September 14, 2009, 1:52 pm: System Notice: This thread content has been automatically archived from another thread which reached post limit, and will be preserved for reference and archival purposes. The discussion should continue in the original thread (http://forums.slickdeals.net/showthread.php?t=98130)

Which do you believe in the age of the Earth?


System Notice: This thread has been automatically renewed after reaching a post limit. Most of its content has been moved to this thread (http://forums.slickdeals.net/showthread.php?t=798800) for reference purposes.

I don't know that I believe fully in either. But I sure as shit don't think creationism should be taught in a public school science class. I have absolutely no problem with them discussing it in religous studies.

neither creation or evolution can be proven. both require faith to a varying degree

Every time I see this thread necromanced, I get the sinking feeling that I'm actually in the movie "Groundhog's Day"

I believe in the inerrancy of the Bible, and I do not believe in the level of redaction you're ascribing to the text. Sure, some people changed a few words here or there, changed place names which no longer meant anything, stuff like that. But there is good evidence that the Pentateuch as a whole is as ancient as Moses himself.
If it is inerrant, then words and names and such would not be changed, you are contradicting yourself. Why would one section call it the staff of Aaron and other places Mose's staff.? Did Moses receive the Torah on Sinai or Herob? Of course that is only one of hundreds of contradictory doublets which give me strong evidence that this book was man-made, not divine. It all has to do with the various political and geographical separation of the various peoples and their own versions of the stories. In order to believe in the biblical inerrancy, your faith must supersede common sense. I'm sorry, I really don't want that to sound mean-spirited, I respect people's beliefs, but there is too much evidence against biblical inerrancy even among some very religious people.

Every time I see this thread necromanced, I get the sinking feeling that I'm actually in the movie "Groundhog's Day"
:lol:

If nothing else, it's nice to see the old crew again. How's life Superdan?

Most of the OT was most likely put together by Ezra (Documentary Theorists call him R, the redactor). He took the various oral and written stories that had been passed down through generations. However, due to the separation of the Kingdom of Israel and Judah, as well as the Babylonian exile, then the re-assimilation of the various tribes which also introduced political turmoil as the different groups claimed divine right, which is why we see Moses predominant but the Aaronid priests weren't willing to give up power so easily. Much of the details of the stories were changed over time by the various sub-groups which is why we see so many doublets in the OT.
Ezra tried his best to reconcile these differences and attempt to make a flowing narrative, but the problems remain until this day.

Even if Ezra were a redactor, I think that the written material he theoretically would have compiled from is far more vast and intricate than what you seem to be assuming. And I doubt that the edits were that severe, if there were any at all. For example, take Judges 1:21:

Judges 1:21
But the sons of Benjamin did not drive out the Jebusites who lived in Jerusalem; so the Jebusites have lived with the sons of Benjamin in Jerusalem to this day.

Now later on in Samuel we find that David drove out the Jebusites from Jerusalem and established it as his capital. Ezra, living some 500 years later would have surely updated portions of scripture such as these to match the current state of affairs if he were really trying to smooth out the manuscripts into one flowing text.

I guess I just don't see what is so damning about the redactor theory. Someone had to compile all this stuff together.

:lol:

If nothing else, it's nice to see the old crew again. How's life Superdan?

Life is amazing! Currently the Mrs. and I are expecting our first child (due in April). I've put the whole C vs. E debate on hiatus as all the proof I'll ever need of Creation is currently growing inside my wife's belly! :D

Life is amazing! Currently the Mrs. and I are expecting our first child (due in April). I've put the whole C vs. E debate on hiatus as all the proof I'll ever need of Creation is currently growing inside my wife's belly! :D

Sweet! Congrats!. I know how you feel. My baby girl, my first one also, was born just last week. Life is good when you see their little faces :D:hug:

Life is amazing! Currently the Mrs. and I are expecting our first child (due in April). I've put the whole C vs. E debate on hiatus as all the proof I'll ever need of Creation is currently growing inside my wife's belly! :D
congrats and best of luck! between you and talgot, this thread's a virtual maternity ward!

Sweet! Congrats!. I know how you feel. My baby girl, my first one also, was born just last week. Life is good when you see their little faces :D:hug:
congrats talgot! :cheers:

congrats and best of luck! between you and talgot, this thread's a virtual maternity ward!


congrats talgot! :cheers:

Thank you thank you! :D

If it is inerrant, then words and names and such would not be changed, you are contradicting yourself. Why would one section call it the staff of Aaron and other places Mose's staff.? Did Moses receive the Torah on Sinai or Herob? Of course that is only one of hundreds of contradictory doublets which give me strong evidence that this book was man-made, not divine. It all has to do with the various political and geographical separation of the various peoples and their own versions of the stories. In order to believe in the biblical inerrancy, your faith must supersede common sense. I'm sorry, I really don't want that to sound mean-spirited, I respect people's beliefs, but there is too much evidence against biblical inerrancy even among some very religious people.

I think a definition of terms is the problem then. The holy scriptures were written by people under inspiration of God, and they inerrantly communicated God's message to a particular people at a particular place in time. Our job reading them is to take from them the timeless truths that appear, and apply them to our lives. The scripture is inerrant in that it allows man a valid picture of God as applied in the answer to the question: "how shall I live?".

congrats and best of luck! between you and talgot, this thread's a virtual maternity ward!

thanks!

I guess that's what happens when one is pro-Creation. :D

(Ok that's a terrible pun but I couldn't resist)

P.S Congrats talgot! :highfive: I'm assuming we'll be seeing some 3:00AM posts on here in the next few weeks ;).

thanks!

I guess that's what happens when one is pro-Creation. :D

(Ok that's a terrible pun but I couldn't resist)

P.S Congrats talgot! :highfive: I'm assuming we'll be seeing some 3:00AM posts on here in the next few weeks ;).

LOL! well only prob is I have to get the mrs permission .

thanks!

I guess that's what happens when one is pro-Creation. :D

(Ok that's a terrible pun but I couldn't resist)

P.S Congrats talgot! :highfive: I'm assuming we'll be seeing some 3:00AM posts on here in the next few weeks ;).
I giggled :)

LOL! well only prob is I have to get the mrs permission .
:whip:

I think a definition of terms is the problem then. The holy scriptures were written by people under inspiration of God, and they inerrantly communicated God's message to a particular people at a particular place in time. Our job reading them is to take from them the timeless truths that appear, and apply them to our lives. The scripture is inerrant in that it allows man a valid picture of God as applied in the answer to the question: "how shall I live?".
I believe you are correct and it is a matter of definition. Biblical inerrancy is typically defined as totally without error, and free from all contradiction; "referring to the complete accuracy of Scripture, including the historical and scientific parts"
I think you may be referring to Biblical infallibility (or limited inerrancy), which holds that the Bible is inerrant on issues of faith and practice but not history or science.
There is also Biblical literalism, the adherence to the explicit and literal sense of the Bible. In its purest form such a belief would deny the existence of allegory, parable and metaphor in the Bible. Biblical literalism is not synonymous with biblical inerrancy. Whereas inerrancy doctrine deals with the truthfulness of the author's intended message, biblical literalism deals with the interpretation of certain passages being literal.

Even if Ezra were a redactor, I think that the written material he theoretically would have compiled from is far more vast and intricate than what you seem to be assuming. And I doubt that the edits were that severe, if there were any at all.
Superdan, I don't believe that I was claiming that Ezra added much, merely that he weaved together the various versions of oral and written histories that were around during his time. Approximately 450 BC - as the Redactor emerges on the scene. He sees the need for religious revival and renewal, for strengthening and centralization. Remember, The southern kingdom of Judah is conquered by Babylon in 587 BC. The people are exiled for 50 years, then return to Jerusalem to rebuild the Temple and restore their religion. There is no longer a king of the line of David, but a high priest.
Ezra was an Aaronid priest empowered by the Persian emperor to arbitrate and assert the state religion. Ezra was instructed to uphold the religious text that he carried back with him from the Babylonian exile. According to the Biblical Book of Nehemiah, when Ezra read it out to the assembled people returning from exile, many thought that certain things were new and had not been read before. In particular, a law, usually ascribed to R, concerning the Festival of Booths, is reported as never having been carried out before.
The process is not easy. Other exiled peoples were assimilated by their conquerors and disappeared; the Israelites remained faithful to their homeland and their God. But the religion had been weakened by the exile, and needed to be strengthened and consolidated. So he combines the three documents (JE, P, and D) into one smooth flowing narrative--the five books of Moses.

The Redactor did lots of cutting and pasting. Genealogies that probably started all together in a P-text were interspersed throughout JE, acting as bridging material or section dividers. Materials that told the same story from pro-Aaron and anti-Aaron viewpoints (for example) were neatly woven together.

The Redactor was respectful of his sources and kept them largely intact. These were all sacred and ancient texts/traditions, so the Redactor presumably didn't drop material--duplication was preferable to omission. Sometimes he combined the different texts; sometimes he left the two stories side by side.

The single document became the center of the Israelite religion, under the prophets Ezra and Nehemiah. Authorship was ascribed to Moses. This wasn't deception. The Redactor in all likelihood knew nothing of the prior 500 year history of authorship and honestly believed the material he was editing had all been handed down from Moses.

From 450 BC on the document was fixed--no more changes. The oldest existing parchments, the Dead Sea scrolls, date from around 100 BC. They're almost word-for-word identical to the versions we have today (although there are occasional transcription errors, most so small they would be noticed only by an experienced scholar).

Much of this is based on the work of Richard Elliot Friedman and comes closest to representing the consensus among Documentary scholars. If you want a good read, his book, Who Wrote the Bible is very intriguing whether you believe any of it or not.

Life is amazing! Currently the Mrs. and I are expecting our first child (due in April). I've put the whole C vs. E debate on hiatus as all the proof I'll ever need of Creation is currently growing inside my wife's belly! :D

Sweet! Congrats!. I know how you feel. My baby girl, my first one also, was born just last week. Life is good when you see their little faces :D:hug:

Congrats you two! :woot:

Holy Crap! I ignore this thread for a bit and BAM! Babies!

Congrats SupaDan and Talgot. I shall smoke a cigar in your honor. :thumbup:

Just to add to the debate...

I love stories like this.

THE scientist who led the team that cracked the human genome is to publish a book explaining why he now believes in the existence of God and is convinced that miracles are real.

Francis Collins, the director of the US National Human Genome Research Institute, claims there is a rational basis for a creator and that scientific discoveries bring man “closer to God”.

His book, The Language of God, to be published in September, will reopen the age-old debate about the relationship between science and faith. “One of the great tragedies of our time is this impression that has been created that science and religion have to be at war,” said Collins, 56.

“I don’t see that as necessary at all and I think it is deeply disappointing that the shrill voices that occupy the extremes of this spectrum have dominated the stage for the past 20 years.”

For Collins, unravelling the human genome did not create a conflict in his mind. Instead, it allowed him to “glimpse at the workings of God”.
Related Links

* Chimp genome helps reveal secrets of man

* Playing the God game

“When you make a breakthrough it is a moment of scientific exhilaration because you have been on this search and seem to have found it,” he said. “But it is also a moment where I at least feel closeness to the creator in the sense of having now perceived something that no human knew before but God knew all along.

“When you have for the first time in front of you this 3.1 billion-letter instruction book that conveys all kinds of information and all kinds of mystery about humankind, you can’t survey that going through page after page without a sense of awe. I can’t help but look at those pages and have a vague sense that this is giving me a glimpse of God’s mind.”

Collins joins a line of scientists whose research deepened their belief in God. Isaac Newton, whose discovery of the laws of gravity reshaped our understanding of the universe, said: “This most beautiful system could only proceed from the dominion of an intelligent and powerful being.”

Although Einstein revolutionised our thinking about time, gravity and the conversion of matter to energy, he believed the universe had a creator. “I want to know His thoughts; the rest are details,” he said. However Galileo was famously questioned by the inquisition and put on trial in 1633 for the “heresy” of claiming that the earth moved around the sun.

Among Collins’s most controversial beliefs is that of “theistic evolution”, which claims natural selection is the tool that God chose to create man. In his version of the theory, he argues that man will not evolve further.

“I see God’s hand at work through the mechanism of evolution. If God chose to create human beings in his image and decided that the mechanism of evolution was an elegant way to accomplish that goal, who are we to say that is not the way,” he says.

“Scientifically, the forces of evolution by natural selection have been profoundly affected for humankind by the changes in culture and environment and the expansion of the human species to 6 billion members. So what you see is pretty much what you get.”

Collins was an atheist until the age of 27, when as a young doctor he was impressed by the strength that faith gave to some of his most critical patients.

“They had terrible diseases from which they were probably not going to escape, and yet instead of railing at God they seemed to lean on their faith as a source of great comfort and reassurance,” he said. “That was interesting, puzzling and unsettling.”

He decided to visit a Methodist minister and was given a copy of C S Lewis’s Mere Christianity, which argues that God is a rational possibility. The book transformed his life. “It was an argument I was not prepared to hear,” he said. “I was very happy with the idea that God didn’t exist, and had no interest in me. And yet at the same time, I could not turn away.”

His epiphany came when he went hiking through the Cascade Mountains in Washington state. He said: “It was a beautiful afternoon and suddenly the remarkable beauty of creation around me was so overwhelming, I felt, ‘I cannot resist this another moment’.”

Collins believes that science cannot be used to refute the existence of God because it is confined to the “natural” world. In this light he believes miracles are a real possibility. “If one is willing to accept the existence of God or some supernatural force outside nature then it is not a logical problem to admit that, occasionally, a supernatural force might stage an invasion,” he says.

(source (http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article673663.ece))

lol, thanks for the post. Might have to check that out.

He's right about science and religion not being at war, except in the mind of some people in each.

He's right about science and religion not being at war, except in the mind of some people in each....or in the minds of some people who are outside of both science and religion. :nod:

...or in the minds of some people who are outside of both science and religion. :nod:
sounds right, too :)

However Galileo was famously questioned by the inquisition and put on trial in 1633 for the “heresy” of claiming that the earth moved around the sun.
I know this is a bit OT but it is something that has been bothering me for some time. Generally, it is proper to use someone's last name when referring to them, journalists are taught to use the full name once, e.g. Albert Einstein, then continue with only their last name for the rest of the story. We always say Einstein, Copernicus, Newton, Kepler, Hawking, etc. but in Galileo's case we use his first name. Why don't we refer to him as Galilei? except for Madonna and other one named people, I can't think of any other instance where this is the case.

“They had terrible diseases from which they were probably not going to escape, and yet instead of railing at God they seemed to lean on their faith as a source of great comfort and reassurance,” he said. “That was interesting, puzzling and unsettling.

This guy never heard of the placebo affect?

There's very little doubt in the medical community regarding the power of the mind in regards to the affects on the body. If believing God helps one to heal, great - but it does not in any way even begin to prove the existence of any God.

“They had terrible diseases from which they were probably not going to escape, and yet instead of railing at God they seemed to lean on their faith as a source of great comfort and reassurance,” he said. “That was interesting, puzzling and unsettling.

This guy never heard of the placebo affect?

There's very little doubt in the medical community regarding the power of the mind in regards to the affects on the body. If believing God helps one to heal, great - but it does not in any way even begin to prove the existence of any God.
I don't think that is what he was puzzled and unsettled about. I believe what he was saying that as a non-believer, he didn't understand the comfort faith gave them when faced with a terminal illness or other terrible ordeal. He would have thought that people would be angry with a god that allowed them to suffer. At least that's how I interpreted it.

I know this is a bit OT but it is something that has been bothering me for some time. Generally, it is proper to use someone's last name when referring to them, journalists are taught to use the full name once, e.g. Albert Einstein, then continue with only their last name for the rest of the story. We always say Einstein, Copernicus, Newton, Kepler, Hawking, etc. but in Galileo's case we use his first name. Why don't we refer to him as Galilei? except for Madonna and other one named people, I can't think of any other instance where this is the case.
Bohemian Rhapsody.

Bohemian Rhapsody.
Bonk, sometimes I'm not sure whether to take you seriously, please use the emoticons. :-p

Bonk, sometimes I'm not sure whether to take you seriously,

Oh that's easy. You are never supposed to take Bonk seriously. :)

Kidding, Bonk! :cool:

Hey all,

I can't remember where I came across this (maybe it was here), but there is an EXCELLENT debate between Dr. Collins and Richard Dawkins on the subject of God & Science. It was published in TIME magazine a few years back. I can't post the whole thing here as it's 9 pages long, but I'll give a few of Collins' quotes from the debate I thought were especially good.


"Faith is not the opposite of reason. Faith rests squarely upon reason, but with the added component of revelation. So such discussions between scientists and believers happen quite readily. But neither scientists nor believers always embody the principles precisely. Scientists can have their judgment clouded by their professional aspirations. And the pure truth of faith, which you can think of as this clear spiritual water, is poured into rusty vessels called human beings, and so sometimes the benevolent principles of faith can get distorted as positions are hardened."

"Certainly science should continue to see whether we can find evidence for multiverses that might explain why our own universe seems to be so finely tuned. But I do object to the assumption that anything that might be outside of nature is ruled out of the conversation. That's an impoverished view of the kinds of questions we humans can ask, such as "Why am I here?", "What happens after we die?", "Is there a God?" If you refuse to acknowledge their appropriateness, you end up with a zero probability of God after examining the natural world because it doesn't convince you on a proof basis. But if your mind is open about whether God might exist, you can point to aspects of the universe that are consistent with that conclusion."

"I just would like to say that over more than a quarter-century as a scientist and a believer, I find absolutely nothing in conflict between agreeing with Richard in practically all of his conclusions about the natural world, and also saying that I am still able to accept and embrace the possibility that there are answers that science isn't able to provide about the natural world--the questions about why instead of the questions about how. I'm interested in the whys. I find many of those answers in the spiritual realm. That in no way compromises my ability to think rigorously as a scientist."


If your interested in the whole thing, check out the following link. The actual debate begins on page 4.

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1555132-1,00.html

I know this is a bit OT but it is something that has been bothering me for some time. Generally, it is proper to use someone's last name when referring to them, journalists are taught to use the full name once, e.g. Albert Einstein, then continue with only their last name for the rest of the story. We always say Einstein, Copernicus, Newton, Kepler, Hawking, etc. but in Galileo's case we use his first name. Why don't we refer to him as Galilei? except for Madonna and other one named people, I can't think of any other instance where this is the case.

It's probably b/c his first name is very unique. Albert, Nicholas & Isaac aren't names you associate with one person, however Napoleon, Michelangelo, Saddam, Galileo and Moon Unit (Zappa) are. ;)

It's probably b/c his first name is very unique. Albert, Nicholas & Isaac aren't names you associate with one person, however Napoleon, Michelangelo, Saddam, Galileo and Moon Unit (Zappa) are. ;)
That was my first inclination but it does go against standard convention. Zappa or Saddam are not good examples because we have to use their first names in order to distinguish them from the other Zappas and Husseins. But you brought up two I hadn't thought of with Napoleon and Michelangelo, however with artists we tend to use the name they sign their work with, such is the case with Michelangelo. If he signed his work Buonarroti, then that is probably how history would know him.
Thanks for answering that, you are probably right on track.

Ben Stein's Expelled: No Integrity Displayed (http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=ben-steins-expelled-review-john-rennie)
A shameful antievolution film tries to blame Darwin for the Holocaust

Editor's note: This story is part of a series "Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed--Scientific American's Take. (http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=sciam-reviews-expelled)"

OP Note: Another story here (http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=ben-steins-expelled-review-michael-shermer).

In the new science-bashing movie Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, Ben Stein and the rest of the filmmakers sincerely and seriously argue that Charles Darwin's theory of evolution paved the way for the Holocaust. By "seriously," I mean that Ben Stein acts grief-stricken and the director juxtaposes quotes from evolutionary biologists with archival newsreel clips from Hitler's Reich. Prepare for an intellectual night at the cinema.

No one could have been more surprised than I when the producers called, unbidden, offering Scientific American's editors a private screening. Given that our magazine's positions on evolution and intelligent design (ID) creationism reflect those of the scientific mainstream (that is, evolution: good science; ID: not science), you have to wonder why they would bother. It's not as though anything in Expelled would have been likely to change our views. And they can't have been looking for a critique of the science in the movie, because there isn't much to speak of.

Rather, it seems a safe bet that the producers hope a whipping from us would be useful for publicity: further proof that any mention of ID outrages the close-minded establishment. (Picture Ben Stein as Jack Nicholson, shouting, "You can't handle the truth!") Knowing this, we could simply ignore the movie—which might also suit their purposes, come to think of it.

Unfortunately, Expelled is a movie not quite harmless enough to be ignored. Shrugging off most of the film's attacks—all recycled from previous pro-ID works—would be easy, but its heavy-handed linkage of modern biology to the Holocaust demands a response for the sake of simple human decency.

