You can't learn this level of stupid. It can only be achieved by generations of willful ignorance and inbreeding.

"Devoted to historical truth", while completely omitting any history or truth. Typical.

Creationists were so fond of saying 'where's the proof, the fossil record is not complete, so the theory of evolution is not complete, so it's wrong'....so where's the proof that humans and dinosaurs lived at the same time? There should be tons of human bones in coprolites with all the other bones, yet not a single example of a dinosaur eating a man has ever been found? Sounds like ridiculous bullshit by their own rules.

The ancestry of living beings isn't just traceable through the fossil record. The study of genetics shows us a huge and utterly overwhelming amount of evidence for the common ancestor idea. Common genes can be traced back to show the lineage of different animals and plants and groups of animals and plants.

Homology is a complex subject..it would take awhile to get into. I found a good link that illustrates the argument against it being a proof that macroevolution occured. If you want to take a look we could discuss further:

http://creation.com/does-homology-provide-evidence-of-evolutionary-naturalism

Ring species show that small changes can indeed lead to separate species. Antibiotic resistant bacteria are evolution in progress. You say that just because small changes can be seen it doesn't follow that big changes can evolve but that's stupid. Big changes are just a series of connected little changes.

I guess it depends on who you ask?

Erwin, D.H. (2000) Macroevolution is more than repeated rounds of microevolution. Evol. & Devel. 2:78-84.

the independence of macroevolution is affirmed not only by species selection but also by other processes such as effect sorting among species.

Lieberman, B.S. and Vrba, E.S. (2005) Gould on species selection. in MACROEVOLUTION: Diversity, Disparity, Contingency. E.S. Vrba and N. Eldredge eds. supplement to Paleobiology vol. 31(2) The Paleontological Society, Lawrence, Kansas, USA

Micro- and macroevolution are thus different levels of analysis of the same phenomenon: evolution. Macroevolution cannot solely be reduced to microevolution because it encompasses so many other phenomena: adaptive radiation, for example, cannot be reduced only to natural selection, though natural selection helps bring it about.

Scott, E.C. (2004) Evolution vs. creationism: an introduction. (Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press).

Macroevolution is decoupled from microevolution, and we must envision the process governing its course as being analogous to natural selection but operating at a higher level of organization.

Stanley, S. M. (1975) A theory of evolution above the species level. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. (USA) 72: 646-650.

In conclusion, then, macroevolutionary processes are underlain by microevolutionary phenomena and are compatible with microevolutionary theories, but macroevolutionary studies require the formulation of autonomous hypotheses and models (which must be tested using macroevolutionary evidence). In this (epistemologically) very important sense, macroevolution is decoupled from microevolution: macroevolution is an autonomous field of evolutionary study.

Ayala, F.J. (1983) Beyond Darwinism? The Challenge of Macroevolution to the Synthetic Theory of Evolution. reprinted in PHILOSOPHY OF BIOLOGY, M. Ruse ed. p. 118-133.

When discussing organic evolution the only point of agreement seems to be: "It happened." Thereafter, there is little consensus, which at first sight must seem rather odd. -(Simon Conway Morris, [palaeontologist, Department of Earth Sciences, Cambridge University, UK], "Evolution: Bringing Molecules into the Fold," Cell, Vol. 100, pp.1-11, January 7, 2000, p.11)

I'm late back to this party and iI don't have time to properly address all the points you make so I'll just stick to this one.

The ancestry of living beings isn't just traceable through the fossil record. The study of genetics shows us a huge and utterly overwhelming amount of evidence for the common ancestor idea. Common genes can be traced back to show the lineage of different animals and plants and groups of animals and plants.

There really is a lot of very good peer reviewed scientific evidence.

Darwin may well have taken a leap of faith but it is one which has now been backed up with a huge amount of evidence. Evolution is not open for questioning any more than gravity is. It's a very simple process which can even be seen happening around us.

Ring species show that small changes can indeed lead to separate species. Antibiotic resistant bacteria are evolution in progress. You say that just because small changes can be seen it doesn't follow that big changes can evolve but that's stupid. Big changes are just a series of connected little changes.

That said mutations can be big as well as small. We've all seen photos of two headed snakes for example. That happens to be a detrimental change, but if a large change occurred that happened to be beneficial and the individual survived to breed then a large change could occur very quickly. Remember these are chance occurrences, there's no intelligence driving evolution, it's just a simple process of random mutation and natural selection.

If you accept that genes can mutate randomly (something which is known to be fact and can be shown happening) and that natural selection occurs (again something which can be shown happening) then there really isn't anything more to be said. Those two processes, given a lot of time can change an animal or plant dramatically. And time is something life has had a lot of. Even the cambrian explosion you mentioned happened over 20 million years or so.

This is evolution. There's nothing complex about the process, there really isn't. There's no way that mutations and natural selection can fit together in any way that isn't evolution.

My cousin lived in the belt buckle of the Bible Belt.

I said to him once -- I don't know what to say to someone who says that transitional fossils are missing.

He laughed and laughed. "All fossils are transitional."

Boy, did that light up my brain. Ever since, when I read a general science article on the discovery of a new fossil, I think my beloved cousin (now gone) as they say that the fossil record has been changed to reflect the new information.

Evolution isn't disproved by the change, of course.

All fossils are transitional.

(I miss you, Gaylan.)

In my study of the evidence from the fossil record, I found more evidence that contradicted the assertions of Darwinian evolution than confirmed it.

Please enlighten me as to your credentials as a paleontologist. I assume you must have some, given that you feel qualified that your expertise is such as to dismiss millions of man hours of experimental results that support the theory of evolution.

In fact, you should really publish your findings in a peer-reviewed journal. If they are correct (and not, as I suspect, complete bollocks), it will be a revelation! There's almost certainly a Nobel prize in it for you.

The evidence for micro evolution is overwhelming.

Sweet. You've accepted the evidence for evolution. "Macroevolution" is just lots of "microevolution". Why are we discussing this?

