Unnamable

What is the difference between an evolutionist and a ‘hard-core’ evolutionist?

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I think that hard-core evolution has a techno sound-track.

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Originally Posted by The Unnamable

Does this apply to any investigation? Is the discussion an ‘investigation’? Does every idea deserve/require open-minded investigation? If I am unwilling to consider the possibility that the moon is made of magic cheese, does that mean I have a closed mind?

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:lol: :lol: :lol: :lol:
Magic cheese - love it!

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Originally Posted by Xamonas Chegwe

I think that hard-core evolution has a techno sound-track.

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Now it's my turn. :lol: :lol: :lol: :lol:

FYI, magic cheese is similar to ordinary cheese but it's more useful in debates.