Expelled wears its ambitions to be a creationist Fahrenheit 911 openly, in that it apes many of Michael Moore's comic tricks: emphasizing the narrator's hapless everyman qualities by showing him meandering his way to interviews; riposting interviewees' words with ironic old footage and so on. Director Nathan Frankowski is reasonably adept at the techniques, although he is not half the filmmaker Michael Moore is (and yes, I do mean in both senses of the phrase).

The film begins with the triumphant entry of financial columnist, media figure and former Nixon White House speechwriter Ben Stein to a filled college lecture hall. (If this review were styled after the movie, I'd be intercutting clips of Nixon flashing a victory sign with Stein's scenes from Ferris Bueller's Day Off and his eyedrop commercials, but you get the idea.) Stein explains that he is speaking out because he has "lately noticed a dire trend" that threatens the state of our nation: the ascendance of godless, materialist, evolutionary science and an unwillingness among academics to consider more theistic alternatives. A montage of short clips then shows Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett and other scientists scorning religion or ID without context. "Freedom is the essence of America!" Stein insists, and he frets that scientists who like their empiricism with a dash of deus ex machina are oppressed. He and Expelled charge that scientists, in their rejection of religious explanations, have become as intolerant as Nazis. Or maybe Stalinists—the film clips were ambiguous on that point.

(The newsreel footage from the old Soviet days kept confusing me. Stein does know that the Stalinists rejected the theory of evolution as a biological rendition of capitalism, doesn't he? And that they replaced it with their own ideologically driven, disastrous theory of Lysenkoism? Does Stein think that moviegoers won't know this?)

I should note that Stein and Expelled rarely refer to "scientists" as I did—they call them Darwinists. Similarly, this review may have already used the word "evolution" about as often as the whole of Expelled does; in the movie, it is always Darwinism. The term is a curious throwback, because in modern biology almost no one relies solely on Darwin's original ideas—most researchers would call themselves neo-Darwinian if they bothered to make the historical connection at all because evolutionary science now encompasses concepts as diverse as symbiosis, kin selection and developmental genetics. Yet the choice of terminology isn't random: Ben Stein wants you to stop thinking of evolution as an actual science supported by verifiable facts and logical arguments and to start thinking of it as a dogmatic, atheistic ideology akin to Marxism.

Expelled then trots out some of the people whom it claims have been persecuted by the Darwinist establishment. First among them is Robert Sternberg, former editor of the peer-reviewed Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington, who published an article on ID by Stephen C. Meyer of the Discovery Institute. Sternberg tells Stein that he subsequently lost his editorship, his old position at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History and his original office. Looking a bit smug in his self-martyrdom, Sternberg also reports that a colleague compared him with an "intellectual terrorist."

What most viewers of Expelled may not realize—because the film doesn't even hint at it—is that Sternberg's case is not quite what it sounds. Biologists criticized Sternberg's choice to publish the paper not only because it supported ID but also because Sternberg approved it by himself rather than sending it out for independent expert review. He didn't lose his editorship; he published the paper in what was already scheduled to be his last issue as editor. He didn't lose his job at the Smithsonian; his appointment there as an unpaid research associate had a limited term, and when it was over he was given a new one. His office move was scheduled before the paper ever appeared. [For more details see Ben Stein Launches a Science-free Attack on Darwin by Michael Shermer. (http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=ben-steins-expelled-review-michael-shermer)]

And so on. These confounding facts are documented in the appendix to the unofficial Congressional report from Rep. Mark Souder's office that the film cites in support of its story. At the very least, the Sternberg affair is considerably more complicated and questionable than Expelled lets on. The movie's one-sided version is either the result of shoddy investigation or deliberate propagandizing—neither of which reflects well on the other information in the film.

So it is with the rest of Expelled's parade of victims. Caroline Crocker, a biology teacher, was allegedly dismissed from her position at George Mason University after merely mentioning ID; the film somehow never reports exactly what she said or why anyone objected to it. Reporter Pamela Winnick was supposedly pilloried and fired after she wrote objectively about evolution and ID; we don't know exactly what she wrote but later we do hear her asserting with disgust that "Darwinism devalues human life." The film forgot to mention that Winnick is the author of the book A Jealous God: Science's Crusade Against Religion—a title that suggests her objectivity on the subject might be a bit tarnished.

The movie's unreliable reporting is even more obvious during the scene in which Stein interviews Bruce Chapman, the president of the Discovery Institute, the institutional heart of ID advocacy. Stein asks whether the Discovery Institute has supported the teaching of ID in science classes so avidly because it is trying to sneak religion back into public schools. Chapman says no and the film blithely takes him at his word. No mention is made of the notorious "Wedge" document, a leaked Discovery Institute manifesto that outlined a strategy of opposing evolution and turning the public against scientific materialism as the first step toward making society more politically conservative and theistic. Maybe Ben Stein didn't think it was relevant, but wouldn't an honest film have trusted its audience to judge for itself?

The most conspicuous absence from the movie, however—and you would think it was impossible in a movie about evolution and ID—is any real science. Anyone looking for scientific reasons or even detailed arguments for why scientists maintained either position would go away unsatisfied. A half hour or so passes before anyone in the film offers even simplistic definitions for evolution and ID. Nor is there any discussion of evolution's accomplishments in illuminating the history of life and problems in fields as diverse as medicine and astrophysics, and its applications to technology such as combinatorial chemistry.

Instead, various Discovery Institute fellows intone that evolution is a "slippery," hard-to-pin-down theory. No such criticism is made of ID, a notion which firmly states that at one or more unspecified times in the past, an unidentified designer who might or might not be God somehow created whole organisms, or maybe just cells, or maybe just certain parts of cells—they're still deciding and will get back to you on that.

Expelled would rather dwell on what it considers to be the failures of evolution, most notably the lack of a detailed explanation for the origin of life. Never mind that nearly all of evolutionary biology concerns other problems. Indeed, even if life somehow did have a supernatural origin, evolution still offers the most coherent scientific explanation for what is seen in nature and the fossil record about the development of life since then.

Moreover, modern biologists do have tentative ideas about how life might first have evolved. One snippet of the film shows philosopher Michael Ruse gamely trying to explain how crystals might have offered a substrate on which the components of protolife could have organized themselves into early replicating units, but that idea is met with Stein's stony-faced derision and a mocking clip of a swami with a crystal ball.

It speaks to their anti-intellectualism and fundamental misunderstanding of science that for the makers of Expelled (and ID advocates more generally) the answer "we don't know yet" is a badge of shame. "We don't know yet" is what defines the fruitful frontier for science; it is what directs scientists' curiosity and motivates them to spend years on research. Research starts where knowledge and certainty drop off. It's one of the many ironies of Expelled that Ben Stein says he wants this movie to free people to ask questions about science, but the ID theories he defends would close off inquiry with nonanswers.

Like the decision to call evolution Darwinism, the omission of science from Expelled was a deliberate choice. In fact, it was crucial to the film's strategy. Because they know Americans revere freedom of speech and fairness, the producers cast the conflict between evolution and ID as purely a struggle between worldviews—a difference of opinions, a battle of ideologies—in which one side is censoring the other. They know that the public will instinctively want to defend the underdog, especially when that opinion aligns with the religious beliefs many of them already share.

It is a terrific strategy, but with one caveat: that airy skirmish of opinions must never, ever touch the ground of solid evidence. Because if it does, if viewers are ever allowed to notice that evolution is supported by mountains of tangible, peer-reviewed evidence gathered by generations of scientists, whereas ID has little more than a smattering of vanity-press pamphlets from a handful of cranks... the bubble pops.

Expelled is all about how science should not reject people with ID "theories." The filmmakers must therefore stop you from ever asking, Why?—because even children understand that in science, two ideas are not equally good if one of them is wrong. Some of the ideas fluffing up ID are demonstrably wrong; the rest are often described as "not even wrong" because they are so untestable or irreconcilable with the rest of science.

Ben Stein doesn't want you to recognize evolution versus ID as a conflict between valid scientific ideas and invalid ones, because then it suddenly begins to look much more just when, say, universities don't reward faculty who fritter away their careers on ill-conceived theories. He doesn't even want you to think about why scientists regard ID as illegitimate.

And so in Expelled you will hear many scientists express their scorn for ID, but you will never hear why. You will never hear anyone note that scientists have identified serious flaws in ID principles such as "irreducible complexity." You will never hear anyone explain why invoking a mysterious designer with unknown (and possibly divine) powers to fill in the gaps in our knowledge is not scientifically satisfying.

You certainly won't hear anyone question why Expelled and the rest of the ID crowd pick on evolutionary biology for its materialism when every other field of modern science is equally so. Albert Einstein failed to devise a unified field theory despite decades of work, and hordes of physicists since have done no better—why doesn't someone slap an ID explanation on that so we can call it a day?

You will hear Dawkins, Dennett, William Provine and other scientists in the film remark that their understanding of evolution helped lead them to atheism, and that is something Ben Stein very much does want you to hear—even if he does not want you to hear details about why or how. (Maybe you would get ideas!) Nevertheless, there are subtle distinctions in what they are saying between what is science, what is philosophy and what is personal conviction, even if the speakers do not always make them.

You certainly would never guess from the film that there are also biologists like Francisco Ayala of the University of California in Irvine and Ken Miller of Brown University, both devout Catholics, and religious persons such as the Rev. Michael Dowd, author of Thank God for Evolution, who find a comfortable middle ground for their beliefs and their science.

However cinematically proficient Expelled may be as entertainment or propaganda, it is largely a rehash of the same arguments that ID proponents have been making for the past couple of decades: it isn't fair to ignore it; evolution is incomplete; the establishment is out to get us; blah blah blah. I'm not sure the Discovery Institute will welcome the film with open arms. After all, it has spent the past 15 years insisting that ID is not closeted religious creationism; now Expelled trashes that position by ridiculing every alternative to the unidentified designer being God.

But in one respect, Expelled does go farther than any other popular ID offensive to date: in how relentlessly, tastelessly and repulsively it links Darwin's theory of evolution to the Holocaust. Here the filmmakers take their previously displayed knack for lying through selective reporting and misdirection and show that they are up to the challenge of shifting blame for the Nazis' genocide, however slightly, away from Hitler. Bravo, Ben Stein. Bravo.

The film lets philosopher David Berlinski begin the assault. After dutifully insisting that of course no one is saying the Holocaust is Darwin's doing, he maintains that Darwinism was a "necessary though not sufficient" cause for it. (This is a flimsy basis for the subsequent argument: if true, shouldn't one focus blame on the sufficient causes rather than the necessary ones—that is, the Nazis themselves?) The film then makes every connection it can between the theory of evolution, eugenics and the Nazi's ugly dreams of eliminating the untermenschen (subhumans), including a guided tour of all the signs of the "Darwinist" influence at a Nazi crematorium and a concentration camp. Stein then reiterates that of course Darwin didn't cause the Holocaust before further pressing the message that evolution bears a heavy responsibility for it anyway.

Hitler's thinking did opportunistically incorporate social Darwinism and eugenics, which are distorted offshoots of true evolutionary concepts. Many prominent scientists of the time agreed with them, too, to their shame, and it's entirely possible that the scientific veneer of authority on those ideas made them more persuasive. Yet this guilt-by-association ploy says nothing about evolution itself: the theory of evolution remains scientifically valid, even if fools misinterpret it.

And make no mistake; social Darwinism and eugenics are distortions of evolutionary theory. Social Darwinism was no more than a thin rationalization for the rigid class stratifications in Victorian society. Eugenics has less to do with evolution than it does the much older ideas of animal breeders. (Think about it: if certain classes of people were genuinely inferior in evolutionary terms, Hitler wouldn't have needed to eliminate them—nature would eventually do that itself.)

The most deplorable dishonesty of Expelled, however, is that it says evolution was one influence on the Holocaust without acknowledging any of the other major ones for context. Rankings of races and ethnic groups into a hierarchy long preceded Darwin and the theory of evolution, and were usually tied to the Christian philosophical notion of a "great chain of being." The economic ruin of the Weimar Republic left many Germans itching to find someone to blame for their misfortune, and the Jews and other ethnic groups were convenient scapegoats. The roots of European anti-Semitism go back to the end of the Roman Empire. Organized attacks and local exterminations of the Jews were perpetrated during the Crusades and the Black Plague. The Russian empire committed many attacks on the Jews in the 19th and early 20th century, giving rise to the word "pogrom." Profound anti-Semitism even pollutes the works of the father of the Protestant Reformation, Martin Luther, who reviled them in On the Jews and Their Lies and wrote, "We are at fault in not slaying them." I don't think Protestantism is accountable for the Holocaust, either, but whose ideas were most Lutheran Germans of the 1930s more familiar with: Darwin's or Luther's?

The weakness of the logic of Expelled is beside the point, however. No one who accepts evolution as fact is likely to leave the theater shaken. Some people with looser understandings of the science or the legal issues might buy into its arguments about "fairness" and protecting religion against science. Expelled is nonetheless mostly a film for ID creationism's religious base. That audience has seen one setback after the next in recent years, with science rejecting ID as useless and the courts rebuffing it as for a constitutional violation in public education. For them, Expelled is a rallying point to revive their morale.

Consequently, Expelled wants to end on an inspiring note. It shows Stein railing against the scope of the oppression he has courageously discovered. "It wasn't just science being expelled!" he exclaims. "It was freedom itself!" And then the incongruous hero marches offstage to a thundering ovation while his voiceover narration wryly tweaks "Anyone? Anyone?" to carry on the fight he has started.

But when I think about Expelled, that closing image isn't what comes to mind. When I think about Ben Stein—an intelligent, well-educated man who I imagine might have lost relatives in the Holocaust but is now appropriating it for an intellectually dishonest purpose—my mind goes to the scene in Seattle, when Stein and his film crew wander the streets asking for directions to the Discovery Institute. "We're really, really lost," Stein laughs. And he really, really is.

Ben Stein's Expelled: No Integrity Displayed (http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=ben-steins-expelled-review-john-rennie)
A shameful antievolution film tries to blame Darwin for the Holocaust

...


Like the decision to call evolution Darwinism, the omission of science from Expelled was a deliberate choice. In fact, it was crucial to the film's strategy. Because they know Americans revere freedom of speech and fairness, the producers cast the conflict between evolution and ID as purely a struggle between worldviews—a difference of opinions, a battle of ideologies—in which one side is censoring the other. They know that the public will instinctively want to defend the underdog, especially when that opinion aligns with the religious beliefs many of them already share.

It is a terrific strategy, but with one caveat: that airy skirmish of opinions must never, ever touch the ground of solid evidence. Because if it does, if viewers are ever allowed to notice that evolution is supported by mountains of tangible, peer-reviewed evidence gathered by generations of scientists, whereas ID has little more than a smattering of vanity-press pamphlets from a handful of cranks... the bubble pops.

Expelled is all about how science should not reject people with ID "theories." The filmmakers must therefore stop you from ever asking, Why?—because even children understand that in science, two ideas are not equally good if one of them is wrong. Some of the ideas fluffing up ID are demonstrably wrong; the rest are often described as "not even wrong" because they are so untestable or irreconcilable with the rest of science.

Ben Stein doesn't want you to recognize evolution versus ID as a conflict between valid scientific ideas and invalid ones, because then it suddenly begins to look much more just when, say, universities don't reward faculty who fritter away their careers on ill-conceived theories. He doesn't even want you to think about why scientists regard ID as illegitimate.

And so in Expelled you will hear many scientists express their scorn for ID, but you will never hear why. You will never hear anyone note that scientists have identified serious flaws in ID principles such as "irreducible complexity." You will never hear anyone explain why invoking a mysterious designer with unknown (and possibly divine) powers to fill in the gaps in our knowledge is not scientifically satisfying.

You certainly won't hear anyone question why Expelled and the rest of the ID crowd pick on evolutionary biology for its materialism when every other field of modern science is equally so. Albert Einstein failed to devise a unified field theory despite decades of work, and hordes of physicists since have done no better—why doesn't someone slap an ID explanation on that so we can call it a day?

[..]

However cinematically proficient Expelled may be as entertainment or propaganda, it is largely a rehash of the same arguments that ID proponents have been making for the past couple of decades: it isn't fair to ignore it; evolution is incomplete; the establishment is out to get us; blah blah blah. I'm not sure the Discovery Institute will welcome the film with open arms. After all, it has spent the past 15 years insisting that ID is not closeted religious creationism; now Expelled trashes that position by ridiculing every alternative to the unidentified designer being God.





Excellent article. Hard to believe Ben Stein, a conservative Republican but a well-educated man, can take his political ideology so far as to go against evolutionary theory this way. I find the title of this thread hard enough to take...the notion that evolution and creationism are merely two choices one can make. But I wouldn't have imagined Ben Stein, Hollywood Republican that he is, as a creationist.

More sickening, is the attempt to connect evolution to the Nazi Holocaust:

... in one respect, Expelled does go farther than any other popular ID offensive to date: in how relentlessly, tastelessly and repulsively it links Darwin's theory of evolution to the Holocaust. Here the filmmakers take their previously displayed knack for lying through selective reporting and misdirection and show that they are up to the challenge of shifting blame for the Nazis' genocide, however slightly, away from Hitler. Bravo, Ben Stein. Bravo.

The film lets philosopher David Berlinski begin the assault. After dutifully insisting that of course no one is saying the Holocaust is Darwin's doing, he maintains that Darwinism was a "necessary though not sufficient" cause for it. (This is a flimsy basis for the subsequent argument: if true, shouldn't one focus blame on the sufficient causes rather than the necessary ones—that is, the Nazis themselves?) The film then makes every connection it can between the theory of evolution, eugenics and the Nazi's ugly dreams of eliminating the untermenschen (subhumans), including a guided tour of all the signs of the "Darwinist" influence at a Nazi crematorium and a concentration camp. Stein then reiterates that of course Darwin didn't cause the Holocaust before further pressing the message that evolution bears a heavy responsibility for it anyway.

Hitler's thinking did opportunistically incorporate social Darwinism and eugenics, which are distorted offshoots of true evolutionary concepts. Many prominent scientists of the time agreed with them, too, to their shame, and it's entirely possible that the scientific veneer of authority on those ideas made them more persuasive. Yet this guilt-by-association ploy says nothing about evolution itself: the theory of evolution remains scientifically valid, even if fools misinterpret it.

And make no mistake; social Darwinism and eugenics are distortions of evolutionary theory. Social Darwinism was no more than a thin rationalization for the rigid class stratifications in Victorian society. Eugenics has less to do with evolution than it does the much older ideas of animal breeders. (Think about it: if certain classes of people were genuinely inferior in evolutionary terms, Hitler wouldn't have needed to eliminate them—nature would eventually do that itself.)

The most deplorable dishonesty of Expelled, however, is that it says evolution was one influence on the Holocaust without acknowledging any of the other major ones for context. Rankings of races and ethnic groups into a hierarchy long preceded Darwin and the theory of evolution, and were usually tied to the Christian philosophical notion of a "great chain of being." The economic ruin of the Weimar Republic left many Germans itching to find someone to blame for their misfortune, and the Jews and other ethnic groups were convenient scapegoats. The roots of European anti-Semitism go back to the end of the Roman Empire. Organized attacks and local exterminations of the Jews were perpetrated during the Crusades and the Black Plague. The Russian empire committed many attacks on the Jews in the 19th and early 20th century, giving rise to the word "pogrom." Profound anti-Semitism even pollutes the works of the father of the Protestant Reformation, Martin Luther, who reviled them in On the Jews and Their Lies and wrote, "We are at fault in not slaying them." I don't think Protestantism is accountable for the Holocaust, either, but whose ideas were most Lutheran Germans of the 1930s more familiar with: Darwin's or Luther's?

[...]

.

:eek:

Astonishing that Mr Stein, a Jew, will stoop to using the Holocaust to discredit a scientific theory (fact, rather]) simply because it clashes with his conservative agenda.

Is this what happens when those Clear Eye drops get into your head?

I am pleased that Stein put this together. I believe in diversity, dialogue, freedom of expression, and informed criticism. Perhaps others are too narrow minded to consider alternative viewpoints, but I am pleased that Stein is taking this message to the people. People complaining about this film and it's ties to Nazi Germany are really saying that can find no fault in the logic behind his film. And it's no wonder, because it hasn't been released yet. Yet you feel the need to criticize it's contents.


I recommend being more open minded; maybe you'll learn something from the film?

I am pleased that Stein put this together. I believe in diversity, dialogue, freedom of expression, and informed criticism. Perhaps others are too narrow minded to consider alternative viewpoints, but I am pleased that Stein is taking this message to the people. People complaining about this film and it's ties to Nazi Germany are really saying that can find no fault in the logic behind his film. And it's no wonder, because it hasn't been released yet. Yet you feel the need to criticize it's contents.


I recommend being more open minded; maybe you'll learn something from the film?

Maybe you didn't read the article but there were a lot of faults with the film that had nothing to do with the Holocaust issue. The fact is that this film is an idealogical propaganda film on par with Michael Moore films, no scientific content. half-truths and misrepresentations.
Some of us thought that Stein would have more integrity than to stoop to that level. Penn and Teller's Bullshit episode did a better job honestly explaining the Creationist viewpoint than this film did of explaining EITHER side.

