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Evolution answers

justintime said:
The Bible devotes very little or nothing at all to what man descended from and almost everything to what man can ascend to.
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For this reason alone you should stop using it as a source of information on this subject. If it says nothing on the subject it cannot provide you any supporting information.
 
justintime said:
For all the knowledge scientists claim to have accumulated, acquired and even profess to have about the universe and origins of life. They have yet to produce a single living organism from scratch in the lab.
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http://www.sciencemag.org/content/329/5987/52.full
Oops.

justintime said:
Theories of amino acids as building blocks of life and a pile of proteins suddenly taking form in the absence of any genetic blueprint belongs in science fiction.
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Peptides can form in the presence of carbon monoxide, sodium chloride, or intense heat and pressure like you would get with meteor impacts on the primordial Earth.

justintime said:
It is easy to assume flaws in systems which are not fully understood especially when we are just scratching the surface. But to jump from total ignorance to speculations of spontaneous events that made all this possible is beyond even science fiction. It is fraudulently disingenuous.
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Much like how you jump from, "We don't know," to, "Goddidit"? I think it's clear which side is being disingenuous here.
 
justintime said:
The Bible devotes very little or nothing at all to what man descended from and almost everything to what man can ascend to.
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The Bible—or at least the Old Testament portion of it—seems to be about God the sociopath, who appears to derive enjoyment from inflicting all manner of suffering on people, and ordering his followers to commit murder and genocide, amongst other things.

Need I point out again how God was perfectly okay with slavery? Need I point out again how God chose to drown almost every person on Earth—an act which surely must have included killing infants and children—as well as killing off almost every animal on the Earth (what sin had the animals committed?). This in spite of God having the ability to smite just those who offended Him.

Why on Earth would you look to the Bible—or at least the Old Testament portion of it—for guidance on anything?
 
Corsair 115 said:
The Bible—or at least the Old Testament portion of it—seems to be about God the sociopath, who appears to derive enjoyment from inflicting all manner of suffering on people, and ordering his followers to commit murder and genocide, amongst other things.

Need I point out again how God was perfectly okay with slavery? Need I point out again how God chose to drown almost every person on Earth—an act which surely must have included killing infants and children—as well as killing off almost every animal on the Earth (what sin had the animals committed?). This in spite of God having the ability to smite just those who offended Him.

Why on Earth would you look to the Bible—or at least the Old Testament portion of it—for guidance on anything?
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These are science questions?
 
justintime said:
The Bible devotes very little or nothing at all to what man descended from...
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Being born and raised a Jew, I recall that God just breathed life into some dirt* and, voila! - Man!

Now, being raised a Reform Jew, when asked, my Rabbi told me this was not necessarily at odds with evolution, or the obvious problem of where Cain's wife came from. That it could have been symbolic of the moment man "ascended" from "mere" ape, and that the Adam and Eve story my have focused on just one such pair, and did not necessarily imply they were the only such pair.

That probably let me cling to Judaism for a short time longer, but it still got effectively left behind in my teenage years.


* Interesting is that some theories of abiogenesis hold that the first self-replicating may have arisen in clays, making this bible story at least somewhat prescient!
 
BTW, the above post seems responsive to justintime.

It's not.

I assume that he is either intentionally uninformed on the topic of evidence of evolution, or just playing forum members with troll-like posts.

Either way, not worth responding to directly.

An informative thread, nonetheless.
 
icebear said:
  • The decades-long experiments with fruit flies beginning in the early 1900s (decades of attempts to produce macroevolution in the lab produced only fruit flies).
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Wait...you're saying speciation takes more than a few decades?!

Wait...what do you mean, the theory of evolution has never claimed otherwise?!

Wait...you mean to say there's nothing to see here?!
 
justintime said:
For all the knowledge scientists claim to have accumulated, acquired and even profess to have about the universe and origins of life. They have yet to produce a single living organism from scratch in the lab.
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It took God/Nature millions of years. Why do you think scientists could just whip it up in a few decades?

ETA: And how did we get onto abiogenesis?
 
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aggle-rithm said:
Wait...you're saying speciation takes more than a few decades?!

Wait...what do you mean, the theory of evolution has never claimed otherwise?!

Wait...you mean to say there's nothing to see here?!
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That's ignoring that, generally speaking, the scientists seem to have been doing what they can to prevent speciation and reduce variation in what they start with as much as possible to improve the quality of the many experiments that make. That argument is attempting to assert the simply wrong premise that all those experiments were contiguous and focused on speciation.
 
justintime said:
...
It is a world created from some primordial soup full of creatures and lagoons and sinister stalkers all competing to destroy the other. Life is determined by selfish genes climbing over each other to succeed. We are just extensions of those selfish genes. So to what end do we owe our accidental meaningless existence? Is it to a theory that cannot explain why human altruism built the institutions, churches, cathedrals, schools and charities? Why every effort by scientists to denigrate human aspirations by shackling us to some evolutionary tree is resisted because the world did not evolve to its current form......humans were inspired to build it so we could enjoy it. It is time to end evolutionary dead end theories and certify its proponents misguided, inept and terribly wrong.
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That highlited bit is the part of creationism that I really cannot understand- this childish insistence that what is best in humans could not possible come from humans. Why can't human altruism be attributed to humanity the same way theists insist its sins must be? In fact, if anybody is "denigrating" human aspirations, it's the theists who shackle us to some deity for the ostensible purpose of finding glory by reflection from it, but with the actual effect of belittling man as incapable of appreciating, or being, good for its (and his) own sake.
 