I purport to say that the idea of a Creator has better explanatory power for what we see than the current scientific theories for origins, not because of what science cannot explain, but for what science has explained.

You've abandoned science at this point. I could equally say that speciation is caused by invisible pink unicorns or the Flying Spaghetti Monster (praise his noodly appendages), but none of it is testable and therefore, it's non-scientific.

Besides, the existing theory explains everything pretty well.

Have you ever studied the scientific proofs for both sides? There are some "clocks" which point that way, and there are other clocks that point the other way. The clocks that point to the old Earth have many flaws, and there are simply more evidences that point to a young Earth.

That is quite simply untrue. It is lies, falsehood, fiction, fabrication, myth, deceit, distortion and misinformation. In short, it's bullshit.

There is no credible evidence for a young earth. Zero, zip, nada.

At this point, you would have to either monumentally stupid or willfully ignorant to believe in it.

Hey robbersdog49, thanks for the level headed reply. I'll address your comments in a few pieces here:

The origin of life and Darwinian evolution are two entirely different things. Regardless of how you believe the first life came about we do know from the fossil record and evidence about the way the environment and climate changed on earth in those early millennia that the first life was simple single cell organisms.

In my study of the evidence from the fossil record, I found more evidence that contradicted the assertions of Darwinian evolution than confirmed it. The Cambrian explosion for example, where basically every type of animal body plan comes into existence at around the same time, contradicts the idea that these things happened gradually over long periods of time. In fact, a new theory was invented called "punctuated equilibrium" which says that the reason we aren't finding the transitional fossils is that the changes happen too quickly to be found in the fossil record. Instead of a theory based on the evidence, we have a theory to explain away the lack of evidence.

Evolution is the process which turned these very simple life forms into the complex forms you see all around you today. It's an ongoing process and the evidence for evolution is overwhelming.

The evidence for micro evolution is overwhelming. The reason we have hundreds of different breeds of dogs is because of micro evolution. Darwin discovered this and all the credit should go to him, but where the leap of faith took place was when he supposed that because we see changes within species, that therefore all life evolved from a common ancestor. This claim is not substantiated scientifically. You cannot see macro evolution taking place anywhere in the world, and you cannot find the transitional fossils to say it ever took place. You cannot test it in a laboratory, it is a historical claim based on weak circumstantial evidence.

Science doesn't know exactly how life first came about. It doesn't claim to. We know that it did because we're here, but how? Not sure. But that's not a problem, science doesn't claim to know everything. Science is a process we use to find out about the world around us. It's not a book with all the answers.

Science is all about what we don't know. It's a process of discovery, and you can't discover something you already know. Religious people like to show any gap in the knowledge of scientists as showing they are frauds, or know nothing and that this means their own views must be true. That's just a stupid logical fallacy. Just because no one else has the answer doesn't mean you can just claim your version must be correct.

Science not being able to tell us how life started has no effect on the validity of the statement 'God did it'.

The God of the gaps fallacy is simply a red herring in these conversations. I don't purport to say that because science can't explain something, that means God did it. Science is all about the principle of parsimony; what theory has the best explanatory power. I purport to say that the idea of a Creator has better explanatory power for what we see than the current scientific theories for origins, not because of what science cannot explain, but for what science has explained. I think the evidence we do understand, in physics, biology, cosmology and information theory overwhelmingly points to design for many good reasons that have nothing to do with the God of the gaps fallacy.

There is also it seems a point of pride for those who think the best position is to say "I don't know", and accusing anyone who thinks they do know as being wrong headed, arrogant, or whatever. It's a very curious position to take because there are plenty of things we can know. No one is going to take the position that if you say the answer to 2 + 2 is 4 and you deny that any other answer is valid, you are arrogant or using fallacious reasoning. Yet, it is arrogrant and fallacious to those who think that science is the sole arbitor of truth when someone who believes in God points to a Creator as the best explanation. They think that because they believe no one else could know the answer except through scientific discovery. You have to realize that is a faith based claim and not an evidence based claim. You think that way when you place your faith in science as what is going to give you the correct answers about how and why you are here. I like these quotes for Robert Jastrow, who was an Astronomer and physicist:

"For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountain of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries."

"Scientists have no proof that life was not the result of an act of creation, but they are driven by the nature of their profession to seek explanations for the origin of life that lie within the boundaries of natural law."

As for the age of the earth, there's a huge amount of evidence which says it's about 4.54 ± 0.05 billion years old. That's plenty of time for evolution to take us from simple single cell life to the complex animals we've become today.

Have you ever studied the scientific proofs for both sides? There are some "clocks" which point that way, and there are other clocks that point the other way. The clocks that point to the old Earth have many flaws, and there are simply more evidences that point to a young Earth. That video I provided shows the evidences I am talking about.

The origin of life and Darwinian evolution are two entirely different things. Regardless of how you believe the first life came about we do know from the fossil record and evidence about the way the environment and climate changed on earth in those early millennia that the first life was simple single cell organisms.

Evolution is the process which turned these very simple life forms into the complex forms you see all around you today. It's an ongoing process and the evidence for evolution is overwhelming.

Science doesn't know exactly how life first came about. It doesn't claim to. We know that it did because we're here, but how? Not sure. But that's not a problem, science doesn't claim to know everything. Science is a process we use to find out about the world around us. It's not a book with all the answers.

Science is all about what we don't know. It's a process of discovery, and you can't discover something you already know. Religious people like to show any gap in the knowledge of scientists as showing they are frauds, or know nothing and that this means their own views must be true. That's just a stupid logical fallacy. Just because no one else has the answer doesn't mean you can just claim your version must be correct.

Science not being able to tell us how life started has no effect on the validity of the statement 'God did it'.