Have you seen it?

. People complaining about this film and it's ties to Nazi Germany are really saying that can find no fault in the logic behind his film.

If the film is promoting creationism, then there can't be much logic involved in it in the first place as creationism isn't based on logic, but instead only the faith of it's followers.

People complaining about this film and it's ties to Nazi Germany are really saying that can find no fault in the logic behind his film.

It's hilarious how illogical this statement is.

People complaining about this film and it's ties to Nazi Germany are really saying that can find no fault in the logic behind his film.

Can you make a logical connection between the theory of evolution and the Holocaust? I'd like to hear it :eek:

Can you make a logical connection between the theory of evolution and the Holocaust? I'd like to hear it :eek:

IIRC, the main argument is that with evolution you have "survival of the fittest" and Hitler wanted to get rid of a race he thought was inferior. Or something along the lines of that. Loosely I can see a connection, but I don't think one can take that as causation when there is just a minor correlation between the two.

IIRC, the main argument is that with evolution you have "survival of the fittest" and Hitler wanted to get rid of a race he thought was inferior. Or something along the lines of that. Loosely I can see a connection, but I don't think one can take that as causation when there is just a minor correlation between the two.
that's confusing darwinism and social darwinism.

that's confusing darwinism and social darwinism.

True, but don't you think that's what most are doing?

that's confusing darwinism and social darwinism.
Social Darwinism is also a misnomer. Selective breeding had been around for centuries prior to Darwin. Natural Selection is, well, natural, not purposely selected for. When and if people used Darwin to forward their own agenda had to purposely distort it to suit their ends. So in a way, there is some logic there but in a very twisted way. Someone like Ben Stein who really is very intelligent should know and understand this. So either he either purposely ignores it to support his agenda or is not as smart as I thought he was.

Social Darwinism is also a misnomer. Selective breeding had been around for centuries prior to Darwin. Natural Selection is, well, natural, not purposely selected for. When and if people used Darwin to forward their own agenda had to purposely distort it to suit their ends. So in a way, there is some logic there but in a very twisted way. Someone like Ben Stein who really is very intelligent should know and understand this. So either he either purposely ignores it to support his agenda or is not as smart as I thought he was.I believe it's the former.

I believe it's the former.

Hence my conclusion that he stooped to the level of Micheal Moore in making an untruthful propaganda film, to which Mammothwooly seems to think I have to have seen the film to make that assessment. Mammoth will have to come to the same conclusion, either he is purposefully distorting the facts or is himself not too bright, either way it is a condemnation of the film.

He and Expelled charge that scientists, in their rejection of religious explanations, have become as intolerant as Nazis. Or maybe Stalinists—the film clips were ambiguous on that point.

(The newsreel footage from the old Soviet days kept confusing me. Stein does know that the Stalinists rejected the theory of evolution as a biological rendition of capitalism, doesn't he? And that they replaced it with their own ideologically driven, disastrous theory of Lysenkoism? Does Stein think that moviegoers won't know this?)


If he represents Stien's position properly in the sentence above... then the intolerance of the Stalinists for other views is the point and not what the particular views were.


The movie's unreliable reporting is even more obvious during the scene in which Stein interviews Bruce Chapman, the president of the Discovery Institute, the institutional heart of ID advocacy. Stein asks whether the Discovery Institute has supported the teaching of ID in science classes so avidly because it is trying to sneak religion back into public schools. Chapman says no and the film blithely takes him at his word. No mention is made of the notorious "Wedge" document, a leaked Discovery Institute manifesto that outlined a strategy of opposing evolution and turning the public against scientific materialism as the first step toward making society more politically conservative and theistic. Maybe Ben Stein didn't think it was relevant, but wouldn't an honest film have trusted its audience to judge for itself?


Much of what is said in this debate broadly hinges on the notion that belief in a creator = religion. As though you can't believe in a creator, or even that an intelligent designer w/o religion. Or that the notion that there may be a creator is one that equals religion.

The whole problem with the ID effort is that we don't have philosophy classes in schools. Now one of the larger issues with the idea of having philosophy classes in schools is that philosophers are in extremely short supply. So we are left with the alternative of having public schools teach what amounts to materialism ... vs ID in science classes.

In my view the materialist perspective has a very strong foothold in our society, and no amount of ID classes in schools will serve to dislodge it. Tocqueville believed that democracy cut man off from higher things in general, including religion, philosophy, and even the possibility of transcendent truth (whether it be discovered by philosophy or revelation). He believed that democracy encouraged both materialism and pantheism.

All that said, I can't fault them for trying. I don't think we'll be well served by the domination of Materialism. Perhaps no view should become so dominant. And when certain viewpoints threaten us with domination we are inclined to resist, as we should.

--

The attempt to connect Nazism to Darwin is bold and shocking... and i'm sure that was the intent. One of our less developed habits of mind is our tendency to search for the single cause. We do this with many things, including history... and of course this is a scientific habit of mind. There is some irony here. Our scientific habit of mind informs the views of people who are viewed as religious zealots.

But we should note that Darwinism and Materialism bring man down off of his existential pedestal. These views cultivate the notion that man is no longer a being invested by god with an inherent worth. Eugenics is something that might have taken what it needed from Darwin to advance its cause... but Darwin is not the only cause of Eugenics... nor is Darwin the only cause of the Holocaust.

I've not seen this movie of course, but I suspect this idea is a watered down version of the thought of people like Strauss and Voegelin. They viewed the Holocaust and Nazism as part of the crisis of modernity. The modern world was brought to witness the fullest application of a number of modern presuppositions... including the idea that, civilization, society and man as a biological organism could be perfected via scientific planning. At the same time value neutral social science was not prepared to call things like Nazism or Stalinism evil. B/c evil was a "value" and social science was held prisoner by its fidelity to the "fact - value distinction".

These realities along with a few others brought about a philosophical re-ordering of sorts. Modernity's project came to be seen as something that was not w/o its flaws. The enlightenment's effort to install a skylight in Plato's cave was a failure for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that the shadows on the wall remain, even though the authors of the shadows have changed.

We are in need of pre-modern rationalism to provide skepticism of modernity, especially our positivistic tendencies.


Back to the ethically problematic Holocaust and Nazi eugenics effort. There are other ethically questionable practices that continue today, and you don't have to be religious or even believe in a creator to see them as such... abortion and embryonic research come to mind, along with the prospect of pre-natal genetic manipulation. Positivists and materialists (often one in the same) tend to dismiss ethical questions when dealing with these issues. They are known to do some things 'in the name of science'... these are sometimes ethically questionable things.

I view the ID effort as bringing a diluted pre-modern rationalism into the classroom in an attempt to combat the materialism that is so dominant in our society. Though I don't think philosophy or religion seem to be strong enough to slow our march towards something like Huxley's Brave New World.

Hence my conclusion that he stooped to the level of Micheal Moore in making an untruthful propaganda film, to which Mammothwooly seems to think I have to have seen the film to make that assessment. Mammoth will have to come to the same conclusion, either he is purposefully distorting the facts or is himself not too bright, either way it is a condemnation of the film.

It's funny, your argument makes what I guess Stein's point will be; science is seen to be the only means to truth. Since I don't agree with evolution, I am anti-scientific (your "distorting the facts") and anti-intellectual (your "not too bright").

Is science the only means to truth? Is there any kind of truth which can never be determined by science?

The attempt to connect Nazism to Darwin is bold and shocking... and i'm sure that was the intent. One of our less developed habits of mind is our tendency to search for the single cause. We do this with many things, including history... and of course this is a scientific habit of mind. There is some irony here. Our scientific habit of mind informs the views of people who are viewed as religious zealots. At this point I find that everyone compares everything to Nazism, so when I see it anywhere, I just ignore it, or translate it to "very bad," as in darkfrog's mom is a Nazi => darkfrog's mom is very bad. Which is probably insulting to Jews, but such is language. Black Panthers are referred to as Nazis, just as the KKK, and traffic cops, and people who complain about others not tipping at restaurants adequately may be called "tipping Nazis" or some such thing.

It's funny, your argument makes what I guess Stein's point will be; science is seen to be the only means to truth. Since I don't agree with evolution, I am anti-scientific (your "distorting the facts") and anti-intellectual (your "not too bright").

Is science the only means to truth? Is there any kind of truth which can never be determined by science?Sorry, when I said "he" I was still talking about Stein. I haven't seen you distort the facts AFAIK. I believe you have faith in biblical inerrancy which makes it hard to accept the science of evolution (although many people of faith do accept evolution). I don't believe Stein was honest in his movie if the SA writers are correct about the inaccuracies and distortions that were mentioned in the article.

You need to reiterate the pronominal referent if you want to point to a far subject! :)

You need to reiterate the pronominal referent if you want to point to a far subject! :)
:lmao: thanks! After your post I re-read it and saw the problem immediately. Here, I will fix it. Hence my conclusion that he stooped to the level of Micheal Moore in making an untruthful propaganda film, to which Mammothwooly seems to think I have to have seen the film to make that assessment. Mammoth will have to come to the same conclusion, either Stein is purposefully distorting the facts or is himself not too bright, either way it is a condemnation of the film.

If the film is promoting creationism, then there can't be much logic involved in it in the first place as creationism isn't based on logic, but instead only the faith of it's followers.

Actually I think the film promotes ID, which really is based on logic more than faith, even if it's True Science© may be lacking.

I'm sure, like most things, the reality lies somewhere in between. I'm sure that something like the Holocaust probably would have happened even without Evolutionary Theory. On the other hand, I have noticed a general trend that looks down upon faith in lieu of pure objective reason, as if the two are mutual exclusives. I don't think that's the case. As I quoted from Dr. Collins a few posts back: "Faith is not the opposite of reason. Faith rests squarely upon reason, but with the added component of revelation."

An article that ductails with the good Doctor Wu and the main OP's assertion. As like SuperDan, I too think the truth is somewhere in the middle. I do think the influence of Darwinism had a measurable impact on Hitler's views and actions. Its definately not the only reason for the holocust.

http://www.discovery.org/scripts/viewDB/index.php?command=view&id=2172

By: Richard Weikart
The Human Life Review
March 1, 2004

[Note: This article first appeared in The Human Life Review 30, 2 (Spring 2004): 29-37.]

A number of years ago two intelligent students surprised me in a class discussion by defending the proposition that Hitler was neither good nor evil. Though I kept my composure, I was horrified. One of the worst mass murderers in history wasn't evil? How could they believe this? How could they justify such a view?

They did it by appealing to Darwinism. Their pronouncement on Hitler occurred while we were discussing James Rachels' book, Created from Animals: The Moral Implications of Darwinism (Oxford University Press, 1990). Darwinism, these students informed us, undermined all morality. This was not the first time I had heard such a view. In fact, at that time I was in the beginning phases of a research project on the history of evolutionary ethics, and I had already reviewed the work of some scientists and social scientists who believed that Darwinism undermined human rights and equality.

Before reading Rachels' book, however, I hadn't thought much about whether or not Darwinism devalued human life itself. Rachels, a philosopher at the University of Alabama, Birmingham, best known for his contributions to the euthanasia debate, argues that Darwinism undermines the Judeo-Christian belief in the sanctity of human life. The title of his book comes from an observation Darwin makes in his 1838 notebooks, "Man in his arrogance thinks himself a great work, worthy of the interposition of a deity. More humble and, I believe, true to consider him created from animals." Rachels assumes the truth of Darwinism and uses it as a springboard to justify euthanasia, infanticide (for disabled babies), abortion, and animal rights. Stimulated by his book, I continued my research on evolutionary ethics, but now with two new questions in mind: Does Darwinism undermine the Judeo-Christian understanding of the sanctity of human life? Does it weaken traditional proscriptions against killing the sick and the weak?

As I read more about the development of evolutionary ethics, I discovered that many scientists, social thinkers, and especially physicians in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Germany did indeed use Darwinian arguments to devalue human life. In the second edition of his popular book, The Natural History of Creation (1870), Ernst Haeckel, the leading Darwinist in Germany, became the first German scholar to seriously propose that disabled infants be killed at birth. Darwinists were in the forefront of the eugenics movement, which often taught that disabled people and non-Europeans were inferior to healthy Europeans. They argued that Darwinism implied human inequality, since biological variation has to occur to drive the process of evolution. Haeckel even suggested that Darwinism was an "aristocratic" process, favoring an aristocracy of talent (not the traditional landed aristocracy, for which Haeckel had no sympathy). Since Darwinism provided a naturalistic explanation for the origin of ethics, many of its adherents dismissed human rights as a chimera.

Darwin expressed incredulity when critics assailed him for undermining morality. In his Autobiography, however, Darwin rejected the idea of objective moral standards, stating that one "can have for his rule of life, as far as I can see, only to follow those impulses and instincts which are the strongest or which seem to him the best ones." (1) Friedrich Hellwald, an influential ethnologist, promoted a Darwinian view of social evolution in his major work, The History of Culture (1875). Hellwald was quite radical in exalting the Darwinian process of the struggle for existence above all moral considerations. "The right of the stronger," he insisted, "is a natural law." (2) He clarified this idea further:


In nature only One Right rules, which is no right, the right of the stronger, or violence. But violence is also in fact the highest source of right, in that without it no legislation is thinkable. I will in the course of my portrayal easily prove that even in human history the right of the stronger has fundamentally retained its validity at all times. (3)

This Darwinian undermining of human rights would be fateful for the Judeo-Christian vision of the sanctity of human life.

Besides stressing human inequality, Haeckel and many of his fellow Darwinists devalued human life by criticizing Judeo-Christian conceptions of humanity as "anthropocentric." Rather than being created in the image of God, they argued, humans were descended from simian ancestors. They blurred the distinctions between humans and animals, alleging that characteristics that had been traditionally considered uniquely human--rationality, morality, religion, etc.--were also present in animals to some degree. In Darwin's own words, the difference between humans and animals is quantitative, not qualitative.

Darwin's explanation that all human characteristics that previously had been associated with the human soul were not qualitatively distinct from animals also undermined the traditional Judeo-Christian conception of body-soul dualism, which endued humans with greater moral and spiritual significance than other organisms. (4) Many Darwinists understood the implications of this, including Haeckel, who founded the Monist League in 1906 specifically to combat all dualistic religions and philosophies, especially Christianity (but also Kantianism). One prominent member of the Monist League, August Forel, a world famous psychiatrist at the University of Zurich, described his initial encounter with Darwinism as a kind of conversion experience. He explained that Darwinism had convinced him that body-soul dualism was no longer tenable and that humans have no free will. Based on his view that heredity accounts for almost all character traits (and most mental illness), Forel became one of the most influential figures in the German eugenics movement, preaching the need to eliminate "inferior" races and handicapped infants, and recruiting Alfred Ploetz, who founded the world's first eugenics organization and journal.

Another element of Darwinism that contributed to the devaluing of human life was its stress on the struggle for existence. Based on the Malthusian population principle, Darwin pointed out that offspring are produced at much higher levels than can survive. Therefore multitudes necessarily perish in the struggle for existence. While Malthus saw this tendency toward overpopulation as the cause of misery and poverty, Darwin explained that it was really beneficial. In the conclusion of The Origin of Species, Darwin wrote, "Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows." (5) For Darwin death--even mass death--was not only inevitable, necessary. As Adrian Desmond explained in his biography of T. H. Huxley (the foremost Darwinian biologist in late nineteenth-century Britain, who earned the nickname, "Darwin's bulldog"), "only from death on a genocidal scale could the few progress." (6) Hellwald expressed the same idea in The History of Culture, claiming that evolutionary progress would occur as the "fitter" humans "stride across the corpses of the vanquished; that is natural law." (7)

Indeed, many leading Darwinists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries claimed that in order to foster evolutionary progress, the less valuable elements of humanity, generally defined as the disabled and those of non-European races, had to be eliminated. They feared that Judeo-Christian and humanitarian ethics, together with the advances of modern civilization--especially medicine and hygiene--would produce biological degeneration, since the weak and sick would be allowed to reproduce. Though many focused on methods to restrict reproduction, a surprising number of leading Darwinists--and not only Haeckel and Forel--actually promoted killing the "unfit" as a means to bring biological progress. Racial extermination and infanticide were integral components of their Darwinian program for biological rejuvenation.

In retrospect, the connection between these Darwinian ideas and Hitler's ideology are obvious. Interestingly, however, when I began my research on evolutionary ethics, Hitler was not even on my radar screen. I was wary of connecting Darwin and Hitler because of Daniel Gasman's failed attempt to draw a direct line from Haeckel to Hitler in The Scientific Origins of National Socialism, a book with which most historians rightly find fault. However, the title of my book--From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004)--indicates that I made the connection nonetheless, though in quite a different manner from Gasman. Indeed, the more I studied books and articles on evolutionary ethics by German scientists, physicians, and social thinkers, the more I discovered that I could not avoid the parallels between German Darwinist discourse and Hitler's ideology. This should not come as a complete surprise, however, since just about all of Hitler's biographers have noted the strong social Darwinist elements in his ideology, as Ian Kershaw does recently in his magisterial two-volume biography.

Hitler was strongly influenced by the Darwinian ideology of the eugenics movement, and his writings and speeches clearly reflect it. In Mein Kampf Hitler asserted that his philosophy


by no means believes in the equality of races, but recognizes along with their differences their higher or lower value, and through this knowledge feels obliged, according to the eternal will that rules this universe, to promote the victory of the better, the stronger, and to demand the submission of the worse and weaker. It embraces thereby in principle the aristocratic law of nature and believes in the validity of this law down to the last individual being. It recognizes not only the different value of races, but also the different value of individuals. . . . But by no means can it approve of the right of an ethical idea existing, if this idea is a danger for the racial life of the bearer of a higher ethic. (8)

Thus Hitler justified his racial views by appealing to Darwinian science. Because Hitler's racial views were so obviously flawed, some scholars call Hitler's views pseudo-scientific or a "vulgar" form of Darwinism. However, this is to judge Hitler by later standards of scientific thought. Many leading scientists and physicians embraced eugenics and scientific racism in Hitler's day, and indeed Fritz Lenz, the first professor of eugenics at a German university, crowed in 1933 that he had formulated the essentials of Nazi ideology even before Hitler began his political career.

Hitler's genocidal program was not the only adverse consequence of Darwinism's devaluing of human life, and Germany was not the only country impacted. Much work on the history of the eugenics movement in the United States, Britain, and elsewhere suggests that scientific and medical elites in many parts of the world imbibed the Darwinian devaluing of human life. Though it did not lead to genocide in these countries, it did lead to other injustices, such as the compulsory sterilization of thousands of people classified as "less fit," based on their hereditary condition (sometimes based on very tenuous evidence, leading to many cases of misdiagnosis). Social Darwinist and eugenics ideology also played an important role in the budding movement to legalize abortion in the early twentieth century.

Further, recent confirmation of my findings about the Darwinian devaluing of human life have come from Ian Dowbiggin's and Nick Kemp's important new studies on the history of the euthanasia movements in the United States and Britain, respectively. Both emphasize the role of Darwinism in paving the way ideologically for euthanasia. According to Dowbiggin, "The most pivotal turning point in the early history of the euthanasia movement was the coming of Darwinism to America." (9) This held true in Britain, as well, for Kemp informs us: "While we should be wary of depicting Darwin as the man responsible for ushering in a secular age we should be similarly cautious of underestimating the importance of evolutionary thought in relation to the questioning of the sanctity of human life." (10) The worldview of most early euthanasia advocates was saturated with Darwinian ideology, and they forthrightly used Darwinian ideas to combat the Judeo-Christian concept of the sanctity of human life.

Thus, historical evidence from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries overwhelmingly supports the thesis that Darwinism devalued human life. Whatever one thinks philosophically about this issue--and, of course, some Darwinists are embarrassed by the link and try to deny it--historically Darwinism has contributed to a devaluing of human life, thereby providing impetus for euthanasia, infanticide, and abortion.

The question now emerges: Is this all just of historical interest? Haven't we learned a lesson from Nazism not to use social Darwinism to devalue humans? Haven't we abandoned biological racism and rabid anti-Semitism, integral components of Nazi ideology?

Yes, indeed, we have learned much from the Nazi past, and I don't think it is fair to compare our present situation with Nazi Germany, as though they are completely the same. We don't live in a murderous dictatorship, and racism is on the defensive, at least in academic circles. For this we can be thankful. Still, in some respects, I wonder if we have learned enough, especially when I see big-name Darwinists, evolutionary psychologists, and bioethicists using Darwinism today to undermine the sanctity of human life. Whether Darwinism does actually devalue human life or not, there are certainly many people who think it does, and they are not intellectual featherweights.