justintime said:
For all the knowledge scientists claim to have accumulated, acquired and even profess to have about the universe and origins of life. They have yet to produce a single living organism from scratch in the lab. Theories of amino acids as building blocks of life and a pile of proteins suddenly taking form in the absence of any genetic blueprint belongs in science fiction.
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Whenever I hear forms of this argument I picture the church chiding Galileo saying that Aristotle had disproven heliocentricity because stellar parallax had not yet been detected therefore it never would be, damn the other overwhelming evidence. Or I picture curmudgeons saying "If God had intended man to fly he would have given us wings."

Your position equates exactly to this: Forget all the overwhelming evidence in support of your position. Forget all the repeatedly demonstrated flaws in my own position. Since you haven't done absolutely everything yet, you're wrong. Since man can't create life in a lab after two hundred years trying, then obviously the universe couldn't have done it with 14 billion years trying.

Or put another way:

You haven't created a universe. Therefore God.


justintime said:
It is easy to assume flaws in systems which are not fully understood especially when we are just scratching the surface. But to jump from total ignorance to speculations of spontaneous events that made all this possible is beyond even science fiction. It is fraudulently disingenuous.
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And the side most guilty of such actions are the believers.

We don't know how this stuff happened, therefore we know how it happened. God.

That's not a joke, by the way. It's what you are doing. It is very much like the ghost hunters who, when confronted with something spooky that they personally cannot find an immediate explanation for say I don't know what it is, therefore I know it is a ghost.
 
Funny everyone attributes computers to science and how we are all better off because of it. The inventors of the computer were not scientists...they were college dropouts. Apple computer Steve Jobs (dropout). Microsoft Corporation..Bill Gates (dropout).

It was discovered humans aren't even good at computers.
Ordinary chimps outperformed college students in cognitive test using computers. Imagine if we were up against smarter chimps.

Matsuzawa emphasises that the chimps in the study are by no means special - all chimps can perform like this, he says. "We underestimate chimpanzee intelligence,"
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http://www.newscientist.com/article...rform-humans-at-memory-task.html#.Ut0vn7ROncs
 
Garrette said:
Whenever I hear forms of this argument I picture the church chiding Galileo saying that Aristotle had disproven heliocentricity because stellar parallax had not yet been detected therefore it never would be, damn the other overwhelming evidence. Or I picture curmudgeons saying "If God had intended man to fly he would have given us wings."

Your position equates exactly to this: Forget all the overwhelming evidence in support of your position. Forget all the repeatedly demonstrated flaws in my own position. Since you haven't done absolutely everything yet, you're wrong. Since man can't create life in a lab after two hundred years trying, then obviously the universe couldn't have done it with 14 billion years trying.

Or put another way:

You haven't created a universe. Therefore God.


And the side most guilty of such actions are the believers.

We don't know how this stuff happened, therefore we know how it happened. God.

That's not a joke, by the way. It's what you are doing. It is very much like the ghost hunters who, when confronted with something spooky that they personally cannot find an immediate explanation for say I don't know what it is, therefore I know it is a ghost.
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Exactly. Creationism (especially JiT's particular flavor) is one big circular argument from incredulity based on ignorant authority; it's almost like they went out of their way to find the worst logical fallacies possible in argument and then use them.
 
justintime said:
Funny everyone attributes computers to science and how we are all better off because of it. The inventors of the computer were not scientists...they were college dropouts. Apple computer Steve Jobs (dropout). Microsoft Corporation..Bill Gates (dropout).
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You think bill gates and steve jobs had anything at all to do with the invention of computers? Wow.
 
justintime said:
Funny everyone attributes computers to science and how we are all better off because of it. The inventors of the computer were not scientists...they were college dropouts. Apple computer Steve Jobs (dropout). Microsoft Corporation..Bill Gates (dropout).

It was discovered humans aren't even good at computers.
Ordinary chimps outperformed college students in cognitive test using computers. Imagine if we were up against smarter chimps.


http://www.newscientist.com/article...rform-humans-at-memory-task.html#.Ut0vn7ROncs
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Aside from the errors* in this post, it indicates your duplicity. On the one hand we are created by an intelligent designer who makes no mistakes. On the other hand, chimps are more clever than we are.

*To start: college degrees are not the definition of scientist. Michael Faraday was a layman as was Tycho Brahe. They were both scientists of the first order.

To continue: one need not be a scientist to be an inventor.

There's more, but it will fly over your head, I am sure.

ETA: Can't believe I missed the most obvious error as pointed out by phunk. Jobs and Gates were not involved in the invention of computers.
 
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