As for the age of the earth, there's a huge amount of evidence which says it's about 4.54 ± 0.05 billion years old. That's plenty of time for evolution to take us from simple single cell life to the complex animals we've become today.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_the_Earth

I'm back Chingalera...I took you off ignore. It didn't seem to work anyway.
And actually yes, I can deny that... you accidentally proved the point that climate change is possibly the MOST important thing to cop to (or deny). Contrary to popular belief, the dinosaurs seem to NOT have gone extinct due to the impact, they were already in MAJOR decline and mostly extinct when it hit. The proof of that is that, in the KT boundary layer, there is not an abundance of dinosaur fossils, they are conspicuously absent. In fact, the fossil records show they had been in decline for centuries (eons?) before the impact and were mostly already gone. Climate study indicates that a climate change was likely happening to them long before the asteroid hit, this was apparently the same thing that caused the first mass extinction as well. I wish more people knew this.
To me, that means that it's not so important if you think climate change IS man driven now, one should think it's happening, it's dangerous, and it's controllable to a point, and we should probably work towards either preparing for it's effects or minimizing them, or both.

@BicycleRepairMan

Also vice versa. Which might sound circular, but isnt. Uniformitarianism is of course the simplest assumtion (occams razor) but it also correlates well with the available evidence. If natural laws acted differently in the past, we would presumably find EVIDENCE that it did. And correlating data is not a "hall of mirrors, it is evidence of correlation. This is basic statistics and empiri.

Thank you for your considered reply. Well see, here's the thing. Creationists and evolutionists are not looking at two sets of evidences. We are looking at the same evidence and interpreting it differently. There isn't creationist evidence and evolutionist evidence, there is just evidence which we both interpret according to the assumptions we bring to it. We are both looking at the same geologic record and saying it happened much differently. The evidence yields different conclusions depending on what assumptions you bring to it.

Uniformitarian is only the first assumption scientists bring to the evidence. The secondary assumption is that the different layers represent vast amounts of time. They come to this conclusion because they observe the rates of these processes are very slow today, and since in uniformitarian, the present is the key to the past, they assume that present day geological features must have taken millions or billions of years to form because of present day rates. Because of this, the completely exclude the hypothesis that the features we see could form very quickly. Therefore, they are biased in their interpretation and will miss the evidence which actually points to rapid formation. I'll give you a good example:

"Previously geologists had thought that constant, rapid water flow prevented mud's constituents -- silts and clays -- from coalescing and gathering at the bottoms of rivers, lakes and oceans. This has led to a bias, Schieber explains, that wherever mudstones are encountered in the sedimentary rock record, they are generally interpreted as quiet water deposits."

http://newsinfo.iu.edu/web/page/normal/7022.html

For a long time geologists believed that mudstones could only form a certain way, which is by slow moving water. They had completely ruled out that it could be formed rapidly. Therefore, whenever they saw mudstones the "story" the rocks told them was that of a slow process taking vast amounts of time. Yet, mudstones, they have found, can be deposited very rapidly. This is actually evidence for a global flood because mudstones make up 2/3s of the record for sedimentary rock. Yet they never saw that because of their assumptions of everything taking vast amounts of time to form. This is a classic example of how the assumptions you bring changes the interpretation of the data. Same mudstones, but the different assumptions yielded a different conclusion from the same evidence.

This is further complicated by the matter of evolution. Biostratigraphy has played a decisive role in determining the relative ages of rock layers around the world, which brings with it a whole other host of assumptions. Because evolution requires vast amounts of time, and they interpret a certain evolutionary progression through the fossil record, therefore they again make the assumption different layers must represent vast amounts of time, based on their evolutionary assumptions. They then use that assumption to validate their uniformitarian assumptions and call this evidence.

The main issue is the assumption of uniformitarian to explain the fossil record. It denies that a catastrophe like a global flood could have caused the features we see today. The geologists believe things happened very slowly, whereas creation geologists believe they have formed very quickly. There is a whole lot of evidence which shows that layers could be laid down rapidly, and canyons and other features could have been cut very quickly. Geologists do acknowledge this, which is why there is another branch of geology called Catastrophism:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catastrophism

They can not deny that many of the things they thought took millions of years "stalactites forming, fossilization, formation of oil and precious metals) can actually happen very quickly. They still deny, however, that a global catastrophe could have been responsible for all of it, despite the fact that the whole Earth is covered by sedimentary rock which is primarily laid down by water.

And this is where we are with fossils and dating. We dont just make wild guesses on the basis of 2 or 3 fossils and one shitty chemistry experiment involving half-lives; We have literally thousands of datapoints. If this is a hall of mirrors, then Satan is truly one crafty bastard making a pretty impressive one for us.

Again, it is the assumptions you bring to that data which colors the interpretation. I can also tell you that the assumption that decay rates never change is wrong:

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/286/5441/882.summary

Pressure and chemistry can alter decay rates according to that experiment. In that instance, they were able to alter the decay rate by 1.5 percent. In much more extreme conditions, however, the decay rate could change significantly. It shows that the uniformitarian assumptions of radiometric dating can and will produce unreliable data.

These are things that they don't teach you in science class. When it comes down to it, there is no actual proof for deep time in the fossil record, when we're talking about actual empirical evidence. We only have circumstantial evidence based on assumptions which I have shown to be faulty. That is where the hall of mirrors comes in, where everything you see is reflecting the assumptions you make. It is what is called a worldview, which is like a set of glasses you use to see the world. Everyone has a worldview. The apriori assumptions you make about reality constitutes your worldview. That is what is going on here..their worldview of the world forming from purely naturalistic processes, and that slowly over vast amounts of time, is a bias which skews all of their data to that direction, when as I showed previously with the mudstones that it could just as easily point in the other direction.

At present this concept of design is just castle-in-the-sky nonsense. Empty piffle. A complete non-starter.

This is why the "mere mention" of "design" will get you "banned" from peer-review, because you could just as well have made a "mere mention" of Bigfoot and the loch ness monster in your zoology report, it's a big tell to your peers that you are a nut who fails to understand the nature of evidence and science, and a big sign that you are in for some fuzzy logic and dumb assumptions instead of solid science.