First of all, the position that Rachels stakes out on issues of life and death are strikingly similar to that of the Australian bioethicist, Peter Singer, whose appointment a few years ago to a chair in bioethics at Princeton University stirred up vigorous controversy. Singer is renowned--or notorious, depending on one's point of view--for promoting the legitimacy of infanticide for handicapped babies and voluntary euthanasia, as well as for defending animal rights. Darwinism plays a key role in Singer's philosophy, underpinning his views on life and death. Singer claims that Darwin "undermined the foundations of the entire Western way of thinking on the place of our species in the universe." It stripped humanity of the special status that Judeo-Christian thought had conferred upon it. Singer complains that even though Darwin "gave what ought to have been its final blow" to the "human-centred view of the universe," the view that humans are special and sacred has not yet vanished. Singer is now laboring to give the sanctity-of-life ethic its deathblow. (11)

Singer and Rachels are not the only prominent philosophers arguing that Darwinism undermines the sanctity of human life. In Darwin's Dangerous Idea the materialist philosopher Daniel Dennett argues that Darwinism functions like a "universal acid," destroying traditional forms of religion and morality. In confronting the issue of biomedical ethics, Dennett asks, "At what 'point' does a human life begin or end? The Darwinian perspective lets us see with unmistakable clarity why there is no hope at all of discovering a telltale mark, a saltation in life's processes, that 'counts.'" Because of this, Dennett argues, there are "gradations of value in the ending of human lives," implying that some human lives have more value than others. After using his Darwinian acid to dissolve the sanctity-of-life ethic, Dennett wonders, "Which is worse, taking 'heroic' measures to keep alive a severely deformed infant, or taking the equally 'heroic' (if unsung) step of seeing to it that such an infant dies as quickly and painlessly as possible?" Darwin's Dangerous Idea is apparently especially toxic to disabled infants. (12)

The evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker, a professor of psychology at Harvard University, also draws connections between Darwinism and infanticide. After some high-profile cases of infanticide occurred in 1997, Pinker wrote an article purporting to explain its evolutionary origins. Since Pinker believes "that nurturing an offspring that carries our genes is the whole point of our existence," of course he tries to explain infanticide as a behavior that somehow confers reproductive advantage. He argues that a "new mother will first coolly assess the infant and her current situation and only in the next few days begin to see it as a unique and wonderful individual." (This is outrageously speculative; no new mother I have ever met has "coolly assessed" her infant, and it seems to me that those who commit infanticide are not "coolly assessing" the survival prospects for their infant, either--more likely they are desperate). According to Pinker, the mother's love for her infant will grow in relation to the "increasing biological value of a child (the chance that it will live to produce grandchildren)." Pinker specifically denies that infants have a "right to life," so, even though he doesn't completely condone infanticide, he thinks we should not be too harsh on mothers killing their children. (13) Pinker's view of infanticide is by no means unusual among evolutionary psychologists. In a leading textbook on evolutionary psychology, Evolution and Human Behavior: Darwinian Perspectives on Human Nature (2000), John Cartwright provides basically the same Darwinian explanation for infanticide as Pinker's.

What do Darwinian biologists have to say about all this? Some think Singer and company are on the right track. In 2001 Richard Dawkins, probably the most famous Darwinian biologist in the world today, made an impassioned plea for using genetic engineering to create an Australopithecine (whose fossil remains are allegedly an ancestor to the human species). Producing such a "missing link" would, according to Dawkins, provide "positive ethical benefits," since it would demolish the "double standard" of those guilty of "speciesism." Dawkins specifically claims that producing such an organism would demonstrate the poverty of the pro-life position, because it would show that humans are not different from animals. In the midst of this acerbic attack on the sanctity of human life, Dawkins expresses the hope that he will be euthanized if he is ever "past it," whatever that means (some people already think that Dawkins is "past it," but fortunately for Dawkins, I suspect that most of them still uphold the sanctity-of-life ethic that Dawkins rejects). (14)

Edward O. Wilson, the Pulitzer-Prize-winning pioneer of sociobiology and Harvard professor whose entire view of human nature revolves around Darwinism, also exemplifies this devaluing of human life, though he is more subtle about it. In his book Consilience (1998) he argues that his empiricist world view "has destroyed the giddying theory that we are special beings placed by a deity in the center of the universe in order to serve as the summit of Creation for the glory of the gods." In one passage in his autobiography he compares humans to ants, informing us that we humans are too numerous on the globe, while ants are in a proper population balance. "If we were to vanish today," Wilson explains, "the land environment would return to the fertile balance that existed before the human population explosion." But if ants were to disappear, thousands of species would perish as a result. The implication seems to be: ants are more valuable than humans, and biodiversity takes precedence over human life.

Many biologists, of course, disagree with Singer and Dawkins. From the late nineteenth century to today they have assured us that Darwinism has no implications for morality. They allege that those trying to apply Darwinism to morality are committing the "naturalistic fallacy" by deriving "ought" from "is." Darwin's friend and defender, Thomas Henry Huxley, vigorously opposed the attempts of his contemporaries to seek ethical guidance in natural evolutionary processes. More recently, Steven Jay Gould often butted heads with evolutionary psychologists, arguing that morality was a separate realm from biology. In his view Darwinism has nothing to say about how humans should act.

Gould, However, did not really divorce science and morality as much as he claimed. While vociferously arguing that Darwinian science on the one hand and religion and morality on the other are "non-overlapping magisteria," separated as far as the east is from the west, he persisted in drawing conclusions from his Darwinian science that are suspiciously laden with religious and moral implications. In Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History (1989), the whole point of his book is to use the Burgess Shale--a fossil-laden outcropping of rock in Canada teeming with many extinct, ancient forms of life--as an example of the contingency of history, to demonstrate that there is no real purpose to human existence. "Wind back the tape of life to the early days of the Burgess Shale; let it play again from an identical starting point, and the chance becomes vanishingly small that anything like human intelligence would grace the replay." His view of the contingency of human creation in the evolutionary process clearly affects the way he views the nature and status of humanity, for he informs us that "biology shifted our status from a simulacrum of God to a naked, upright ape." The closing words of this book are remarkable for someone who claims to keep science and religion in non-overlapping compartments:


And so, if you wish to ask the question of the ages-why do humans exist?-a major part of the answer, touching those aspects of the issue that science can treat at all, must be: because Pikaia [a Burgess shale chordate] survived the Burgess decimation. This response does not cite a single law of nature; it embodies no statement about predictable evolutionary pathways, no calculation of probabilities based on general rules of anatomy or ecology. The survival of Pikaia was a contingency of 'just history.' I do not think that any 'higher' answer can be given, and I cannot imagine that any resolution could be more fascinating. We are the offspring of history, and must establish our own paths in this most diverse and interesting of conceivable universes-one indifferent to our suffering, and therefore offering us maximal freedom to thrive, or to fail, in our own chosen way. (15)

Does Gould really think this conclusion has no religious or moral implications? Does he really believe that his claim that biology demotes humans from the image of God to a naked ape is a purely scientific statement that has no bearing on moral issues, such as abortion and euthanasia?

In light of all this, does Darwinism really devalue human life? I think I have shown conclusively that historically Darwinism has indeed devalued human life, leading to ideologies that promote the destruction of human lives deemed inferior to others. Those on the forefront in promoting abortion, infanticide, euthanasia, and racial extermination often overtly based their views on Darwinism. Also, as I have shown in this essay, those favoring a Darwinian dismantling of the sanctity-of-life ethic have a good deal of intellectual firepower, and the idea is becoming rather widespread in academic circles today. There are, of course, various religious and philosophical moves that one can make to evade these conclusions, and some Darwinists have in the past and will continue in the future vigorously to oppose such developments (for this we can be thankful), construing them as faulty extrapolations by overzealous Darwinian materialists. However, it seems to me that there is an inherent logic in the move by Darwinists to undermine the sanctity-of-life ethic, which makes it so alluring that I doubt it will ever disappear as long as Darwinism is ascendant. In any case, it is certainly safe to say that in modern society Darwinism has contributed mightily to the erosion of the sanctity-of-life ethic. Darwinism really is a matter of life and death.

Richard Weikart is a Fellow at Discovery Institute and professor of history at California State University, Stanislaus.

Study: Tyrannosaurus Rex Basically a Big Chicken (http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,352510,00.html)

Tyrannosaurus rex just got a firm grip on the animal kingdom's family tree, right next to chickens and ostriches.

New analyses of soft tissue from a T.rex leg bone re-confirm that birds are dinosaurs' closest living relatives.

"We determined that T. rex, in fact, grouped with birds — ostrich and chicken — better than any other organism that we studied," said researcher John Asara of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard Medical School. "We also show that it groups better with birds than [with] modern reptiles, such as alligators and green anole lizards."

Scientists long suspected non-avian dinosaurs were most closely related to modern-day birds. This idea initially rested largely on similarities between the outward appearances of bird and dinosaur skeletons.

Later, further evidence on the close evolutionary relationships among birds and non-avian dinosaurs accumulated.

A leg bone full of key gunk

The latest evidence comes from an ancient femur bone unearthed in 2003 by Jack Horner of the Museum of the Rockies in the Hell Creek Formation, a fossil-packed area that spans Montana, Wyoming and North and South Dakota.

It seems some 68 million years ago, a teenage T. rex died and left behind a drumstick-shaped femur bone that today still contains intact soft tissue and the oldest preserved proteins discovered to date.

Though no genetic material was preserved, researchers were able to extract the proteins from the collagen tissues.

"The proteins are what carry out the function inside the cells and organs. So the protein does a lot of the work. That [protein] sequence was derived from DNA," Asara told LiveScience.

In the case of T. rex's collagen, "it was responsible for making hard bone so that the dinosaur could stand."

By comparing the dino's protein sequences with those of 21 living organisms, a team of researchers say they have locked in the dinosaur-bird link.

Mastodons and K-T boundary addressed

The study, detailed in the April 25 issue of the journal Science, also shored up the evolutionary link between the extinct mastodon and the modern-day elephant.

A slew of advanced techniques — such as the protein sequencing — are shedding more light on the lives and deaths of now-extinct animals such as mastodons and dinosaurs.

For instance, another study published this week in Science pinned down more accurately the point in geologic time when dinosaurs, pterosaurs, plesiosaurs, mosasaurs and many plant and invertebrate animal species went extinct (as a result of what is called the K-T extinction event).

The new figure for that event is 65.95 million years ago, a few hundred thousand years later than previous estimates, says lead author Klaudia Kuiper of Utrecht University in the Netherlands.

The massive extinction event was likely the result of a meteor impact and/or volcanic activity on Earth that reduced sunlight and made photosynthesis very difficult for plants.

Reptiles, alligators, ostrich added

The current family-tree research builds on protein analyses of the T. rex bone by Asara and his colleagues, published last year in the journal Science.

"Now it's gone a lot further," Asara said. "We had no reptiles represented last year. We now have alligator and ostrich represented."

The researchers also refined the family relationships using more sophisticated algorithms.

This current study was supported by the National Institutes of Health, the Paul F. Glenn Foundation and the David and Lucile Packard Foundation.

Copyright © 2008 Imaginova Corp. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

interesting article paperboy. That's gotta be the first time somebody's BLASTed a dino sequence. :lol:

wow, what happened to this thread? Down to 50 posts?

talgot -- an interesting read, but completely wrong. The misinterpretation of the few, regardless of how scholarly people think those people are (or thought they were, as most of those people dicussed in the article were from 100+ years ago), doesn't mean that Darwinism has any implications on how humans "should" behave. Obviously, we don't need Darwin to discuss how people should behave, as we were "behaving" before Darwin was around. Nor does Darwin undermine values. In fact, values go hand in hand with Darwin. Values make our species stronger, actually. There are the typical creationist assumptions put into this article, such as that "purposelessness" must undercut values. This isn't right at all. Even if overall life is purposeless (ie no heaven/hell), values benefit life while on earth. Game theory shows this.

wow, what happened to this thread? Down to 50 posts?

I think most of it was moved to the archive. Check the first post.

I think most of it was moved to the archive. Check the first post.

:doh: Thanks!

The massive extinction event was likely the result of a meteor impact and/or volcanic activity on Earth that reduced sunlight and made photosynthesis very difficult for plants.

I was under the impression that volcanic activity had been ruled out unless associated with/activated by the impact. I also thought that the Chicxulub impact has been accepted as the event causing the K-T boundary due to multiple findings including the date of the impact as well as he finding of large amounts of iridium throughout the sediment all over the world.

I was under the impression that volcanic activity had been ruled out unless associated with/activated by the impact. I also thought that the Chicxulub impact has been accepted as the event causing the K-T boundary due to multiple findings including the date of the impact as well as he finding of large amounts of iridium throughout the sediment all over the world.
I thought so to. Could just be a foxnews sort of thing.

By: Richard Weikart
The Human Life Review
March 1, 2004

[Note: This article first appeared in The Human Life Review 30, 2 (Spring 2004): 29-37.]

A number of years ago two intelligent students surprised me in a class discussion by defending the proposition that Hitler was neither good nor evil. Though I kept my composure, I was horrified. One of the worst mass murderers in history wasn't evil? How could they believe this? How could they justify such a view?

They did it by appealing to Darwinism. Their pronouncement on Hitler occurred while we were discussing James Rachels' book, Created from Animals: The Moral Implications of Darwinism (Oxford University Press, 1990). Darwinism, these students informed us, undermined all morality. This was not the first time I had heard such a view. In fact, at that time I was in the beginning phases of a research project on the history of evolutionary ethics, and I had already reviewed the work of some scientists and social scientists who believed that Darwinism undermined human rights and equality.


Blah blah blah
blah blahblah

In light of all this, does Darwinism really devalue human life? I think I have shown conclusively that historically Darwinism has indeed devalued human life, leading to ideologies that promote the destruction of human lives deemed inferior to others. Those on the forefront in promoting abortion, infanticide, euthanasia, and racial extermination often overtly based their views on Darwinism. Also, as I have shown in this essay, those favoring a Darwinian dismantling of the sanctity-of-life ethic have a good deal of intellectual firepower, and the idea is becoming rather widespread in academic circles today. There are, of course, various religious and philosophical moves that one can make to evade these conclusions, and some Darwinists have in the past and will continue in the future vigorously to oppose such developments (for this we can be thankful), construing them as faulty extrapolations by overzealous Darwinian materialists. However, it seems to me that there is an inherent logic in the move by Darwinists to undermine the sanctity-of-life ethic, which makes it so alluring that I doubt it will ever disappear as long as Darwinism is ascendant. In any case, it is certainly safe to say that in modern society Darwinism has contributed mightily to the erosion of the sanctity-of-life ethic. Darwinism really is a matter of life and death.

Richard Weikart is a Fellow at Discovery Institute and professor of history at California State University, Stanislaus.
WOW! I guess some people just don't quite 'get' Darwin. Natural selection would by definition eliminate the things like infanticide and extermination of the sick and infirm since those are conscious, not natural decisions made by the individual species itself.
Did any of these people ever think that the human capacity to help the weak and disabled may be a trait of evolution to begin with? IOW, we evolved above the instinctive primitive brain allowing us to better defend from other species as well as realize a need for preservation of human life, even in the earliest days by forming tribes.
If we allowed social Darwinism of the Hitler variety, we would never have had people like Einstein and Stephen Hawking among many others. Devaluing human life and attempting to choose who is worthy to reproduce is anti-Darwinism since it removes the 'natural' from Natural Selection. This author demonstrated nothing 'conclusively', far from it.

I thought so to. Could just be a foxnews sort of thing.

That is weird. It's a LiveScience article and I thought they were usually on with their facts. :dontknow:

WOW! I guess some people just don't quite 'get' Darwin. Natural selection would by definition eliminate the things like infanticide and extermination of the sick and infirm since those are conscious, not natural decisions made by the individual species itself.
Did any of these people ever think that the human capacity to help the weak and disabled may be a trait of evolution to begin with? IOW, we evolved above the instinctive primitive brain allowing us to better defend from other species as well as realize a need for preservation of human life, even in the earliest days by forming tribes.
If we allowed social Darwinism of the Hitler variety, we would never have had people like Einstein and Stephen Hawking among many others. Devaluing human life and attempting to choose who is worthy to reproduce is anti-Darwinism since it removes the 'natural' from Natural Selection. This author demonstrated nothing 'conclusively', far from it.

Devil's Advocate:

I think when people think of applying Darwinism to Hitler, they think of the principle of Survival of the Fittest, which isn't necessarily a "natural decision" made by the species itself. It could be of the social nature, killing those members which are not the fittest, thus allowing only the most fit members to continue on propagating the race, no?

Natural selection wasn't applied to the current human condition AFAIK. Natural selection has always been described as an outside force acting upon creatures, having nothing to do with what the creatures might want. I would when creatures select themselves it's engineering, although I guess both would be evolution.

Devil's Advocate:

I think when people think of applying Darwinism to Hitler, they think of the principle of Survival of the Fittest, which isn't necessarily a "natural decision" made by the species itself. It could be of the social nature, killing those members which are not the fittest, thus allowing only the most fit members to continue on propagating the race, no?
except "survival of the fittest" is really a bastardized version of darwinism. "Fitness" is determined by viability in the current environment. When people commit genocide/mass murder, they're essentially playing the role of nature. However, their "fitness" criteria is something arbitrary, like skin color, which has no impact on survivability. Which means that the executed are no less fit than the executers. Which means there's no evolutionary benefit.

Devil's Advocate:

I think when people think of applying Darwinism to Hitler, they think of the principle of Survival of the Fittest, which isn't necessarily a "natural decision" made by the species itself. It could be of the social nature, killing those members which are not the fittest, thus allowing only the most fit members to continue on propagating the race, no?
I understand the definition and idea behind social darwinism but my comment is that someone with half a brain can see the faults and would not be so easily swayed by any tenuous connection made by his own students. I also found it amusing how 'shocked' he was by the mere suggestion (as if a history professor heard about this for the first time by his own students:rolleyes: ) even more more after reading about the James Rachel book he assigned to his class to read. I guess either the author or Weikart himself believes that any readers will put their own brain on hold when reading that crap.

However, after looking into this more, I find that the Discovery Institute partly funded his research which answers a lot of questions.

except "survival of the fittest" is really a bastardized version of darwinism. "Fitness" is determined by viability in the current environment. When people commit genocide/mass murder, they're essentially playing the role of nature. However, their "fitness" criteria is something arbitrary, like skin color, which has no impact on survivability. Which means that the executed are no less fit than the executers. Which means there's no evolutionary benefit.

Hey, it wasn't my idea. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survival_of_the_Fittest) Again playing devil's advocate: Who's to say that the natural version is the best way to do it?

Hey, it wasn't my idea. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survival_of_the_Fittest) Again playing devil's advocate: Who's to say that the natural version is the best way to do it?
its not a matter of "best way to do it." it's how it's done :) we could engineer any situation we wanted -- but depending on what that was, we might destroy everything.

its not a matter of "best way to do it." it's how it's done :) we could engineer any situation we wanted -- but depending on what that was, we might destroy everything.

More devil's advocate: Natural selection seeks to produce the best creature with the best characteristics at any given time, right? So why not apply it at a higher level? If not, why? Why shouldn't we live by own laws and rules that produced us and apply it to our social structures? Sure we might destroy everything, but nature might do that for us, so what have we got to lose? Maybe if we don't have social darwinism, we will be destroyed by nature?

Hi guys! I'm a bit disappointed to see this thread shrunken :D

I have nothing to add. I still believe science and faith are not mutually exclusive, and that there is no reason evolution cannot be God's tool of creation.

Sorry I'm never on anymore guys, too much to do in Australia, including learning Japanese, which sucks all my time away!

:heart: Cap

More devil's advocate: Natural selection seeks to produce the best creature with the best characteristics at any given time, right? So why not apply it at a higher level? If not, why? Why shouldn't we live by own laws and rules that produced us and apply it to our social structures? Sure we might destroy everything, but nature might do that for us, so what have we got to lose? Maybe if we don't have social darwinism, we will be destroyed by nature?

I really have no idea what you're trying to say. The things that survive are the things that survive. It's not really so much that they are selected, but rather that the things that die before producing offspring are deselected. So I don't know what you mean by living by the laws and rules that produced us. We do live by those laws, we can do nothing else.

More devil's advocate: Natural selection seeks to produce the best creature with the best characteristics at any given time, right? So why not apply it at a higher level? If not, why? Why shouldn't we live by own laws and rules that produced us and apply it to our social structures? Sure we might destroy everything, but nature might do that for us, so what have we got to lose? Maybe if we don't have social darwinism, we will be destroyed by nature?
wrong. You're pretending there is a selector. It's all a matter of the probability of a certain creature to reproducing. The creatures that exist at a given time are not necessarily the "best" they could be for the particular environment. They're just good enough.

Another example when Lucifer put bones into the ground in order to confuse us and tried to make us question evolution.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/25179317/

Another example when Lucifer put bones into the ground in order to confuse us and tried to make us question evolution.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/25179317/
cool post, with some interesting other links in it. Thanks.

And damn that beazelbub.

The creatures that exist at a given time are not necessarily the "best" they could be for the particular environment.

That's what I said, just re-worded.

I still don't see any good logical arguments against social darwinism, just that... we don't want to... :confused:

That's what I said, just re-worded.

I still don't see any good logical arguments against social darwinism, just that... we don't want to... :confused:
:lol: that's so old that i cant figure out what line of thought a response should take.

what do you mean a logical argument against social darwinism?

:lol: that's so old that i cant figure out what line of thought a response should take.

:dontknow:

what do you mean a logical argument against social darwinism?

Playing devils advocate again, I have yet to see a logically based argument for why we shouldn't have social darwinism. All the reasons amount to emotional, moral or personal opinions.

Another example when Lucifer put bones into the ground in order to confuse us and tried to make us question evolution.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/25179317/

I'm not sure how this find, although very cool, further's proof of evolution. It's not like any organic material remains that can be dated.

Another example when Lucifer put bones into the ground in order to confuse us and tried to make us question evolution.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/25179317/

I get to go see that :whee:

I'm not sure how this find, although very cool, further's proof of evolution. It's not like any organic material remains that can be dated.
Are you saying it can't be dated without organic material?
I still find it amazing that YEC will accept the science that gives them microprocessors and synthesized chemicals but will reject the same science when it is used to date anything over 6000 years.

Are you saying it can't be dated without organic material?
I still find it amazing that YEC will accept the science that gives them microprocessors and synthesized chemicals but will reject the same science when it is used to date anything over 6000 years.

Prolly cause of the fact when you are talking thousands of years or millions.. you do not know all the variables.. you have to assume for the most part conditions simular to today.Plus when your dating methods are not accurate and give wide ranges even on a single creature found it makes the dating of it highly suspect.

Are you saying it can't be dated without organic material?
I still find it amazing that YEC will accept the science that gives them microprocessors and synthesized chemicals but will reject the same science when it is used to date anything over 6000 years.

I realize this...my point was that there is nothing different in this find than other "normal" fossil finds that would give any more evidence to evolution.

p.s. i'm not a YEC :secret:

superdan, don't you realize? If you don't accept evolution, you must therefore be a YEC, and believe every single thing they do, because you've been brainwashed by them. Evolution is what normal, rational, reasonable people would naturally believe without any conditioning by religious society.

Get with it.

superdan, don't you realize? If you don't accept evolution, you must therefore be a YEC, and believe every single thing they do, because you've been brainwashed by them. Evolution is what normal, rational, reasonable people would naturally believe without any conditioning by religious society.

Get with it.

Well I can't say I blame DF for assuming. I've defended YEC views in the past, and finding people who reject both evolution and Bishop Ussher's dates are probably few and far between. That's ok though, I like the outsider label...it fits very nicely and doesn't chafe :D.

Prolly cause of the fact when you are talking thousands of years or millions.. you do not know all the variables.. you have to assume for the most part conditions simular to today.Plus when your dating methods are not accurate and give wide ranges even on a single creature found it makes the dating of it highly suspect.
So dating doesn't work because of wide ranges? So if I get a range of 1.2-1.5 mya, that is too suspect, so it must be less than 6000ya?
As for not knowing all of the variables, you don't need to, just a few. Also, there are more dating methods than just radioisotope, but it is interesting when various methods agree with each other. However, that type of confirmation isn't good enough for you.
I realize this...my point was that there is nothing different in this find than other "normal" fossil finds that would give any more evidence to evolution.

p.s. i'm not a YEC I didn't think you were a YEC, however, your post appeared to be attacking dating methods, in spite of the fact that the article had nothing to do with dating of the fossil, or how dating this specimen would produce superior results to dating more typical fossils. My comment wasn't directed a you per se, but those that attack the various dating methods without even understanding them.

So dating doesn't work because of wide ranges? So if I get a range of 1.2-1.5 mya, that is too suspect, so it must be less than 6000ya?
As for not knowing all of the variables, you don't need to, just a few. Also, there are more dating methods than just radioisotope, but it is interesting when various methods agree with each other. However, that type of confirmation isn't good enough for you.
I didn't think you were a YEC, however, your post appeared to be attacking dating methods, in spite of the fact that the article had nothing to do with dating of the fossil, or how dating this specimen would produce superior results to dating more typical fossils. My comment wasn't directed a you per se, but those that attack the various dating methods without even understanding them.

No i said results are suspect. Especially on the most common of them carbon dating. I never said just cause methods of dating are suspect that it automatically makes earth young. That would be a logical fallacy. Different methods may agree.. but if they are all off then what good does it do? If i get 30 random people all over the globe that say the sky is pink pok-a-dots doesn't doesn't make it right just cause they agree. It may in the end be that earth is very old. I just do not see dating methods at this time to be accurate enough to not question it.

So dating doesn't work because of wide ranges? So if I get a range of 1.2-1.5 mya, that is too suspect, so it must be less than 6000ya?
As for not knowing all of the variables, you don't need to, just a few. Also, there are more dating methods than just radioisotope, but it is interesting when various methods agree with each other.

Some agree, others don't. Lord Kelvin calculated the secular cooling of the sun to show that it could be no more than a few hundred million years old. Also, the M51 galaxy rotates so fast that it would not be a spiral galaxy if it were more than 100 Million years old.

In fact, I'm not aware of any other dating method that agrees with Uranium-based radioisotope dating, which is one reason I don't commit either to 4.6 billion or 6,000K.

Playing devils advocate again, I have yet to see a logically based argument for why we shouldn't have social darwinism. All the reasons amount to emotional, moral or personal opinions.

What do you mean by why we shouldn't have social darwinism? Do you mean why not allow people to take over whatever they want when they are able to? In that case, game theory simulations show that society advances (ie in technology, arts, etc) much faster when people are defended from such takeovers by an outside authority (ie govt). This is because people don't have to spend their time focusing on defense and are free to make other discoveries.

the concept of darwinism can be seen to apply to social situations, but "social darwinism" is an active selection process. Someone says "I'm taking over" and justifies it with this bizarre concept. However, if you look at cultures and ideas throughout over the course of history, you do see "evolution." Sometimes this is due to active forces -- ie Alexander the Great conquering lands -- but more often -- and more recently, it's due to the spread of ideas and people accepting ones which they enjoy more.

does that answer your question? It is very interesting that many things that we consider "moral" actually do have a benefit -- it just takes modern math to show what that benefit is.

No i said results are suspect. Especially on the most common of them carbon dating. I never said just cause methods of dating are suspect that it automatically makes earth young. That would be a logical fallacy. Different methods may agree.. but if they are all off then what good does it do? If i get 30 random people all over the globe that say the sky is pink pok-a-dots doesn't doesn't make it right just cause they agree. It may in the end be that earth is very old. I just do not see dating methods at this time to be accurate enough to not question it.
How many creationists would see the same time on five different clocks and then feel free to ignore it? Yet, when five radiometric dating methods agree on the age of one of the Earth's oldest rock formations, it is dismissed without a thought.

Use your vast scientific knowledge to show how multiple methods of dating on a geologically simple situation -- one that consists of several primary (i.e. not redeposited) volcanic ash deposits with a diverse dateable mineral assemblage (multiple minerals and methods are possible), could end up being incorrect. And then please tell us what it would take to make radiometric dating accurate enough for you to not question it.

As I said, it is very convenient for you to ignore radioactive decay and call it unreliable while you tool around in your car using a GPS using the same technology.

Some agree, others don't. Lord Kelvin calculated the secular cooling of the sun to show that it could be no more than a few hundred million years old. Also, the M51 galaxy rotates so fast that it would not be a spiral galaxy if it were more than 100 Million years old.

In fact, I'm not aware of any other dating method that agrees with Uranium-based radioisotope dating, which is one reason I don't commit either to 4.6 billion or 6,000K.
Well, we all know where Lord Kelvin erred. What that has to do with modern dating methods is beyond me. Do you have any support for your hypothesis of M51 by any actual astronomers, or is it more propaganda put forth by creationists to cloud the issue?

I'm sorry to have to break this to you but the age of the earth has been validated by multiple radiometric dating methods - Pb-Pb, Sm-Nd, Rb-Sr, Lu-Hf, Re-Os, Ar-Ar

U-dating is indeed backed up by many other isotopic systems, as darkfrog says, including whole rock as well as individual mineral grain analysis. Most radioisotope dating is NOT done in isolation but is checked against at least one other independent method.

In any case, long before we knew how to use isotopes, geologists had already figured out that the Earth had to be older than 6,000 years old, and many estimated it to be at least a few million years old, based on things like the rates at which sediment gets deposited in the oceans, rates of mountain formation, etc.

U-dating is indeed backed up by many other isotopic systems, as darkfrog says, including whole rock as well as individual mineral grain analysis. Most radioisotope dating is NOT done in isolation but is checked against at least one other independent method.

In any case, long before we knew how to use isotopes, geologists had already figured out that the Earth had to be older than 6,000 years old, and many estimated it to be at least a few million years old, based on things like the rates at which sediment gets deposited in the oceans, rates of mountain formation, etc.
:welcome: to sd!

:welcome: to sd!

Thanks! :) I've obviously jumped in with a safe, dull, uncontroversial topic that we can all agree on. :lol:

Thanks! :) I've obviously jumped in with a safe, dull, uncontroversial topic that we can all agree on. :lol:
but at least you've chosen the right side :lol:

Thanks! :) I've obviously jumped in with a safe, dull, uncontroversial topic that we can all agree on. :lol:
That's the best way to do it! Like ripping off a bandage. I think my first post may have been in this thread as well :lol: certainly my first post on the podium.

LOL, good thread then.

darkfrog, I was thinking the same thing about you! That you're on the right side of the matter! ;)

LOL, good thread then.

darkfrog, I was thinking the same thing about you! That you're on the right side of the matter! ;)

Interesting debate.

Some thoughts....

I think it's possible to believe in God and Evolution. If God created evolution is that creationism or evolution? ;)

Lost in Translation....The literal translation of the Hebrew Bible says "In A beginning..." NOT "in THE beginning". In "A beginning" opens the possibility that there might have been other beginnings besides our own. My point is that from the second word of a translated text, we already encounter such a monumental change, could the contemporary English version describing "days" in Genesis possibly mean a unit of time other than 24 hours? I think so.

Late night thoughts. ;)

As I see it there are a couple of possibilities.

1) Dating methods are relatively accurate to predict age.

2) Conditions are not the same now that they once were, therefore causing inaccurate accounts.

3) dating methods are accurate for todays conditions but do not accurately predict past the point when the earth was in a different state.


My point is dating methods may be accurate. (relatively speaking). But maybe only to a point. If things are relatively unchanged since the begining, then this may be the proper gauge. If not, the readings although possibly accurate now ,would not give off the same reading under different conditions. To many variables and to much unknown to say they are accurate in my view.

Contradictions in dating the very same fossils and ones we know of that died recently to hold to much weight with me at this time. I lean towards a young earth side. But I am nto totally closed to older earth if I am convinced otherwise.

As I see it there are a couple of possibilities.

1) Dating methods are relatively accurate to predict age.

2) Conditions are not the same now that they once were, therefore causing inaccurate accounts.

3) dating methods are accurate for todays conditions but do not accurately predict past the point when the earth was in a different state.


My point is dating methods may be accurate. (relatively speaking). But maybe only to a point. If things are relatively unchanged since the begining, then this may be the proper gauge. If not, the readings although possibly accurate now ,would not give off the same reading under different conditions. To many variables and to much unknown to say they are accurate in my view.

Contradictions in dating the very same fossils and ones we know of that died recently to hold to much weight with me at this time. I lean towards a young earth side. But I am nto totally closed to older earth if I am convinced otherwise.I will ask again. Please explain what these variables and unknowns are that could affect the rate of radioactive decay at ANY time in the past. Why don't you comment on my observation that you have no problem accepting the 'scientists' when they use radioactive decay in the atomic clocks of the GPS satellites but of course you know better and are smarter than they are when it comes to using the same principle to date rocks.

I will ask again. Please explain what these variables and unknowns are that could affect the rate of radioactive decay at ANY time in the past. Why don't you comment on my observation that you have no problem accepting the 'scientists' when they use radioactive decay in the atomic clocks of the GPS satellites but of course you know better and are smarter than they are when it comes to using the same principle to date rocks.

From an article I read.

The only dating methods discussed (over and over again) by evolution-believing scientists and the mass media are ones that supposedly "prove" that the earth is billions of years old. One of the most popular of these is known as radiometric dating. However, not as well known is the fact that such methods have a number of serious flaws which are usually glossed over, or ignored when writing on, or discussing this subject in public.

With the exception of Carbon-14, radiometric dating is used to date either igneous or metamorphic rocks that contain radioactive elements such as uranium. And even though various radioactive elements have been used to "date" these rocks, for the most part, the methods are basically the same. They consist of measuring the amount of radioactive (mother) element and comparing it to the amount of stable (daughter) element. A discussion of the Uranium/Lead method follows.

Uranium is radioactive, which means it is in the process of changing from an unstable element into a stable one. The most common form is uranium-238. It has a half-life of about 4.5 billion years. This means that if you had some pure uranium-238 with no lead in it, 4.5 billion years later one half of it would have decayed into its stable daughter product (lead-206). And after 9 billion years there would be 75% lead and 25% uranium, and so on. Few people realize it but all radiometric dating methods require making at least three assumptions. These are:

1) The rate of decay has remained constant throughout the past.
2) The original amount of both mother and daughter elements is known.
3) The sample has remained in a closed system.

Constant Decay Rate:
For purposes of radiometric dating it must be assumed that the rate of decay from mother element to daughter element has remained constant throughout the past. Although there is no way to prove whether or not this has been the case, scientists have attempted to alter the rate of decay of radioactive materials and have found that they are almost immune to change. Most creationists have few qualms in accepting this first assumption.

Original Amounts Known:
The second assumption is much more speculative since there is no way to verify whether or not some (or most) of the daughter element was already present when the rock solidified. Therefore, a guess must be made. However, in some cases, a few scientists are telling us that they have solved this problem.

For example, with the uranium/lead method scientists have attempted to estimate what the original ratio (of uranium-238 to lead-206) was when the Earth formed. To do this they have selected a certain meteorite, which contained various types of lead (including lead 204, 206, 207 and 208) but no uranium, and they have assumed that this ratio is equivalent to the earth's original lead ratio. They did this because it is almost certain that these lead isotopes were all present in large quantities when the earth was created. This is because "common" lead contains both radiogenic (lead 206, 207 and 208) and non-radiogenic lead (204) but it does not contain any uranium. In fact, about 98% of "common" lead is "radiogenic" (containing lead 206, 207,208) and only 2% non-radiogenic. 1,2,3,4,5,6

A Closed System:
The third assumption is that the sample has remained in a closed system. This is necessary due to outside influences such as heat and groundwater that can seriously alter the original material. And since the earth is not a closed system, these last two assumptions make radiometric dating highly subjective and questionable.

For example, if a rock sample was below the water table at any time, leaching would take place. For Uranium/Lead dating this means that some of the uranium that was initially present would be "leached" out of the rock. Leaching can also cause uranium to be leached into rocks that have little or no uranium in them. Therefore, in virtually every case, scientists do not know what the original condition of the rock was; and, even if they did know, they don't any more due to heat contamination, mixing, and leaching. This is discussed in great detail by Dr. Snelling in his article on this subject. 4

Note: As for the few cases where scientists do know what the "original" condition (or date of eruption) was, they still have not been able to come up with the correct "date" for the age of the rock without all sorts of fancy footwork and massaging of data. That's because radiometric dating (with the exception of Carbon 14) is almost always performed on igneous rocks (i.e. those that were once in a molten state). Also because, when different substances are in a liquid state, something known as mixing almost always takes place: meaning that whenever a liquid (or molten) rock is erupted out of the earth, both the mother and daughter elements will be "mixed" together, thus making it virtually impossible to determine the time that an eruption took place.

Heat Contamination:
Another problem that calls into question the credibility of radiometric dating is heat contamination. For example, In 1973, in Alberta, Canada (near the town of Grand Prarie) a high voltage line fell which caused nearby tree roots to fossilize almost instantly. When scientists at the University of Regina, Saskatchewan were asked what the results would be if these roots were dated by Potassium Argon method. Their response was that the results:

"WOULD BE MEANINGLESS; it would indicate an age of millions of years BECAUSE HEAT WAS INVOLVED IN THE PETRIFICATION PROCESS." The Mysteries of Creation, by Dennis Petersen, p. 47.

Two well-documented examples of "heat contamination" are the 1800 and 1801 eruptions from two Hawaiian volcanoes. Although these eruptions were less than 200 years old, the radiometric "dates" obtained from them were 140 million to 2.96 billion years for one, and from 0 to 29 million years for the other -- depending upon the (ocean) depth at which the lava sample was obtained. This is documented in Table 1 below.

This also brings up an important question:

If radiometric dating methods are unable to produce the correct date in cases where the actual date of eruption is known, why should we believe that these same methods can produce accurate dates when the date of eruption is unknown?

The point is simply this: radiometric dating is known to produce grossly erroneous dates when heat is involved in the formation or fossilization process. And since the only rocks which yield ages in excess of 100,000 years are of volcanic origin, this method of dating the earth is not based on science, but rather speculation and subjecting reasoning. Unfortunately, the public is rarely informed of these facts.



By the way, I don't have any issues with GPS technology. That has nothing to do with predicting the past .

no offense talgot, but that article sucks. Unless power lines were falling everywhere millions and billions of years ago.....:rolleyes:

And we've already discussed why you don't use dating methods used for time scales of millions/billions of years for things that are hundreds/thousands of years old. That means you'd be trying to measure decay to something like 6 or more decimal places, something technology just doesn't do (not to mention, is rather irrelevant due to stochastic properties). It's like trying to use a 100 ft long piece of string to accurately measure a centimeter or using a 30 gallon drum to measure a tablespoon. Their volcanoes don't show that heat causes a problem. It shows that the author (and the people who conducted this "study") have no idea what they're doing.

I get to go see that :whee:

Saw the leg and the arm last evening. Pretty cool stuff.

no offense talgot, but that article sucks. Unless power lines were falling everywhere millions and billions of years ago.....:rolleyes:

And we've already discussed why you don't use dating methods used for time scales of millions/billions of years for things that are hundreds/thousands of years old. That means you'd be trying to measure decay to something like 6 or more decimal places, something technology just doesn't do (not to mention, is rather irrelevant due to stochastic properties). It's like trying to use a 100 ft long piece of string to accurately measure a centimeter or using a 30 gallon drum to measure a tablespoon. Their volcanoes don't show that heat causes a problem. It shows that the author (and the people who conducted this "study") have no idea what they're doing.Actually, that study as well as every other study that shows where flaws and limitations in radiometric dating were and are done by scientists in order to help other scientists. They are done to prevent errors in dating by showing when and where we can use certain dating methods and when we can't. Not one of these studies was done by a 'creation scientist'. They merely cherry-pick data they think will support their case. An instance where a method fails to work does not imply that it does not ever work. The question is not whether there are "undatable" objects, but rather whether or not all objects cannot be dated by a given method. The fact that one wristwatch has failed to keep time properly cannot be used as a justification for discarding all watches.

The 1801 Hawaiian eruption made famous by creationist apologists is a perfect example of a study done by scientists to help them avoid errors, by showing the limitation of K-Ar dating.
The article shows that there is a relationship between water depth and Argon outgassing from volcanic rock. The study showed that lava deposited in deep water (as occured in the Hawaii 1801 eruption) could not release trapped Argon gas and would therefore produce K-Ar age dates that were too old. It was interesting to see the data. The authors took samples from various depths and dated them and it was easy to see that the rocks found near the surface dated young (essentially zero age) and as you moved into deeper water those rocks produced progressively older ages for the rock. The bottom line in the article was that the researchers warned against taking volcanic rock samples at depth and dating them using K-Ar dating since it could easily be shown that these rocks gave erroneous dates.

Now if that author Talgot quoted actually understood dating, he would know that the 'limitations' he discusses are well understood and accounted for by using varying methods including isochron dating.

If, as he claims, leaching had that much affect, the leaching would affect different isotopes at vastly different rates. Ages determined by different methods would be in violent disagreement. While water can affect the ability to date rock surfaces or other weathered areas, there is generally no trouble dating interior portions of most rocks from the bottom of lakes, rivers, and oceans.

Where's the original thread? How did this get down to 100 posts?

no offense talgot, but that article sucks. Unless power lines were falling everywhere millions and billions of years ago.....:rolleyes:

And we've already discussed why you don't use dating methods used for time scales of millions/billions of years for things that are hundreds/thousands of years old. That means you'd be trying to measure decay to something like 6 or more decimal places, something technology just doesn't do (not to mention, is rather irrelevant due to stochastic properties). It's like trying to use a 100 ft long piece of string to accurately measure a centimeter or using a 30 gallon drum to measure a tablespoon. Their volcanoes don't show that heat causes a problem. It shows that the author (and the people who conducted this "study") have no idea what they're doing.