Design is a better hypothesis for the information we find in DNA, and the fine tuning we see in the physical laws. The reason design is a non-starter is because the idea this Universe was created by anyone is anathema to the scientific community:

Even if all the data point to an intelligent designer, such an hypothesis is excluded from science because it is not naturalistic."

S. C. Todd,
Correspondence to Nature 410(6752):423, 30 Sept. 1999

It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counterintuitive, no matter how mystifying to the unitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine foot in the door.

Richard Lewontin, Harvard
New York Review of Books 1/9/97

No evidence would be sufficient to create a change in mind; that it is not a commitment to evidence, but a commitment to naturalism. ...Because there are no alternatives, we would almost have to accept natural selection as the explanation of life on this planet even if there were no evidence for it.

Steven Pinker MIT
How the mind works p.182

After essentially nullifying and disproving everything we have learned about biology the last 200 years, you still have all the work ahead of you, I'm afraid. You now have to build a completely new framework and model for every single observation ever made in biology that makes sense of it all and explains why things are the way they are. Shouting that a thing is "complex" is not cutting it, I'm afraid. You need a new theory of DNA, Immunology, Bacterial resistance, adaptation, vestigal organs, animal distobution, mutation, selection, variation, genetics, speciation, taxonomy... well, as Dobzhansky put it: "Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution" That quote is more relevant than ever.

Your error here is conflating micro and macro evolution. Creation scientists believe in micro evolution and speciation. That is part of the creationist model of how the world was repopulated with animals after the flood. Macro evolution, the idea that all life descended from a universal common ancestor, is not proven by immunology, bacterial resistance, adaptation, animal distribution, mutation, seclection, variation, speciation, taxonomy etc. The only way you could prove it is in the fossil record and the evidence isn't there. They've tried to prove it with genetics but it contradicts the fossil record (the way they understand it). So Creationists have no trouble explaining those things..and common genetics points to a common designer.

You dont have to trust scientists, most of the EVIDENCE is RIGHT FUCKING THERE, in front of you, in your pocket, in your hand, around your home, in every school, in every home, in every post office or courtroom, in the streets. ACTUAL REAL EVIDENCE, right there, PROVING, every second, that the universe is billions of years old.

Every scientist since Newton could be a lying sack of shit, all working on the same conspiracy, and it would mean fuck all, because the evidence speaks for itself.

The earth is definately NOT ten thousand years young.

Have you ever heard of the horizon problem? The big bang model suffers from a light travel time problem of its own, but they solve it by postulating cosmic inflation, which is nothing more than a fudge factor to solve the problem. First, it would have to expand at trillions of times the speed of light, violating the law that says nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. There is also no theory compatible with physics that could explain the mechanism for how the Universe would start expanding, and then cease expanding a second later. It's poppycock. See what secular scientists have to say about the current state of the Big Bang Theory:

http://www.cosmologystatement.org/

As far as how light could reach us in a short amount of time, there are many theories. One theory is that the speed of light has not always been constant, and was faster at the beginning of creation. This is backed up by a number of measurements taken since the 1800s showing the speed of light decreasing. You can see the tables here:

http://www.answersingenesis.org/articles/cm/v4/n1/velocity-of-light

I don't have time to waste on your ignorance any more, but just a few quick rebuttals should be sufficient to discredit your credibility.

First off, I'm not sure what you're trying to prove by this abstract:
http://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev.es.24.110193.001101

Quote: "Morphologists achieved much during that time, and none of their well supported phylogenies is overthrown by molecular data. So far, molecular sequences have contributed most significantly in areas where morphological data are inconclusive, deficient, nonexistent or poorly analyzed."

If anything it supports my point, but there are better sources out there. Which is why I chose to limit my literature sources to those that were at least after the year 2000. Why, you ask? Because the first bacterial genome was sequenced in 1995, about two years after that article. We've learned a lot since then, though, according to that abstract, even then they understood that molecular systematics were capable of elucidating many areas of the fossil record we didn't understand. Just read to the end of it.

I knew you would jump on the whole part where I conceded that it is not absolute agreement. Look, I took 30 seconds to write a sarcastic response on an internet forum. So what that I didn't bother to delve into the nuances of consensus trees and whatnot. Argue with the damn articles, not me.

You also just ignore it when I say that the fact that junk DNA has a function has nothing to do with it's evolutionary relevance and continue to claim otherwise without giving a reason. It is the relative mutation rates, not the functionality - maybe you didn't catch that the first time around.

Yada yada yada, I've got better things to do. Anyone who reads this little exchange can see your evident dishonesty and unwarranted extrapolation and that's all that matters. Because if someone is willing to plug their ears and yell loudly whenever something contradicts absolutely held beliefs like you are clearly willing to do, then there will be no convincing. This exchange is for those who are on the fence, and you're little display of anti-intellectualism speaks for itself even without all the scientific proof.

And trust me, I was a Christian. I was deriding salvation by grace as an arbitrary thing, doesn't mean I don't understand what you guys think.

"Ok, you need to understand two different concepts........the odds of getting so much similarity by accident is exceedingly small.

So in light of this reality.....supposedly bring down evolution."

Minor disagreements? I'm having a hard time believing that you've seriously investigated this subject if you are now claiming (scaled back from your prior claim of perfect agreement between "scores" of them) that molecular and morphological phylogonies typically have a high level of agreement. They don't. Agreement is the exception, not the rule. Even worse, molecular phylogonies don't agree with eachother either:

As morphologists with high hopes of molecular systematics, we end this survey with our hopes dampened. Congruence between molecular phylogenies is as elusive as it is in morphology and as it is between molecules and morphology. . . .

Partly because of morphology’s long history, congruence between morphological phylogenies is the exception rather than the rule. With molecular phylogenies, all generated within the last couple of decades, the situation is little better. Many cases of incongruence between molecular phylogenies are documented above; and when a consensus of all trees within 1% of the shortest in a parsimony analysis is published (e.g. 132, 152, 170), structure or resolution tends to evaporate

Congruence Between Molecular and Morphological Phylogenies

http://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev.es.24.110193.001101

"If only you were a bit better at it. Even the quotes you chose to mine serve to undermine your point. I think my point can be summarized by the following quote from your reference"

“On one side stand traditionalists who have built evolutionary trees from decades of work on species' morphological characteristics. On the other lie molecular systematists, who are convinced that comparisons of DNA and other biological molecules are the BEST way to unravel the secrets of evolutionary history.”

The relevant part here is the word “best.” These people are clearly just trying to decide what the most accurate method of phylogenetic determination is and this article represents nothing more than a discussion of one of the many battles that go on in the constant refinement of science. And this disagreement does nothing at all to disprove evolution""

Your charge of quote mining is false. Quote mining is the logical fallacy of quoting something out of context, distorting its intended meaning. The quote I provided was very much in context, and showed support for the assertion that molecular and morphological phylogenies do not have "perfect" agreement, and now I have further supported that assertion (and disproven your scaled back claim of very statistically significant agreement) that their agreement is actually very superficial. It is far more significant how little agreement there actually is.

The very reason there is a contention about which is the "best" method is precisely because there is so little agreement. In any case, molecular homology appears to be winning the battle, perhaps because the evolutionists are getting tired of never finding any evolution in the fossil record.

Which brings us to the many issues with molecular homologies, specifically, their lack of falsifiability:

"We believe that it is possible to draw up a list of basic rules that underlie existing molecular evolutionary models:

All theories are monophyletic, meaning that they all start with the Urgene and the Urzelle which have given rise to all proteins and all species, respectively.

Complexity evolves mainly through duplications and mutations in structural and control genes.

Genes can mutate or remain stable, migrate laterally from species to species, spread through a population by mechanisms whose operation is not fully understood, evolve coordinately, splice, stay silent, and exist as pseudogenes.

Ad hoc arguments can be invented (such as insect vectors or viruses) that can transport a gene into places where no monophyletic logic could otherwise explain its presence.

This liberal spread of rules, each of which can be observed in use by scientists, does not just sound facetious but also, in our opinion, robs monophyletic evolution of its vulnerability to disproof, and thereby its entitlement to the status of a scientific theory.

The absolute, explicit and implicit, adherence to all the monophyletic principle and consequently the decision to interpret all observations in the light of this principle is the major cause of incongruities as well as for the invention of all the genetic sidestepping rules cited above."

A Polyphyletic View of Evolution

Schwabe and Warr

This is why Schwabe, a biochemist, wrote:

Molecular evolution is about to be accepted as a method superior to paleontology for the discovery of evolutionary relationships. As a molecular evolutionist I should be elated. Instead it seems disconcerting that many exceptions exist to the orderly progression of species as determined by molecular homologies; so many, in fact, that I think the exception, the quirks, may carry the more important message

It's a shell game where virtually any kind of data can be accomodated, and at no point is the theory questioned. Ad hoc explanations can be invented for any kind of discrepency.

""There are analogous debates going on in nearly all branches of academic study. Taking an example with fewer existential implications for religion, look towards the Holocaust. There is an ongoing effort by Yad Va Shem, a jewish organization, to catalogue all those who died under the Nazi regime as well as those who aided jews in various ways (http://www1.yadvashem.org/yv/en/remembrance/hall_of_names.asp). Now at the moment they have verified only three million names and something like 24000 people who helped, and details on each vary. But wait, oh no! We all know that there were roughly six million victims! And we don’t even have complete information about the paltry three million we’ve catalogued. Does this mean that the Holocaust did not happen? Of course it doesn’t. You need to take the internal debate in context and realize that the total sum of evidence is overwhelming. Creationists, however, can not be so objective with such a threatening theory as evolution.""

A mountain of weak, circumstantial evidence (much of which contradicts itself) does not prove macro evolution. "We're working on it" does not somehow validate that evidence. We know the holocaust happened; there is no proof for macro evolution.

""As for your junk DNA article, you similarly blow the relevance way out of proportion. Here’s the last sentence from the text that summarizes the relevance of the article:

“The present study suggests that some selfish DNA transposons can instead confer an important role to their hosts, thereby establishing themselves as long-term residents of the genome.”

Here it states simply that some of the junk DNA, not all of it, can become useful to the cell. This sentence proves you wrong in two ways. First, it admits that they have only found a few instances of utility for this junk DNA, which is a far cry from the evidence that would be necessary for the slow death you speak of. Second, the acknowledges that this as an instance of Junk DNA incorporating itself into the genome and taking on novel and useful roles. In other words, evolution!

The genome is huge and nowhere in biology does it say that all of the DNA we have designated as junk is most certainly junk. Again, this is just another example of incrementally refining our understanding about how things work, but it is not revolutionary and it still demonstrates a clear framework.

And regardless or whether or not your article shows that a lot of Junk DNA has function (which is common knowledge, by the way), it does not at all disprove the fact that junk DNA shows typically exhibits much higher rates of mutation because its specific sequence is less rigidly constrained than coding DNA (http://www.nature.com/nrg/journal/v12/n11/full/nrg3098.html?WT.ec_id=NRG-201111). It is not a complete lack of function that demonstrates evolution, but simply a higher rate of mutation that results in sequences that will be more varied the more distantly related two species are.""

There are numerous sources showing that junk dna is not junk:

http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2011/04/28/1103894108.full.pdf+html

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/10/071025112059.htm

http://www.nature.com/scitable/topicpage/transposons-or-jumping-genes-not-junk-dna-1211

Based on your earlier argument, "we're working on it", you should realize that what some scientists consider to be junk dna stems entirely from ignorance. The idea that it got in there by "viral dna insertions" and the like is simply another ad hoc explanation among many.