That was an example of heat causing issues. You know the difference Bonk. :P Lightning lava flows all generate heat as well as other things. You dismiss what doesn't fit your view a bit easy my friend. :)

The point is dating is suspect. Dating is off for things supposedly thousands or millions of years on many finds. But convienently dismissed as error if it doesn't provide the results they expected to see.

Another interesting article.

http://www.varchive.org/ce/c14.htm

Here is an excerpt: In the cataclysmic events reconstructed in Worlds in Collision and also those that preceded the fall of the Middle Kingdom in Egypt, various effects could not but vitiate the radiocarbon performance, some of these effects tending to make organic life appear older than its actual age, and others making it appear more recent.

Bursts of cosmic rays and of electrical discharges on an interplanetary scale would make organic-life surviving the catastrophes much richer in radiocarbon and therefore, when carbon dated, that organic matter would appear much closer to our time than actually true. But if the invasion of the terrestrial atmosphere by “dead” (non-radioactive) carbon from volcanic eruptions, from meteoric dust, from burning oil and coal and centuries-old forests, predominated the picture, then the changed balance of radioactive and of radio-inert carbon would make everything in the decades following the event appear much older. Thus, it is the competition of these factors that would decide the issue in each separate case. My own impression is that in the catastrophes of the eighth century and beginning of the seventh, the second phenomenon was by far more dominant. For the events of the middle of the fifteenth century before the present era, both phenomena were very expressed, but the burning petroleum added to the exhaust of all volcanoes burning simultaneously, added also to the ash of the proto-planet in near-collision must have outweighed the greatly increased advent of cosmic rays (which resulted also from interplanetary discharges). But in the catastrophe of the Deluge, which I ascribe to Saturn exploding as a nova, the cosmic rays must have been very abundant to cause massive mutations among all species of life, and correspondingly, these cosmic rays must have also changed the radiocarbon clock and certainly made ensuing life, subjected today to radiocarbon tests, appear much more recent than historically true. I am not in a position to point to the century or even millennium when the Universal Deluge took place, but it must have happened between five and ten thousand years ago, probably closer to the second figure.

The Deluge also increased the water basin or hydrosphere on earth, and if we can believe some indications, the Atlantic Ocean (called the Sea of Cronus by the ancients) originated in part during the Deluge. It is quite possible that the volume of water was more than doubled on earth in this one cataclysm.

Thus both conditions stipulated by Libby (that is, constant rate of influx of cosmic rays, and constant quantity of water in the hydrosphere) have been violated, but following the uniformitarian doctrine these violations have been discarded from consideration. We are left with a method in which the researchers have failed to take heed of the warnings expressed by its inventor.

The sustained effort of radiocarbon researchers to find support in Egyptian chronology, and their reliance on that chronology, is fundamentally a mistake. As I tried to show in Ages in Chaos, the Egyptian chronology is basically wrong.

Where's the original thread? How did this get down to 100 posts?

it was archived. Appearently they wanted to not show all my fantastic posts :P lol j/k

You dismiss what doesn't fit your view a bit easy my friend. :)

Pot, meet kettle, kettle, meet pot.

Pot, meet kettle, kettle, meet pot.

The difference is I have not said it can't be true .. I said suspect.. and I lean towards younger earth. I would think you of all people would appreciate the skeptic that wants to be sure ? After all the implications are tremendous.

Actually, that study as well as every other study that shows where flaws and limitations in radiometric dating were and are done by scientists in order to help other scientists. They are done to prevent errors in dating by showing when and where we can use certain dating methods and when we can't. Not one of these studies was done by a 'creation scientist'. They merely cherry-pick data they think will support their case. An instance where a method fails to work does not imply that it does not ever work. The question is not whether there are "undatable" objects, but rather whether or not all objects cannot be dated by a given method. The fact that one wristwatch has failed to keep time properly cannot be used as a justification for discarding all watches.

The 1801 Hawaiian eruption made famous by creationist apologists is a perfect example of a study done by scientists to help them avoid errors, by showing the limitation of K-Ar dating.
The article shows that there is a relationship between water depth and Argon outgassing from volcanic rock. The study showed that lava deposited in deep water (as occured in the Hawaii 1801 eruption) could not release trapped Argon gas and would therefore produce K-Ar age dates that were too old. It was interesting to see the data. The authors took samples from various depths and dated them and it was easy to see that the rocks found near the surface dated young (essentially zero age) and as you moved into deeper water those rocks produced progressively older ages for the rock. The bottom line in the article was that the researchers warned against taking volcanic rock samples at depth and dating them using K-Ar dating since it could easily be shown that these rocks gave erroneous dates.

Now if that author Talgot quoted actually understood dating, he would know that the 'limitations' he discusses are well understood and accounted for by using varying methods including isochron dating.

If, as he claims, leaching had that much affect, the leaching would affect different isotopes at vastly different rates. Ages determined by different methods would be in violent disagreement. While water can affect the ability to date rock surfaces or other weathered areas, there is generally no trouble dating interior portions of most rocks from the bottom of lakes, rivers, and oceans.
Thanks for all the info DF.

That was an example of heat causing issues. You know the difference Bonk. :P Lightning lava flows all generate heat as well as other things. You dismiss what doesn't fit your view a bit easy my friend. :)

Not really. Did you read darkfrog's post? Apparently the conclusion of that paper is "see -- doing this doesn't work." And then your author treats the results as if they worked perfectly. :dontknow:


The point is dating is suspect. Dating is off for things supposedly thousands or millions of years on many finds. But convienently dismissed as error if it doesn't provide the results they expected to see.


Ummm, what? Do you mean that ranges are sometimes big? Maybe so, but, while an example range of 1.3-1.5 billion years a grand span of 200 million years, it's still rather accurate for that time scale. Scientists rarely dismiss errors unless they get better data on subsequent trials and that data is consistent. If they do, sometimes they'll try to figure out the initial source of error, though serious efforts won't be expended. However, if they keep getting a consistently unexpected answer, they explore why. They don't just discard it. As Asimov said, "The most exciting sound in science is not 'eureka!' but 'that's funny....'"

Another interesting article.

http://www.varchive.org/ce/c14.htm

Here is an excerpt:

The consistency of various methods directly contradicts the hypothesis of the author. Not to mention, he accepts biblical descriptions of events (ie The Deluge) as fact. :shake:

Not one of these studies was done by a 'creation scientist'. .
If they were you would dismiss it. And many of these flaws were discovered before creationism was a household name. Scientist generally do not label themselves evolutionary scientists or creationists.


They merely cherry-pick data they think will support their case. An instance where a method fails to work does not imply that it does not ever work. The question is not whether there are "undatable" objects, but rather whether or not all objects cannot be dated by a given method. The fact that one wristwatch has failed to keep time properly cannot be used as a justification for discarding all watches. . who has suggested such? Not I or anyone I know of has used a handful of examples and decided to throw all them out cause of a few. :rolleyes:



Now if that author Talgot quoted actually understood dating, he would know that the 'limitations' he discusses are well understood and accounted for by using varying methods including isochron dating. So you admit scientists throw out what doesn't fit and use methods that finally give them a closer answer to what they already assumed they should be? (/sarcasm)



If, as he claims, leaching had that much affect, the leaching would affect different isotopes at vastly different rates. Ages determined by different methods would be in violent disagreement. While water can affect the ability to date rock surfaces or other weathered areas, there is generally no trouble dating interior portions of most rocks from the bottom of lakes, rivers, and oceans.

So 150million year difference in some cases is not trivial?

Not really. Did you read darkfrog's post? Apparently the conclusion of that paper is "see -- doing this doesn't work." And then your author treats the results as if they worked perfectly. :dontknow:



Ummm, what? Do you mean that ranges are sometimes big? Maybe so, but, while an example range of 1.3-1.5 billion years a grand span of 200 million years, it's still rather accurate for that time scale. Scientists rarely dismiss errors unless they get better data on subsequent trials and that data is consistent. If they do, sometimes they'll try to figure out the initial source of error, though serious efforts won't be expended. However, if they keep getting a consistently unexpected answer, they explore why. They don't just discard it. As Asimov said, "The most exciting sound in science is not 'eureka!' but 'that's funny....'"



The consistency of various methods directly contradicts the hypothesis of the author. Not to mention, he accepts biblical descriptions of events (ie The Deluge) as fact. :shake:
There is not this consistancy you say. Just cause you say it all the time doesn't make it true. So if any scientist believes any part of their religion that makes them wrong? Interesting...

So you admit scientists throw out what doesn't fit and use methods that finally give them a closer answer to what they already assumed they should be? (/sarcasm)


How does that follow? He said that the scientists showed that method doesn't work for certain conditions. No method works for everything. You don't run a PCR program to elongate a 50 bp fragment if you're working with a 1500 bp piece of DNA.

There is not this consistancy you say. Just cause you say it all the time doesn't make it true. So if any scientist believes any part of their religion that makes them wrong? Interesting...
Yes there is. Or am I supposed to take your word over the people doing the studies and the studies themselves?



So 150million year difference in some cases is not trivial?

Nope. In cosmology, millions of light years can be considered "close enough."

Well, we all know where Lord Kelvin erred.

Are you talking about radioactivity? The sun contains little radioactive matter.

I could be wrong about this one, as it was something I read a long time ago and probably should have re-researched before using it as an argument.

Do you have any support for your hypothesis of M51 by any actual astronomers, or is it more propaganda put forth by creationists to cloud the issue?

Why do you think scientists invented the idea of dark matter?

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

I'm sorry to have to break this to you but the age of the earth has been validated by multiple radiometric dating methods: - Pb-Pb, Sm-Nd, Rb-Sr, Lu-Hf, Re-Os,

I didn't mean other radiometric dating elements, I meant other methods altogether. Even so, it matters not to me if the Earth is 6K or 4.6 Billion years...it really doesn't affect my theology. Radiometric dating is one (but not the only) reason I am not YEC, so its nothing new. The science is very intriguing and I've certainly warmed up to it over the years. However, I for one do not put all my eggs in one basket, especially with a method that assumes so much about initial conditions. I'll use your example of the watch. I go to Wal-Mart (i'm cheap) to pick out a watch and see a whole row. They all correspond in time (12:00AM) so I figure that must be the correct time, however, after going outside I see it's midday. Was the method (time) wrong, or were the initial conditions (the watch was set at the right time to being with) I assumed wrong ? So yes, I think RMD reliably shows that the YEC view is simply not plausible, and I would personally lean more towards Uniformitarian measurements. But I am not willing to call the whole matter closed based solely off one method.

Interesting debate.

Some thoughts....

I think it's possible to believe in God and Evolution. If God created evolution is that creationism or evolution? ;)

Lost in Translation....The literal translation of the Hebrew Bible says "In A beginning..." NOT "in THE beginning". In "A beginning" opens the possibility that there might have been other beginnings besides our own. My point is that from the second word of a translated text, we already encounter such a monumental change, could the contemporary English version describing "days" in Genesis possibly mean a unit of time other than 24 hours? I think so.

Late night thoughts. ;)

Some people would say no (AIG (http://www.answersingenesis.org/creation/v17/i1/god_evolution.asp)), however I heard a very interesting interpretation in another debate.

A theistic evolutionist brought up Genesis 1:24 as "biblical" proof of Evolution:

Genesis 1:24 Then God said, "Let the earth bring forth living creatures after their kind.

This certainly seems to suggest that at some point, a natural process was used to produce kinds, however broad that may be.

Personally I don't accept evolution, but not because I think it unbiblical (I don't)...I could certainly see how one could interpret these verses to allow for evolution. So I don't think that believing in evolution necessitates disbelief in God.

Are you talking about radioactivity? The sun contains little radioactive matter.

I could be wrong about this one, as it was something I read a long time ago and probably should have re-researched before using it as an argument.


IIRC, Kelvin actually didn't believe the earth was old enough to allow for evolution. He actually decided that it was something like 40 million originally, but he made a bunch of assumptions that undermined his argument and these were the problems.

Hopefully someone else can fill in more details.


Why do you think scientists invented the idea of dark matter?

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


I'm no cosmologist, but I though dark matter was predicted based on something else (calculations of energy emitted at the big bang and compared to the mass in the universe?) From this came the idea of dark matter and then it was realized that if this did exist, it could be seen through gravitational effects, like galaxy rotation.


I didn't mean other radiometric dating elements, I meant other methods altogether. Even so, it matters not to me if the Earth is 6K or 4.6 Billion years...it really doesn't affect my theology. Radiometric dating is one (but not the only) reason I am not YEC, so its nothing new. The science is very intriguing and I've certainly warmed up to it over the years. However, I for one do not put all my eggs in one basket, especially with a method that assumes so much about initial conditions. I'll use your example of the watch. I go to Wal-Mart (i'm cheap) to pick out a watch and see a whole row. They all correspond in time (12:00AM) so I figure that must be the correct time, however, after going outside I see it's midday. Was the method (time) wrong, or were the initial conditions (the watch was set at the right time to being with) I assumed wrong ? So yes, I think RMD reliably shows that the YEC view is simply not plausible, and I would personally lean more towards Uniformitarian measurements. But I am not willing to call the whole matter closed based solely off one method.

Radiometric dating is a principle. Each isotope is a separate "method." So all these clocks would need to be misaligned. What would do that? And more importantly, what experiment do your propose? We can't ask Methusula, and even he'd be like "man, how old do you think I am?"

LOL, good thread then.

darkfrog, I was thinking the same thing about you! That you're on the right side of the matter! ;)

Depends on how you look at it. We're offering free beer :cheers:.



p.s. Welcome to TP (the Podium)!

How does that follow? He said that the scientists showed that method doesn't work for certain conditions. No method works for everything. You don't run a PCR program to elongate a 50 bp fragment if you're working with a 1500 bp piece of DNA..

Did you not see the (/sarcasm) at the end of that? ;)

Of course not. I never said as such. But these dates you claim that are verified by other methods are in many cases not close.. in some they are.. in others they are in a closed system. Earth is not a closed system. Conditions are not the same now as before. Even evolutionists that speak on the theory would not dispute that. heck premordial soup anyone? If that was true we certainly do not have anything close to what might have been. Fluctuations of heat and cold and sunspots Etc.. make it very likely this open system has and was maniplulated as the last article suggested if you read more than the snippet I put on here.


Yes there is. Or am I supposed to take your word over the people doing the studies and the studies themselves?

Absolutely do not take my word for it. There is much evidence and debate on dating methods to give any reasonable person pause on the accuracy they give. Some just choose to ignore it . :) Doesn't mean you can't lean towards their accuracy as I lean away from it. Just I feel those that except it as truth seem to be more closed to that yet say they are the ones that are open to science dictating the truth and say this is unquestioned.. yet it is questioned.

Why do you think scientists invented the idea of dark matter?

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

Yes, dark matter, including the supper massive black holes at the center of most if not all galaxies, helps explain why they rotate faster than predicted if using only the visible mass. It does nothing to support your argument that it is too fast to maintain spirals. It just shows the lack of understanding by someone (you have yet to point out who) of the nature of galaxies and their spirals. Due to the birth and death of stars and the shifting of positions, the spirals we see today aren't even the same spirals that existed millions of years ago, the argument is moot.

Did you not see the (/sarcasm) at the end of that? ;)

Of course not. I never said as such. But these dates you claim that are verified by other methods are in many cases not close.. in some they are.. in others they are in a closed system. Earth is not a closed system. Conditions are not the same now as before. Even evolutionists that speak on the theory would not dispute that. heck premordial soup anyone? If that was true we certainly do not have anything close to what might have been. Fluctuations of heat and cold and sunspots Etc.. make it very likely this open system has and was maniplulated as the last article suggested if you read more than the snippet I put on here.



Absolutely do not take my word for it. There is much evidence and debate on dating methods to give any reasonable person pause on the accuracy they give. Some just choose to ignore it . :) Doesn't mean you can't lean towards their accuracy as I lean away from it. Just I feel those that except it as truth seem to be more closed to that yet say they are the ones that are open to science dictating the truth and say this is unquestioned.. yet it is questioned.

For all intents and purposes, the interior of igneous rock, once it has cooled, is a closed system. The fact that conditions on the earth were vastly different billions of years ago does nothing to change the fundamental fact of physics that decay rates have remained the same. Any other change, heat, cold and sunspots included does not change our ability to use radiometric dating.

Here, I will sum up your line of reasoning:
1. I believe the earth to be no older than 6000 years because the bible says so.
2. Scientists have this tool that show otherwise.
3. Someone that believes what I do about the bible claims there is actual debate about the accuracy of this tool. He even uses fancy science sounding language to make his case.
4. I have no idea if this guy knows what he's talking about because I won't take the time to read the real scientific literature to learn about radiometric dating.
5. Instead of listening to the 99.9% of physicists, geologists, etc. that understand this tool, explaining that there really is no debate, I'm going to listen to this other guy, not because his science is beyond reproach, but solely because he believes what I do about the bible.
6. I now can claim that I also believe that radiometric dating methods are suspect keeping my worldview from being crushed.

Yes, dark matter, including the supper massive black holes at the center of most if not all galaxies, helps explain why they rotate faster than predicted if using only the visible mass. It does nothing to support your argument that it is too fast to maintain spirals. It just shows the lack of understanding by someone (you have yet to point out who) of the nature of galaxies and their spirals. Due to the birth and death of stars and the shifting of positions, the spirals we see today aren't even the same spirals that existed millions of years ago, the argument is moot.

This scientist, if i read it right seems to disagree. This is a bit more over my head.. so take it for what its worth. Interesting to me if nothing else.http://www.thehindu.com/thehindu/seta/2005/04/07/stories/2005040700061600.htm

If someone wants to believe in creationism, it's obvious they won't let a little science stand in their way. Even if they have distort every known scientific fact to make it so.

The article that talks about U-Pb dating is pretty baffling; U-Pb dating typically focuses on individual minerals (typically zircon, which overwhelmingly incorporates uranium but not lead during formation, i.e., there would be no daughter isotopes at point of crystallization). Zircon does in fact act as a closed system, since it doesn't weather much, either chemically or physically. There are established ways to test if you have a closed system or not for all the other isotopic pairs; it's virtually impossible to publish a paper on the subject without having to prove to reviewers that you're looking at a closed system. Whole rocks can also be dated, but isotope geochemists know to take that with a grain of salt; no one is trying to pull the wool over anyone else's eyes, as seems to be implied.

Plus, weathered rocks/minerals are never selected for dating in the first place, and people go out of their way to get a fresh surface for isotopic samples.

As for rates of radioactive decay changing with changes in the Earth's environmental conditions, this is confusing nuclear processes with stuff that's going in the outer shells of atoms with the electrons, etc.---these are two very different things.

For all intents and purposes, the interior of igneous rock, once it has cooled, is a closed system. The fact that conditions on the earth were vastly different billions of years ago does nothing to change the fundamental fact of physics that decay rates have remained the same. Any other change, heat, cold and sunspots included does not change our ability to use radiometric dating.

Here, I will sum up your line of reasoning:
1. I believe the earth to be no older than 6000 years because the bible says so.
2. Scientists have this tool that show otherwise.
3. Someone that believes what I do about the bible claims there is actual debate about the accuracy of this tool. He even uses fancy science sounding language to make his case.
4. I have no idea if this guy knows what he's talking about because I won't take the time to read the real scientific literature to learn about radiometric dating.
5. Instead of listening to the 99.9% of physicists, geologists, etc. that understand this tool, explaining that there really is no debate, I'm going to listen to this other guy, not because his science is beyond reproach, but solely because he believes what I do about the bible.
6. I now can claim that I also believe that radiometric dating methods are suspect keeping my worldview from being crushed.

I am not sure why you continually find it neccessary to mock and belittle others here just cause you disagree. Most of what you wrote is inaccurate. You obviously do not read what I write half the time or you would not put such drivel of a smear summary of my position. I thought you and I were beyond this kind of thing? I have not mocked you nor made rediculous and over the top claims on what you believe.

P.S. All that stuff about igneous/metamorphic, etc. is in the article to obfuscate the issue; it's pretty basic stuff that's dressed up to look like something suspicious is going on. With igneous rocks formed from melt, we date the time of crystallization; for metamorphic rocks, we date the time at which metamorphism took place. For sedimentary rocks, we use what's called relative dating, using fossils and sequences of rock types in different areas. We put the whole thing together to derive an age scale for rocks in any area.

As I mentioned before, isotopes are only one part of the story; to make the Earth be 6,000 years old, you have to violate some pretty big scientific principles to build mountains, erode mountains, stack kilometers of sedimentary rock layers on top of each other as in the Grand Canyon, move geologic plates, etc. etc. in that short of a time. Then you have to resort to saying the entire Universe is the way it is, because that's just how God made it.

We might as well stop doing science at that point b/c what would be the point?

I am not sure why you continually find it neccessary to mock and belittle others here just cause you disagree. Most of what you wrote is inaccurate. You obviously do not read what I write half the time or you would not put such drivel of a smear summary of my position. I thought you and I were beyond this kind of thing? I have not mocked you nor made rediculous and over the top claims on what you believe.
It is not merely because I disagree, it is how you are presenting your argument. It was not meant to be as insulting as it was an actual assessment of how I believe you have come to your conclusion. It is very apparent that you have little understanding of the topic by the arguments you keep presenting, which always seem to belong to someone else. I'm willing to listen to your argument but you have yet to offer one that isn't recycled nonsense from creationist websites. None of the claims that the creationists have made against radiometric dating have withstood any real scrutiny over the years, why do you think presenting them here would be any different?

Here's a nice summary presented by a Christian --Radiometric Dating: A Christian Perspective http://www.asa3.org/aSA/resources/Wiens.html

There are well over forty different radiometric dating methods, and scores of other methods such as tree rings and ice cores.
All of the different dating methods agree--they agree a great majority of the time over millions of years of time. Some Christians make it sound like there is a lot of disagreement, but this is not the case. The disagreement in values needed to support the position of young-Earth proponents would require differences in age measured by orders of magnitude (e.g., factors of 10,000, 100,000, a million, or more). The differences actually found in the scientific literature are usually close to the margin of error, usually a few percent, not orders of magnitude!
Vast amounts of data overwhelmingly favor an old Earth. Several hundred laboratories around the world are active in radiometric dating. Their results consistently agree with an old Earth. Over a thousand papers on radiometric dating were published in scientifically recognized journals in the last year, and hundreds of thousands of dates have been published in the last 50 years. Essentially all of these strongly favor an old Earth.
Radioactive decay rates have been measured for over sixty years now for many of the decay clocks without any observed changes. And it has been close to a hundred years since the uranium-238 decay rate was first determined.
Both long-range and short-range dating methods have been successfully verified by dating lavas of historically known ages over a range of several thousand years.
The mathematics for determining the ages from the observations is relatively simple.

P.S. All that stuff about igneous/metamorphic, etc. is in the article to obfuscate the issue; it's pretty basic stuff that's dressed up to look like something suspicious is going on. With igneous rocks formed from melt, we date the time of crystallization; for metamorphic rocks, we date the time at which metamorphism took place. For sedimentary rocks, we use what's called relative dating, using fossils and sequences of rock types in different areas. We put the whole thing together to derive an age scale for rocks in any area.

As I mentioned before, isotopes are only one part of the story; to make the Earth be 6,000 years old, you have to violate some pretty big scientific principles to build mountains, erode mountains, stack kilometers of sedimentary rock layers on top of each other as in the Grand Canyon, move geologic plates, etc. etc. in that short of a time. Then you have to resort to saying the entire Universe is the way it is, because that's just how God made it.

We might as well stop doing science at that point b/c what would be the point?
I do not know if the earth is 6k or 4.5 billion. From what I read and seen in my own experience I tend to think young earth . How young? I am not sure.

Play along with me a sec. If the story of a world wide flood is true. And you have the fountains of the deep (super pressured water under the crust) ripping through the crust would you not have those things occur that you claim would have to happen in a small amount of time? The pushing of plates and continental shelves to create mountains. The runoff creating errosion. The layers of sediment you would see today just as you see in a sediment globe. The twisting and bending of strata you see in some places. ETC..?

It is not merely because I disagree, it is how you are presenting your argument. It was not meant to be as insulting as it was an actual assessment of how I believe you have come to your conclusion. It is very apparent that you have little understanding of the topic by the arguments you keep presenting, which always seem to belong to someone else. I'm willing to listen to your argument but you have yet to offer one that isn't recycled nonsense from creationist websites. None of the claims that the creationists have made against radiometric dating have withstood any real scrutiny over the years, why do you think presenting them here would be any different?

Here's a nice summary presented by a Christian --Radiometric Dating: A Christian Perspective http://www.asa3.org/aSA/resources/Wiens.html

There are well over forty different radiometric dating methods, and scores of other methods such as tree rings and ice cores.
All of the different dating methods agree--they agree a great majority of the time over millions of years of time. Some Christians make it sound like there is a lot of disagreement, but this is not the case. The disagreement in values needed to support the position of young-Earth proponents would require differences in age measured by orders of magnitude (e.g., factors of 10,000, 100,000, a million, or more). The differences actually found in the scientific literature are usually close to the margin of error, usually a few percent, not orders of magnitude!
Vast amounts of data overwhelmingly favor an old Earth. Several hundred laboratories around the world are active in radiometric dating. Their results consistently agree with an old Earth. Over a thousand papers on radiometric dating were published in scientifically recognized journals in the last year, and hundreds of thousands of dates have been published in the last 50 years. Essentially all of these strongly favor an old Earth.
Radioactive decay rates have been measured for over sixty years now for many of the decay clocks without any observed changes. And it has been close to a hundred years since the uranium-238 decay rate was first determined.
Both long-range and short-range dating methods have been successfully verified by dating lavas of historically known ages over a range of several thousand years.
The mathematics for determining the ages from the observations is relatively simple.


If you had bothered reading the last 2 posts I had links 2 you would have noticed they were not creationist sites. Could it possibly be that not just creationist believe dating is flawed? As well as evolutionary theory? Who here doesn't recycle somethign someone else wrote? have you done all the work you profess to call truth? No. You tend to come off as holier than thou many times.

If you had bothered reading the last 2 posts I had links 2 you would have noticed they were not creationist sites. Could it possibly be that not just creationist believe dating is flawed? As well as evolutionary theory? Who here doesn't recycle somethign someone else wrote? have you done all the work you profess to call truth? No. You tend to come off as holier than thou many times.

The first article was definitely creationist in origin, but you neglected to include a link. The second one was a website about Velikovsky. I didn't feel there was a need for me to include a critique of his work here. Suffice it to say it is on par with Erich von Däniken's Chariots of the Gods.

This scientist, if i read it right seems to disagree. This is a bit more over my head.. so take it for what its worth. Interesting to me if nothing else.http://www.thehindu.com/thehindu/seta/2005/04/07/stories/2005040700061600.htm
I'm in biology, not physics, but I believe what the author is saying is that the things we think are black holes, a singularity with gravity so strong that nothing can escape, are actually spots of dark matter which behave more like matter on earth besides the fact that they're invisible. He reaches his conclusion mostly based upon the conundrum everyone in physics realizes -- our "tools" for looking at the universe (quantum mechanics, "normal" physics) work at completely separate scales and are incompatible at other scales. (This is why physicists are working on grand unified theories that would unite these viewpoints.) But this really doesn't have anything to do with galaxies not spinning as fast as or faster than they "should."

P.S. All that stuff about igneous/metamorphic, etc. is in the article to obfuscate the issue; it's pretty basic stuff that's dressed up to look like something suspicious is going on. With igneous rocks formed from melt, we date the time of crystallization; for metamorphic rocks, we date the time at which metamorphism took place. For sedimentary rocks, we use what's called relative dating, using fossils and sequences of rock types in different areas. We put the whole thing together to derive an age scale for rocks in any area.

As I mentioned before, isotopes are only one part of the story; to make the Earth be 6,000 years old, you have to violate some pretty big scientific principles to build mountains, erode mountains, stack kilometers of sedimentary rock layers on top of each other as in the Grand Canyon, move geologic plates, etc. etc. in that short of a time. Then you have to resort to saying the entire Universe is the way it is, because that's just how God made it.

We might as well stop doing science at that point b/c what would be the point?
thanks. I take it you're a geologist, geochemist, or one of those other "earthy" types?

The first article was definitely creationist in origin, but you neglected to include a link. The second one was a website about Velikovsky. I didn't feel there was a need for me to include a critique of his work here. Suffice it to say it is on par with Erich von Däniken's Chariots of the Gods.

I figured as much. To be frank I doubt anyone would suit your needs if they disagreed with your position. It would seem as anyone that strays away from the elitist scientific community you and others subscribe to are nutjobs and or discredited?

I figured as much. To be frank I doubt anyone would suit your needs if they disagreed with your position. It would seem as anyone that strays away from the elitist scientific community you and others subscribe to are nutjobs and or discredited?
when they can't back it up, yes. When they bring about a credible argument (not just one that sounds credible to people who don't understand it), then they're worth talking about.

when they can't back it up, yes. When they bring about a credible argument (not just one that sounds credible to people who don't understand it), then they're worth talking about.

That is such a tired arguement . "You just don't understand.. but I do or I know the right ones that do...." :rolleyes: Seriously... that is the classic fallback position for your side.. its old.. and not always true. It certainly can be true of both sides. As fluid as science is about what it truely knows you guys sure feel often how there is no arguement to be made on your world view.

That is such a tired arguement . "You just don't understand.. but I do or I know the right ones that do...." :rolleyes: Seriously... that is the classic fallback position for your side.. its old.. and not always true. It certainly can be true of both sides. As fluid as science is about what it truely knows you guys sure feel often how there is no arguement to be made on your world view.
umm....on a matter of science, would you rather trust the trained scientist or the untrained scientist? It's not a tired argument. when something is wrong, it is wrong no matter how many times it is repeated. The good thing about science is you don't need to trust anyone -- besides that they didn't completely make up everything. You can read the studies for yourself.

On a matter of health, would you rather trust a doctor or the guy behind the McDonald's counter?

On a matter of baseball, would you trust Joe Torre or Joe your next door neighbor?

:popcorn:

That is such a tired arguement . "You just don't understand.. but I do or I know the right ones that do...." :rolleyes: Seriously... that is the classic fallback position for your side.. its old.. and not always true. It certainly can be true of both sides. As fluid as science is about what it truely knows you guys sure feel often how there is no arguement to be made on your world view.Yes, it is such a tired old argument, that one requiring data and evidence to back up a hypothesis. Damn those requirements that conclusions are repeatable and verifiable. I think we should change science to just accept everything without question. Forgot about experts, everybody has a right to an opinion, let's integrate everyone's assumption, no matter how baseless into the core of scientific knowledge. :rolleyes:

Yes, it is such a tired old argument, that one requiring data and evidence to back up a hypothesis. Damn those requirements that conclusions are repeatable and verifiable. I think we should change science to just accept everything without question. Forgot about experts, everybody has a right to an opinion, let's integrate everyone's assumption, no matter how baseless into the core of scientific knowledge. :rolleyes:
to be honest, it'd make getting this damn Ph.D. easier.

umm....on a matter of science, would you rather trust the trained scientist or the untrained scientist? It's not a tired argument. when something is wrong, it is wrong no matter how many times it is repeated. The good thing about science is you don't need to trust anyone -- besides that they didn't completely make up everything. You can read the studies for yourself.

On a matter of health, would you rather trust a doctor or the guy behind the McDonald's counter?

On a matter of baseball, would you trust Joe Torre or Joe your next door neighbor?

I have trust in science. Not always the people in it. Many have agendas just as you claim creationists do. And there are many scientists that do back up there findings that happen to not agree with evolution. Thats why you look through it all carefully to come up with ones conclusion. Just because one has scientists by their name doesn't make them right and infallable. Most science we agree on. Where we tend to part ways is the conclusions. Not the facts. Scientists are the new High priests , put on a pedestal. They are no more correct than any preacher. By your reasoning you would take the advise of more preachers who have studied what they do. But you don't always do you. You still have to vet.. and still have people that are wrong just as in science.

Radiometric dating is a principle. Each isotope is a separate "method." So all these clocks would need to be misaligned. What would do that? And more importantly, what experiment do your propose? We can't ask Methusula, and even he'd be like "man, how old do you think I am?"

Hey that's for you to answer, Mr. Scientist :P. With C-14 readings, there have been independent tests done that collaborate the dates given by C-14 readings. For example, the annual varves in Lake Suigetsu in Japan have been matched with corresponding C-14 readings. Surely there is some science out there that would collaborate with 4.6 BYA.

I have trust in science. Not always the people in it. Many have agendas just as you claim creationists do. And there are many scientists that do back up there findings that happen to not agree with evolution. Thats why you look through it all carefully to come up with ones conclusion. Just because one has scientists by their name doesn't make them right and infallable. Most science we agree on. Where we tend to part ways is the conclusions. Not the facts. Scientists are the new High priests , put on a pedestal. They are no more correct than any preacher. By your reasoning you would take the advise of more preachers who have studied what they do. But you don't always do you. You still have to vet.. and still have people that are wrong just as in science.
ummm...no. You're correct about some things, but completely wrong about the most important. For one, please give references to what scientists don't "back up their findings that happen to not agree with evolution." Though to be honest, I'm not even sure what you're trying to say. Scientists are usually more correct than preachers, not because they are a scientist but because they've studied the subject they're talking about much more than the preacher. By my reasoning, I would take the word of a preacher who's studied (and understands) on matters related to his studying over someone who hasn't had the training. That doesn't mean the preacher is right -- but he would have reason to make the statement he did, and that is what's important. If he said "just trust me -- I'm a preacher," I'd find it suspicious.

I'm not saying the scientists can't be wrong. But you haven't shown anything showing that they ARE wrong, nor have you presented anybody else that actually has a viewpoint that can't be shown wrong.

The idea, implied though it is, that scientists who radio-date and show earth is billions of years old, are doing so to fulfill an agenda against religion is just preposterous. Again, in science, everything can be questioned and forced to be supported.

Hey that's for you to answer, Mr. Scientist :P. With C-14 readings, there have been independent tests done that collaborate the dates given by C-14 readings. For example, the annual varves in Lake Suigetsu in Japan have been matched with corresponding C-14 readings. Surely there is some science out there that would collaborate with 4.6 BYA.
possibly, though I doubt it. Nor would I want to be the one counting to 4.6 billion :lol:

Play along with me a sec. If the story of a world wide flood is true. And you have the fountains of the deep (super pressured water under the crust) ripping through the crust would you not have those things occur that you claim would have to happen in a small amount of time? The pushing of plates and continental shelves to create mountains. The runoff creating errosion. The layers of sediment you would see today just as you see in a sediment globe. The twisting and bending of strata you see in some places. ETC..?

This isn't possible based on what we know of how physical laws operate on Earth. There is no pressurized water "under" the crust on that scale...just solid mantle; if you're thinking of groundwater in the crust, it exists in pore spaces in bedrock, not as a big highly pressurized stream underground, except locally like at a spring. A flood on a scale that could actually move tectonic plates (i.e., create new magma at the mid-oceanic ridges, which would then pull oceanic crust apart, taking continents with it; or push existing oceanic crust back into the Earth's mantle) is *impossible*, again applying normal physical laws...there just would be no mechanism to make that happen. Sediment that is deposited in a flood looks fairly different from sediment deposited gradually in multiple depositional cycles, pretty easy to tell apart. We know what floods do geologically speaking, and there is no way even the most gigantic flood that we could imagine on Earth could plausibly create all the geologic features we see. Four hundred years ago, a Catholic Bishop (who was later beatified) looked into the matter, and was forced to conclude the biblical flood didn't do the trick, geologically speaking.

Now, if we say that the normal laws of physics didn't apply during the act of creation, then we are talking about miracles and all discussion on the topic ends b/c the frame of reference changes.

BTW, we use the age of the Earth and our understanding of how to arrive at the ages of rock formations in many practical matters all the time. For example, oil/gas/coal exploration as we know it, the search for uranium for nuclear power, the search for various minerals/metals, looking for groundwater (it's frequently age-dated to help us understand the source, pathways, etc. for the water), etc. all depend on knowing the age of rocks in an area. Just to give you an example, we know not to look for coal in Precambrian rocks b/c we know plants (the source of coal) hadn't evolved by then. To really disown age-dating and all of its applications in one's daily life, a person would have to live off the grid, probably in a cave somewhere.

superdan, thanks for the offer of the drink! After typing that long post, I sure could use that beer! ;)

As to whether there are indep. ways to get at 4.56 billion years, there aren't any non-isotopic methods as far as I know that can give us that precise date. But there are many many meteorites which have been dated independently by diff. labs across the world, and have given those ages, irrespective of isotopic system used. There's also the use of Pb isochrons, which is just too long to go into here. There are other calculations that physicists have made that confirm 4.5 bill.yrs. as a reasonable age for the planet, based on the age of the Sun, moon, solar system, etc.

Ananya,

Thank you for your respectful and very informative posts. Ususally when we get newcomers to this thread, they enter in full rant mode, either that religion is the root of all evil or that evilution is just a baseless religion. Unfortunately, that's by and large how we got to 6,000+ posts....

Ananya,

Thank you for your respectful and very informative posts. Ususally when we get newcomers to this thread, they enter in full rant mode, either that religion is the root of all evil or that evilution is just a baseless religion. Unfortunately, that's by and large how we got to 6,000+ posts....

Thanks, Dan! :) Actually, I was thinking this was a pretty civil discussion. I'm a regular on another deal site and we probably couldn't even talk about this sort of stuff there w/out all hell breaking loose.

Now if I could only figure out how to get an avatar to show up and how to view people's profiles, I might even stick around to post some more. :confused: ;)

Thanks, Dan! :) Actually, I was thinking this was a pretty civil discussion. I'm a regular on another deal site and we probably couldn't even talk about this sort of stuff there w/out all hell breaking loose.

Now if I could only figure out how to get an avatar to show up and how to view people's profiles, I might even stick around to post some more. :confused: ;)
under the home button (top left) you should see user CP. That's where you go to edit options. To see a profile, click a user name in a post and select "see public profile."

Perhaps you missed my question to you earlier: do you work in earth science?

evilution

:rofl2:

under the home button (top left) you should see user CP. That's where you go to edit options. To see a profile, click a user name in a post and select "see public profile."

Perhaps you missed my question to you earlier: do you work in earth science?

It won't let me access the public profiles...I'll check w/ a mod. I wondered if it was some feature not open to newbies?

Yup, you caught me, I'm a geologist. What gave me away? :lol:


P.S. Never mind, it all works now! Guess I needed to have the account for 24 hours or whatever.

Yes, I thought "evilution" was a stroke of genius in terms of word play, although not a sentiment I agree with.

It won't let me access the public profiles...I'll check w/ a mod. I wondered if it was some feature not open to newbies?

Yup, you caught me, I'm a geologist. What gave me away? :lol:


P.S. Never mind, it all works now! Guess I needed to have the account for 24 hours or whatever.

Yes, I thought "evilution" was a stroke of genius in terms of word play, although not a sentiment I agree with.
yeah, you gain different abilities based on posts and longevity. Though apparently you've posted enough to get a custom avatar :)

Cool...I don't think we have a geologist here. Some biologists, chemists, engineers, but no geologist. welcome! :)

yeah, you gain different abilities based on posts and longevity. Though apparently you've posted enough to get a custom avatar :)

Cool...I don't think we have a geologist here. Some biologists, chemists, engineers, but no geologist. welcome! :)

Don't forget me .. know it all smarty :)

Don't forget me .. know it all smarty :)
oh....we have biologists, chemists, engineers, a geologist, dan the superhero (who now apparently has access to lots of beer :lol:) and the indescribable talgot :hug:

oh....we have biologists, chemists, engineers, a geologist, dan the superhero (who now apparently has access to lots of beer :lol:) and the indescribable talgot :hug:

HAHA. Jack of all things creation/evolution... master of none! :sadwalk:

HAHA. Jack of all things creation/evolution... master of none! :sadwalk:
fine -- the self-described talgot :tongue:

"For me it is creation...so many facts to disprove evolutionists"

There is no fact whatsoever that supports the idea (doesn't qualify even as a theory) of creationism.

It's good to see that at least most folks believe in evolution. Our educational system isn't completely in the toilet.

Thanks for the welcome. As for being the only geologist, us geologists are used to being our lonesome little selves in the big, bad world. :(


Our educational system isn't completely in the toilet.

Just give it some time...it'll get there. :lol:

"For me it is creation...so many facts to disprove evolutionists"

There is no fact whatsoever that supports the idea (doesn't qualify even as a theory) of creationism.

It's good to see that at least most folks believe in evolution. Our educational system isn't completely in the toilet.

Not according to some polls. Teaching evolution as fact as does our educational system does is a problem. Doesn't mean creation needs to be taught. I would like to know what "facts" you have that evolution is true?

.... I would like to know what "facts" you have that evolution is true?


Are you really serious? Have you ever read so much as a single scientific article on evolution? Have you ever seen a documentary on it? Did you go to school?

It amazes me people ask this stupid question about what facts there are regarding evolution. If you're an educated adult, asking about this, I think it shows you've simply chosen to ignore the facts regarding evolution - likely due to being brainwashed into believing some religious nonsense.

Evolution is biological change over time. It's a fact it happens. There are literally millions of well-documented examples.

Are you really serious? Have you ever read so much as a single scientific article on evolution? Have you ever seen a documentary on it? Did you go to school?

It amazes me people ask this stupid question about what facts there are regarding evolution. If you're an educated adult, asking about this, I think it shows you've simply chosen to ignore the facts regarding evolution - likely due to being brainwashed into believing some religious nonsense.

Evolution is biological change over time. It's a fact it happens. There are literally millions of well-documented examples.

There is? Like? If your going to make assertions you need to back it up rather than insult. :) If it was a fact it wouldn't say the "theory" now would it?