""And finally, read these articles if you want a more complete understanding about how the comparisons between phylogenetic trees are indeed imperfect, but well supported and constantly refined:

http://cmgm.stanford.edu/phylip/consense.html
http://taxonomy.zoology.gla.ac.uk/rod/cplite/ch4.pdf
http://www.mathnet.or.kr/mathnet/paper_file/McGill/Bryant/03ConsensusAMS.pdf
http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2105/10/423
http://bioinformatics.oxfordjournals.org/content/23/12/1556.full

There are literally hundreds of thousands of these articles detailing what is essentially a whole, distinct area of study. Just search the term “consensus trees” and you’ll see what I mean.

http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=consensus+trees&hl=en&btnG=Search&as_sdt=1%2C5&as_sdtp=onhttp://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=consensus+trees&hl=en
&btnG=Search&as_sdt=1%2C5&as_sdtp=on""

I have already demonstrated that the consensus is very weak. What you need to provide is data backing up your claims regarding cytochrome c. I am awaiting the "scores" of phylogonies that will match that data.

>> ^messenger:
Someone who believes in something despite evidence against it is not using sense, reason and intellect. The Bible contradicts itself internally (contradictory lists of the "begats" is the clearest example I can think of), so cannot be accurate. If you believe the Bible is infallible, that isn't a reasonable belief. Some people "believing in a personal god" doesn't equate to "believing in Yahweh", which is your contention, so it doesn't matter if they're true or not. There's nothing unscientific about spirituality, and identifying some aspect of your spiritual experience a personal god. There's plenty unscientific about declaring the Bible to be infallible. Again with not understanding science.


If you're referring to the geneology of Jesus, it is presenting one geneology through David's son Solomon, which is the royal line, and one geneology through David's son Nathan, which is the non royal line. The lineage in Matthew is Josephs line, and the lineage in Luke is Marys line. There is no actual contradiction there, or anywhere else in the bible. What skeptics call contradictions are usually things they simply do not understand.

In any case, it would not be unreasonable to believe the bible, even if there were contradictions. This is simply a fallacious argument.

>> ^messenger:
The absence of circumstantial evidence where you might expect to find it is circumstantial evidence of absence. If the Bible were true, we would should expect, for example, that miracles would continue to occur, because why not? They should be even more commonly documented because of our massively increased population and information technology. But they appear to happen less! This is absence of circumstantial evidence. Amazing discoveries in science aren't evidence for God. God is one theory that explains them, but it doesn't work the other way -- you can't start with an amazing fact, and declare that it suggests all other theories are wrong. No matter what the universe looks like, it will still conform with the theory of God creating it, so amazing discoveries are not evidence -- they're just things we can't explain yet, like retrograde motion was once considered "amazing" and attributed to gods.)


Your contention is false for a few reasons; first, that miracles do not occur, and second, that we should expect to find an abundance of miracles. Not only have I seen miracles occur, I have been a party to them. As far as the number of miracles, we shouldn't expect to know how many miracles occur. God isn't performing for the general public. Even the post-resurrection appearances were only for a limited number of people.

We do have circumstantial evidence for Gods existence, such as the information in DNA and the evidence of fine-tuning. The theory of God has explanatory power, and is a better explanation for these phenomena. We should never ignore a theory which better explains the evidence.

>> ^messenger:
This where I start picturing you with your hands over your ears going LALALALALALA! Nothing rules out God's agency. Nothing rules out God period. He cannot be ruled out because there's nothing verifiable about his existence whatsoever. Nobody ever makes this claim, ever, ever, ever. It's like you wish we were saying this, but we're not. Really, we're not. BUT, if someone claims that their god has a chariot that moves the sun across the sky, I call bullshit because we have actually seen with our eyes that the Earth is spherical and rotates on its axis, which causes the apparent motion of the sun. If someone says the Earth is only a few thousand years old, I say bullshit and refer you to archaeology and to every branch of science that demonstrates the Earth to be much older.


It is the persistant claim of atheists that science has sufficiently described the Universe and is regulating God to a smaller and smaller corner. It's called the "god of the gaps" and you hear this all the time. You hear it from eminient scientists like Dr Krauss. So I don't wish it is being said, it is being said all the time.

As far as the age of the Earth goes, there are more evidences for a young earth than an old one. Since you don't know much about macro evolution, you probably don't know much about the theory of deep time either. Paleontology and archaelogy are historical sciences. The age of the earth is assumed, and the evidence is interpreted through that assumption. The assumption itself is never challenged.

>> ^messenger:
This is the least scientific thing you have ever said.


Messenger, you seem like a thoughtful person, so step outside of your box for a moment and think about this. The statement that "If God exists, the entire Universe is evidence of His existence" is a scientific statement of absolute fact. If it isn't, explain why not.

>> ^messenger:
You and I agreed before, no solipsism.


I engaged in no solipsism, as you will see, and I also thought we weren't going to be doing cherry picking either. I noticed you avoided these questions:

The question I would put to you is, how would you tell the difference? How would you know you're looking at a Universe God didn't create? What would you expect that to look like?

>> ^messenger:
You realize that you are using logic to prove that logic isn't real? "If-then" statements and implied questions come from logic. If logic doesn't stand on its own, then you can't use it to prove that it doesn't stand on its own. If you want to know where the rules of formal logic come from, you can look it up. If you don't accept them as valid, you've descended into solipsism, at which point I don't even accept that anything exists but my own mind. If you accept the definitions and rules of logic as valid on their face, then we don't require anything to explain where they came from. Logic is definitions, like equality. a=a. How do I know this? It's the definition of equality. If you disagree, then words have no definition, and thus no meaning, and we also agreed that "words have meaning".


I am not using logic to disprove logic, I am using logic to show you that you don't have a foundation for your own rationality. You live your life as if logic is a transcendent and absolute law, the same way as you do right and wrong, but you can't account for it in your worldview. It's a bit like sitting in Gods lap to slap His face. If logic doesn't have the same value independent of human belief, then you have no basis for your own rationality. Words do have meaning, which is why I am pointing out you have some intellectual sinkholes in your worldview that you just accept without thinking about it.

>> ^messenger:
Also, as your argument goes, if you assert that logic is a creation, and that God created logic, this entails that God exists outside of logic. Interesting prediction.


I didn't say God created logic, I said He is a rational being. Since we are made in His image, we are also rational beings.

>> ^messenger:
No, I wouldn't, necessarily. That's one field of science that I know very little about. If you've read a single book about it, you know more than me. That' doesn't mean you understand better than me how science works in general.


It doesn't mean that, no, but it does mean that you spoke authoritatively and condescendingly about something that I actually know more about than you do, jumping to conclusions based on your misunderstanding of what I said, that on a lack of knowledge about the theory itself. I would say this is positive evidence in my favor, and negative evidence against you.

>> ^messenger:
But since you bring it up, the theory of macro evolution may or may not be weak, I don't know, but outdated quotes from Darwin and about Darwin about the impossibility of macro evolution don't convince me any more than outdated quotes from Newton about the impossibility of the Solar System holding together. Do you know what Newton concluded? He concluded it must be God holding it together. Einstein figured out why it really doesn't fly apart, and it wasn't because of God.


They aren't outdated quotes, they are predictions that were made about what we should expect to find if the theory is true. Darwin made a great discovery, that changes can occur within a species. From there, he made an unjustified extrapolation that all species had a common ancestor. He expected to find evidence for this theory in the fossil record, but what he found was evidence against his theory. He blamed this on the relative poverty of the fossil record. 120 years later, we know it isn't the poverty of the fossil record; there simply is no fossil evidence to confirm macro evolution.

Do you know what a gluon is? It is a theoretical sub-atomic particle that binds quarks together. It has never been observed; it is simply a fudge factor, and without it, atoms would fly apart. Scripture says God is upholding them.

>> ^messenger:
Likewise, the problem of the lack of fossil records has been resolved since Darwin's time. The fossil evidence of intermediary links isn't a problem with the fossil evidence: it's a problem with Darwin's model. Darwin believed all evolution happened gradually, as he had observed. But there's no reason to believe it must all be slow. If one species had some tiny mutation that happened to give it a massive advantage over other species, its descendants would naturally spread into all sorts of new niches and tons of evolution would take place, both for it and other animals in its environment. Again, these changes were very rapid, so rapid, that they may not have left fossil evidence. Sometimes they did and other times they didn't, or we haven't found it yet. Check this video out: It's mostly a rebuttal to the "God is not a blind watchmaker" argument for Intelligent Design, but you can skip to 1:33 and still understand the premise. If you watch until 8:42, you'll see the reason why we wouldn't expect to find fossils of intermediary links, and why this isn't an argument against macro evolution anymore.


You're talking about the theory of punctuated equillibrium, or the modern "hopeful monster" theory. This is one of my favorite quotes:

In fact, most published commentary on punctuated equilibria has been favorable. We are especially pleased that several paleontologists now state with pride and biological confidence a conclusion that had been previously been simply embarrassing; 'all these years of work and I haven't found any evolution.'

Gould & Eldredge
Paleobiology v.3 p.136


It's the theory to explain why there is no evidence for evolution. How convenient. Do you realize that this makes macro evolution unfalsifiable? It also makes macro evolution a metaphysical theory, like abiogenesis, which you must take on faith. The video you referenced is not an accurate demonstration of macro evolution, either, since nothing is being added to the genome. A reconfiguration of the same genetic material is not traversing above the species level and is therefore micro evolution.

Since you're never read a book on macro evolution, try this one and challenge yourself:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0890510628/ref=olp_product_details?ie=UTF8&me=&seller=

@shinyblurry

If you understood it better than I do then you would know what macro evolution is.

No, I wouldn't, necessarily. That's one field of science that I know very little about. If you've read a single book about it, you know more than me. That' doesn't mean you understand better than me how science works in general.

But since you bring it up, the theory of macro evolution may or may not be weak, I don't know, but outdated quotes from Darwin and about Darwin about the impossibility of macro evolution don't convince me any more than outdated quotes from Newton about the impossibility of the Solar System holding together. Do you know what Newton concluded? He concluded it must be God holding it together. Einstein figured out why it really doesn't fly apart, and it wasn't because of God.

Likewise, the problem of the lack of fossil records has been resolved since Darwin's time. The fossil evidence of intermediary links isn't a problem with the fossil evidence: it's a problem with Darwin's model. Darwin believed all evolution happened gradually, as he had observed. But there's no reason to believe it must all be slow. If one species had some tiny mutation that happened to give it a massive advantage over other species, its descendants would naturally spread into all sorts of new niches and tons of evolution would take place, both for it and other animals in its environment. Again, these changes were very rapid, so rapid, that they may not have left fossil evidence. Sometimes they did and other times they didn't, or we haven't found it yet. Check this video out: It's mostly a rebuttal to the "God is not a blind watchmaker" argument for Intelligent Design, but you can skip to 1:33 and still understand the premise. If you watch until 8:42, you'll see the reason why we wouldn't expect to find fossils of intermediary links, and why this isn't an argument against macro evolution anymore.

>> ^messenger:
So, how is you believing that you have a superior intellect to someone who believes in God not pride?

Read it again. Nobody claimed to have a superior intellect to anyone else. The contrast is between using our intellect and not using it. As Galileo famously put it, "I do not feel obliged to believe that that same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forego their use." Now, he was talking from the perspective of a person of faith who simply didn't believe the bible or church teachings anymore but certainly did still believe in God. We are speaking as people with sense, reason and intellect who don't see sufficient evidence to come to the conclusion that God might reasonably exist.

It's the entire contention that someone who believes in God is not using their sense, reason and intellect that is prideful. Did you know that 40 percent of biologists, physicists and mathematicians believe in a personal God? Some extremely intelligent people believe in a Creator, and they can back up their beliefs with logical evidence. You see theists through a grossly distorted lens created by your own prejudice, and it blinds you. Galileo, by the way, did believe the bible; what he didn't buy is the catholic interpretation of it, and rightly so.

>> ^messenger:
Since there is no empirical evidence for or against Gods existence, how do you calculate how likely or unlikely His existence is?

The lack of evidence for existence is a non-concrete kind of evidence for the lack of existence. So the overwhelming lack of evidence for God is a bloody strong case. Everywhere we look in nature, we continue not to find God.

The absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence. Although I think there is evidence, such as fine tuning and information in DNA. In any case, do you honestly believe you can point an instrument at God and say "there he is!". Is this idea not fundamentally ridiculous? I think what youre confusing is mechanism with agency. You think because you describe a mechanism, how something works in a mechanical sense, somehow it rules out an Agent. God says He upholds the entire Universe; that He is the one that keeps the atoms from flying apart. How does mechanism rule out Gods agency?

Not only that, but if God created the Universe, do you realize that the entire Universe is evidence of Gods existence? The question I would put to you is, how would you tell the difference? How would you know you're looking at a Universe God didn't create? What would you expect that to look like?

What about the laws of logic? Where do they come from? If they're only in our brains, subject to constant flux, then what is rationality? It isn't anything you can trust if what you believe is true. Therefore all of your arguments fall apart. You have nothing in your worldview that can explain it, yet I can explain it. I know there is an omnipotent God who made us in His image, and we are rational beings because He is a rational being.

>> ^messenger:
Please, stop talking about science. You really do not understand it. You sound like a religious sceptic spouting crap about the bible. Really, what you say about science is just non-verified faither talking points. All science is based only on observation and drawing generalized inferences from that. "Theories" are just that. The strength of a scientific theory is roughly [how well it predicts other things] ÷ [how many things you have to just accept]. The belief in a particular atomic structure for oxygen has many predictions, which are testable and have largely been shown reliably true. So the atomic structure of an oxygen atom is a generally accepted theory, even though we will never be able to sense it directly. It's scientific. On those same grounds, the theory of evolution is also a strong theory in science. It has very few conjectures (three simple ones, I believe I heard Dawkins once say), it generates predictions, the predictions are testable, and they affirm the theory. Saying that evolution is untestable is as ridiculous as saying we haven't investigated every oxygen atom, so the model of the atom is untestable, and therefore unscientific.

If you understood it better than I do then you would know what macro evolution is. The scientific method uses empirical evidence, which comes from empirical experimentation or observation. There is no experiment to prove macro evolution, nor can it be empirically observed. It is simply an unjustified extrapolation from micro evolution (which is proven beyond a reasonable doubt), and based on nothing but inferences from *circumstantial* evidence and not evidence based on empirical observation.

Many people have this conception that the theory of common descent is as certain and proven as 2 + 2 = 4, or as Sepacore put it:

"once claimed to be a book of literal truth, becomes more and more metaphorical as science stomps its way all over the human races ignorance of the universe reaching greater level's of understandings that are testable through mathematical predictions"

That is certainly how it is taught in schools, as absolute fact, and that's why I believed it too. It's when you stop looking at their conclusions and see the actual data they base them on that you will get the shock of your life. Yes, you're right, the theory makes a few predictions, all of which have turned out to be wrong..such as this:

The main cause, however, of innumerable intermediate links not now occurring everywhere throughout nature depends on the very process of natural selection, through which new varieties continually take the places of and exterminate their parent-forms. But just in proportion as this process of extermination has acted on an enormous scale, so must the number of intermediate varieties, which have formerly existed on the earth, be truly enormous. Why then is not every geological formation and every stratum full of such intermediate links? Geology assuredly does not reveal any such finely graduated organic chain; and this, perhaps, is the most obvious and gravest objection which can be urged against my theory. The explanation lies, as I believe, in the extreme imperfection of the geological record.

Darwin

Darwin predicted that for his theory to be true, there must be innumerable transitional forms in the fossil record. What have we found?:


"Paleontologists just were not seeing the expected changes in their fossils as they pursued them up through the rock record. That individual kinds of fossils remain recognizably the same throughout the length of their occurrence in the fossil record had been known to paleontologists long before Darwin published his Origin. Darwin himself, .., prophesied that future generations of paleontologists would fill in these gaps by diligent search... One hundred and twenty years of paleontological research later, it has become abundantly clear that the fossil record will not confirm this part of Darwin's prediction. Nor is the problem a miserly fossil record. The fossil record simply shows that this prediction is wrong.
N. Eldredge and I. Tattersall, The Myths of Human Evolution, 1982, pg 45-46.

What we find is that creatures appear in stasis, and enter and leave the fossil record abruptly with no changes.

Another prediction is a start from simple to complex, with an increase of diversity of the phyla over a long period of time.

"Consequently, if my theory be true, it is indisputable that before the lowest Silurian stratum was deposited, long periods elapsed, as long as, or probably longer than the whole interval from the Silurian age to the present day; and during these vast, yet quite unknown periods of time, the world swarmed with living creatures. To the question why we do not find records of these vast primordial periods, I can give no satisfactory answer."
Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species, 1st edition, pg 307.

What we find is that all of the phyla we have today all abruptly appeared in the "cambrian explosion"

"The fossil record had caused Darwin more grief than joy. Nothing distressed him more than the Cambrian explosion, the coincident appearance of almost all complex organic designs ... "
S. Gould, The Panda's Thumb, pg 238, 239.

This is just the tip of the iceberg for how poor a theory macroevolution actually is, but you won't have a shortage of true believers in it, even though they don't even understand what evidence it is based on. I do know something about science, and although I am a layman, I am perfectly capable of understanding of what makes a sound theory, and what doesn't. I would believe in macroevolution if the evidence supported it. Not only does it not support it, but it actually argues against it. It is shocking to someone who has been indoctrinated (like I was), but if you want to talk about fairy stories, macroevolution is a whale of a tale.