Not according to some polls. Teaching evolution as fact as does our educational system does is a problem. Doesn't mean creation needs to be taught. I would like to know what "facts" you have that evolution is true?

Evolution is true because it is an observable phenomenon. It is only the creationists/designers that make a distinction between macro and micro

There is? Like? If your going to make assertions you need to back it up rather than insult. :) If it was a fact it wouldn't say the "theory" now would it?

A scientific "theory" isn't just a random guess, or even an educated guess. It's of course something that's gone through the scientific method. Unlike say, fairy tales and creation legends.

There is as much evidence to support the theory of evolution (we could easily call it the law of evolution) as there is for the law of gravity (which we could call the theory of gravity; those two words are essentially interchangeable in this context). As for examples, it's hard to know where to start since there are so many obvious ones. When bacteria develop resistance to antibiotics, there is no reasonable way to explain it except to recognize that they are evolving (adapting) to changing circumstances. And of course if you couldn't change organisms through selection (man-made in this particular instance), there would be no point in trying to breed dogs, horses, guppies, or the giant pumpkin.

Evolution is true because it is an observable phenomenon. It is only the creationists/designers that make a distinction between macro and micro

We have had no qualms with observable adaptations.. Its the Evolutionist crown that calls it evolution , which is a bad term for that. You jump from scientific fact of observance to assumption and speculation when you say this leads to completely different creatures. That is not fact. I think the distinction needs to be made when evolutionists decided to blur the two together. ;)

A scientific "theory" isn't just a random guess, or even an educated guess. It's of course something that's gone through the scientific method. Unlike say, fairy tales and creation legends.

There is as much evidence to support the theory of evolution (we could easily call it the law of evolution) as there is for the law of gravity (which we could call the theory of gravity; those two words are essentially interchangeable in this context). As for examples, it's hard to know where to start since there are so many obvious ones. When bacteria develop resistance to antibiotics, there is no reasonable way to explain it except to recognize that they are evolving (adapting) to changing circumstances. And of course if you couldn't change organisms through selection (man-made in this particular instance), there would be no point in trying to breed dogs, horses, guppies, or the giant pumpkin.

Firstly, I would be careful in your terms. Calling ones faith "fairytales " can be viewed as inflamatory. :)

Secondly, creation theory doesn't state itself as fact unlike evolution tries to do. Creation is primarly historical science with its own evidence to support it.

By your example, have you observed a bacteria not being a bacteria? Have you observed a dog not being a dog? Sure there is much variation. But what a boring creation would it be without that? The dna allows for variation and adaptation in creatures. But it surely hasn't been shown outside of speculation to produce anything other than what it is.

I never denied there is no evidence to support your theory. But evidence is not the same as fact. Surely you know that? :)

Firstly, I would be careful in your terms. Calling ones faith "fairytales " can be viewed as inflamatory. :)

Secondly, creation theory doesn't state itself as fact unlike evolution tries to do. Creation is primarly historical science with its own evidence to support it.

By your example, have you observed a bacteria not being a bacteria? Have you observed a dog not being a dog? Sure there is much variation. But what a boring creation would it be without that? The dna allows for variation and adaptation in creatures. But it surely hasn't been shown outside of speculation to produce anything other than what it is.

I never denied there is no evidence to support your theory. But evidence is not the same as fact. Surely you know that? :)
He said fairy tales AND creation legends.
Just because you don't like that the term evolution is used, doesn't make it wrong to use it to describe genetic change over time, regardless of speciation.
Calling one of the strongest scientific theories speculation and assumption is no different that us calling your story a fairy tale.

We have had no qualms with observable adaptations.. Its the Evolutionist crown that calls it evolution , which is a bad term for that. You jump from scientific fact of observance to assumption and speculation when you say this leads to completely different creatures. That is not fact. I think the distinction needs to be made when evolutionists decided to blur the two together. ;)
You are correct, that part is not fact and is part of what makes up the theory. However, as has been pointed out numerous times in this thread, that theory is based very solidly on observation and experimentation. There is no more speculation in the ToE than any other valid theory that has traits of being unobservable, including much of physics, chemistry, cosmology, etc. We don't see how atoms bonds, and don't directly see subatomic particles, but we know they are there by the evidence they leave behind. This is after they have been proposed and hypothesized about long before we could show they existed.

By your example, have you observed a bacteria not being a bacteria? Have you observed a dog not being a dog?

No because macro-evolution is not a realistic means of producing new species. Who knows, maybe it happened once, or three times. But the basic problem is that when new chromosomes are added or removed from a sophisticated animal life form, there is nothing for it to mate with. You have to have two different animals mutate at the same time in a compatible way, and have that compatibility be beneficial. And of course they have to find each other. This is my problem with macro-evolution, and it does not stem from my religious beliefs. No matter how many times darkfrog might suggest arguments against evolution must.

Basically micro-evolution is observable science, and the idea that macro-evolution was a determining force in the rise of animals comes from a scientific philosophical worldview.

No because macro-evolution is not a realistic means of producing new species. Who knows, maybe it happened once, or three times. But the basic problem is that when new chromosomes are added or removed from a sophisticated animal life form, there is nothing for it to mate with. You have to have two different animals mutate at the same time in a compatible way, and have that compatibility be beneficial. And of course they have to find each other. This is my problem with macro-evolution, and it does not stem from my religious beliefs. No matter how many times darkfrog might suggest arguments against evolution must.

Basically micro-evolution is observable science, and the idea that macro-evolution was a determining force in the rise of animals comes from a scientific philosophical worldview.Interspecies mating is quite common and occurs to this day.

We don't see how atoms bonds, and don't directly see subatomic particles, but we know they are there by the evidence they leave behind. This is after they have been proposed and hypothesized about long before we could show they existed.


We can observe atoms bonding through indirect methods, and smash atoms together to observe subatomic particles, as you have noted. And indeed we could even genetically modify a pig to be a cow. The question is not whether it's possible; it is. The question is whether it was the source of the varied forms of life we see on earth today. Thus it has a historical element. The historical evidence for evolution is there if you want to see it, and absent if you don't. I do not find it compelling.

Interspecies mating is quite common and occurs to this day.

Animals with 54 chromosomes mate with animals with 24? I'm not aware that this happens.

You are correct, that part is not fact and is part of what makes up the theory. However, as has been pointed out numerous times in this thread, that theory is based very solidly on observation and experimentation. There is no more speculation in the ToE than any other valid theory that has traits of being unobservable, including much of physics, chemistry, cosmology, etc. We don't see how atoms bonds, and don't directly see subatomic particles, but we know they are there by the evidence they leave behind. This is after they have been proposed and hypothesized about long before we could show they existed.
I don't disagree with what you wrote. I think this is ultimately an accurate statement.

I don't disagree with what you wrote. I think this is ultimately an accurate statement.Holy Shit we agreed on something:D

Holy Shit we agreed on something:D

Outside of this thread, from most of your other posts, we actually share simular views.;)

Firstly, I would be careful in your terms. Calling ones faith "fairytales " can be viewed as inflamatory. :)

Secondly, creation theory doesn't state itself as fact unlike evolution tries to do. Creation is primarly historical science with its own evidence to support it.

By your example, have you observed a bacteria not being a bacteria? Have you observed a dog not being a dog? Sure there is much variation. But what a boring creation would it be without that? The dna allows for variation and adaptation in creatures. But it surely hasn't been shown outside of speculation to produce anything other than what it is.

I never denied there is no evidence to support your theory. But evidence is not the same as fact. Surely you know that? :)

The "creation legend" is the part you should have taken offense with, if you were going to be offended. :) The fairy tales were in there as a third category altogether...1) fairy tales, 2) creation legends, and 3) evolution...possible ways to describe the origin of the Earth.

I'm not sure what creation "historical science" would be...I'm still trying to wrap my head around Psychology being a science :tongue:, let alone something that isn't even remotely scientific calling itself a science. There is no shame in religion just being religion, without trying to dress itself up to look like science.

I'm not sure I follow the argument in your 3rd paragraph...are you saying the adaptation part of evolution is okay, as long as we're not talking about forming new species? I'm not a biologist, but I believe several bird species (known as ring species) can breed outside their own species, and produce *fertile* offspring.

I'm curious as to where you stand on extinction, since that is the other leg of the table that is "evolution"...do you believe extinction takes place? The church historically had a lot of problems with the idea b/c --- if God made all the species on Earth, they had to be perfect, and a perfect species made by God could never just simply become extinct. THIS was one of the biggest problems the Victorians had with Darwin. We of course get to see extinction in action all the time now which people could not in the past, and that question has been put to rest.

A similar issue that both Nicolaus Steno and Leonardo before him struggled with was the explanation for fossils. Since the church deemed everything in the natural world to be static, exactly as God had made it save for the effects of the flood, the standard explanation for any fossils was that they were "curiosities" or artifacts placed in rock by God to amuse, entertain, and/or edify humans with their mysterious presence. When people like Leonardo and Steno argued that these were the remains of once-living organisms (Bishop Steno dissected a real shark to correctly identify fossils previously known as "tonguestones" as just fossilized shark teeth), this was seen as deeply heretic.

The church and Christianity survived these two little "crises" intact...I imagine they will weather the next one (accepting evolution?) too.

The "creation legend" is the part you should have taken offense with, if you were going to be offended. :) The fairy tales were in there as a third category altogether...1) fairy tales, 2) creation legends, and 3) evolution...possible ways to describe the origin of the Earth.

I'm not sure what creation "historical science" would be...I'm still trying to wrap my head around Psychology being a science :tongue:, let alone something that isn't even remotely scientific calling itself a science. There is no shame in religion just being religion, without trying to dress itself up to look like science.

I'm not sure I follow the argument in your 3rd paragraph...are you saying the adaptation part of evolution is okay, as long as we're not talking about forming new species? I'm not a biologist, but I believe several bird species (known as ring species) can breed outside their own species, and produce *fertile* offspring.I've already answered him. Species can and do cross-breed, adding even more elements to the evolutionary process. But that isn't even the whole story since sexual production is a relatively late evolutionary adaptation.

I've already answered him. Species can and do cross-breed, adding even more elements to the evolutionary process. But that isn't even the whole story since sexual production is a relatively late evolutionary adaptation.

Thanks. :) I started writing my post, then got busy with some other stuff...should have looked for new posts before hitting "reply".

oh....we have biologists, chemists, engineers, a geologist, dan the superhero (who now apparently has access to lots of beer :lol:) and the indescribable talgot :hug:

I think that admittedly random post was inspired by a flashback I was having. A couple years back, I stayed with my aunt and uncle while completing an internship a couple years back. We went to one of their church picnic's, which happened to be sponsored by Miller Lite. Let's just say it wasn't your typical pot-luck family gathering. The priest even got up and sang some Jimmy Buffett :doh:, then held a fundraiser in which he got his ear pierced.

Truthfully I think beer is gross :eek:, but don't have anything against a little bubbly every so often.

I'm not sure I follow the argument in your 3rd paragraph...are you saying the adaptation part of evolution is okay, as long as we're not talking about forming new species? I'm not a biologist, but I believe several bird species (known as ring species) can breed outside their own species, and produce *fertile* offspring.

I'm curious as to where you stand on extinction, since that is the other leg of the table that is "evolution"...do you believe extinction takes place? The church historically had a lot of problems with the idea b/c --- if God made all the species on Earth, they had to be perfect, and a perfect species made by God could never just simply become extinct. THIS was one of the biggest problems the Victorians had with Darwin. We of course get to see extinction in action all the time now which people could not in the past, and that question has been put to rest.

I think a major problem is that we have infused our ideas of "good" and "perfect" contrary to those originally established. Many creationists refuse to accept anything other than a perfect creation sans any death in regards to Genesis. However this world completely and wholeheartedly relies upon death in order to sustain itself, whether it be the dead cells that form our fingernails or the microorganisms that sustain much of ocean life. I believe God set up this world so that we can find out who he is. And If Genesis really describes a perfect world in our sense then he would have had to completely redesign everything from top to bottom. Sometimes it almost seems as if we are flat out denying Him in order to conform Him to our preconceived ideas, however noble they may be. That said, I do believe the element of design is unmistakable, even if it is achieved through wholistically natural processes.

FWIW the Jewish idea of perfection doesn't seem to mesh with our modern day interpretation. In their version of heaven in Isaiah 65, death is still existent (the young will die at 100 years according to Isaiah 65:20), however peace and righteousness are the characteristics that embody this "perfect" world.

Evolution is true because it is an observable phenomenon. It is only the creationists/designers that make a distinction between macro and micro

Some of us can see the change in species over time, but disagree on the scope evolution played on it. I probably wouldn't have much problem with evolution if the historical data fit better. As it is the fossil record looks more like a series of plateaus one must jump from in order to reach the summit we are at today (yes I have looked at the Transitional Fossils list). Yes there is certainly progression but there is also way too much stasis, so a more likely theory for me is progressive creation (http://www.godandscience.org/youngearth/progressive.html). It just makes the most sense of the data, whether bonkman thinks its boring or not :P.

I think a major problem is that we have infused our ideas of "good" and "perfect" contrary to those originally established. Many creationists refuse to accept anything other than a perfect creation sans any death in regards to Genesis. However this world completely and wholeheartedly relies upon death in order to sustain itself, whether it be the dead cells that form our fingernails or the microorganisms that sustain much of ocean life. I believe God set up this world so that we can find out who he is. If Genesis really describes a perfect world in our sense then he would have had to completely redesign everything from top to bottom. That said, I do believe the element of design is unmistakable, even if it is achieved through wholistically natural processes.

FWIW the Jewish idea of perfection doesn't seem to mesh with our modern day interpretation. In their version of heaven in Isaiah 65, death is still existent (the young will die at 100 years according to Isaiah 65:20), however peace and righteousness are the characteristics that embody this "perfect" world.I don't see why you can't have death and still be perfect if we accept death as part of life.
Don't christians believe in an afterlife, which makes death not the end and therefore doesn't do anything to make 'life' less perfect?

Some of us can see the change in species over time, but disagree on the scope evolution played on it. I probably wouldn't have much problem with evolution if the historical data fit better. As it is the fossil record looks more like a series of plateaus one must jump from in order to reach the summit we are at today (yes I have looked at the Transitional Fossils list). Yes there is certainly progression but there is also way too much stasis, so a more likely theory for me is progressive creation (http://www.godandscience.org/youngearth/progressive.html). It just makes the most sense of the data, whether bonkman thinks its boring or not :P.
Why can't punctuated equilibrium be right? Just because you want to see progression slowly doesn't mean it happened that way. A lot of scientist would have liked their ideas to be born out but many times they have to discard their pre-conceived notions when it conflicts with evidence. A lot of things in out universe aren't common sensical but they are true nonetheless.

Why can't punctuated equilibrium be right? Just because you want to see progression slowly doesn't mean it happened that way. A lot of scientist would have liked their ideas to be born out but many times they have to discard their pre-conceived notions when it conflicts with evidence. A lot of things in out universe aren't common sensical but they are true nonetheless.

Because I also think that evolutions scope is also limited my irreducible complexity (no tomato throwing please). Those two factors combined (and other things) cause me to lean towards progressive creation as a more plausible route. I don't have a problem with PE, but I don't see it as a necessity either I guess. Why is it a better alternative?

I don't see why you can't have death and still be perfect if we accept death as part of life.
Don't christians believe in an afterlife, which makes death not the end and therefore doesn't do anything to make 'life' less perfect?

I think we are actually agreeing, and you just misread my post ;).

Because I also think that evolutions scope is also limited my irreducible complexity (no tomato throwing please). Those two factors combined (and other things) cause me to lean towards progressive creation as a more plausible route. I don't have a problem with PE, but I don't see it as a necessity either I guess. Why is it a better alternative?
It's only an alternative to phyletic gradualism, which is what you were describing. I don't think many scientists believe that evolution occurs at a consistent rate. There is something called evolutionary capacitance that won't allow genetic change to show phenotypically (hence observable in fossils) until a certain stimulus where these changes may be expressed suddenly (on a geologic timescale).
The fossil record does show jumps and plateaus like you said. Evolutionists don't claim otherwise. That's where some of the challenge is. How can we explain those pauses scientifically. You have to remember the time scales we are dealing with. The time in between a fossilized species with only a slight change can be tens of thousands of years, many generations, enough to where even slighter changes would be missed like missing frames in a movie. There just will never be enough fossils to 'complete the picture' as you want to see it. Fossilization is just to rare to do so.

Truthfully I think beer is gross :eek:,

That's it Dan. You're off the team.


Maybe the Evolutionists will take you.

:cool:

That's it Dan. You're off the team.


Maybe the Evolutionists will take you.

:cool:That's Evolustionists, thank you. :P

I'm reminded of this quote:
"Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy." - Benjamin Franklin

Found this when I was searching for a source for that quote:

EVOLUTION OF ALCOHOL SYNTHESIS
By P.Z. Myers

We need to appreciate beer more. Alcohol has a long history in human affairs, and has been important in purifying and preserving food and drink, and in making our parties livelier. We owe it all to a tiny little microorganism, Saccharomyces cerevisiae, which converts complex plant sugars into smaller, simpler, more socially potent molecules of ethanol. This is a remarkable process that seems to be entirely to our benefit (it has even been argued that beer is proof of the existence of God*), but recent research has shown that the little buggers do it all entirely for their own selfish reasons, and they’ve been busily making alcohol that has gone undrunk by humankind for tens of millions of years.

In order to explain how we know this, forgive me, but I must explain some very basic biochemistry, and summarize what cells do to extract energy from sugar. We start with a 6 carbon sugar molecule. As a first step, called glycolysis, enzymes in the cell snap the molecule in half, liberating a little bit of energy and producing two 3-carbon molecules, called pyruvate.

Pyruvate gets passed on to the next step, called the citric acid cycle. This is a series of reactions that breaks the 3-carbon chain down carbon by carbon, liberating yet more energy at each step. It’s all the steps after glycolysis that extract the bulk of the energy from the sugar molecule, but there’s a catch: these steps require oxygen to run (this is also called the aerobic pathway). No oxygen, no citric acid cycle. Glycolysis can run, but some of the reaction products (especially a compound called NADH) accumulate, and soon enough that reaction would get choked off, too.

In the absence of oxygen, cells can continue to get that little bit of energy from glycolysis if only they can get rid of the accumulating reaction products somehow. In us, our cells do that by carrying out an additional reaction to convert excess pyruvate and NADH to another 3-carbon molecule, lactate, and NAD+. Lactate diffuses out of the cells and into the blood stream, forming lactic acid. When you are exercising anaerobically, that is, making your cells work harder than you can deliver oxygen to them, they limp along by dumping 3-carbon molecules in the form of lactic acid so they can keep burning sugar inefficiently. Once you’re done working out, and your oxygen intake catches up, the lactate is converted back to pyruvate and can be burned completely and efficiently in the citric acid cycle.

Yeast do something different. If they are under anaerobic conditions, say, deep in the flesh of some decaying fruit, or in a wine bottle, they have the same problem: they want to keep their metabolism going by carrying out glycolysis, but to do that they have to get rid of accumulating products, somehow. They don’t do it by making lactic acid, though (thank goodness—if they did, fermentation would produce a vinegary acid). Instead, they take the 3-carbon pyruvate and split off one carbon, producing CO2, which is given off as a gas. Any homebrew beer makers out there will be familiar with the idea of monitoring fermentation by observing the gas being produced.

The 2-carbon molecule left behind is called acetaldehyde. Acetaldehyde is further processed by an enzyme called alcohol dehydrogenase, Adh for short, which also recycles NADH. Adh converts the 2-carbon acetaldehyde into another 2-carbon molecule, ethanol. Alcohol. Booze.

Just like us, yeast produce this byproduct to keep going under anaerobic conditions, and when oxygen is available, they try to recover the energy in the alcohol. Familiar brewers’ yeast has two forms of alcohol dehydrogenase: Adh1, which favors the production of alcohol from acetaldehyde, and Adh2, which more effectively runs the reaction in reverse, producing acetaldehyde from alcohol, and allowing the 2-carbon molecule to be fed back into the citric acid cycle.

If you’d rather see this in a simple biochemical diagram of the yeast pathways below: it says the same thing I just wrote up there.





Enzymes in red are associated with gene duplications that, according to the transition redundant exchange clock, arose nearly contemporaneously. The make-accumulate-consume pathway is boxed. The shunting of the carbon atoms from pyruvate into (and then out of, blue arrows) ethanol is energy-expensive, consuming a molecule of ATP (green) for every molecule of ethanol generated. This ATP is not consumed if pyruvate is oxidatively decarboxylated directly to acetyl-coenzyme A to enter the citric acid cycle directly (dashed arrow to the right). If dioxygen is available, the recycling of NADH does not need the acetaldehyde-to-ethanol reduction.
Zymurgosaurus dipsomanius, not Homo sapiens.

The second line of evidence is very cool. It would be instructive to be able to directly examine the metabolism of yeast from 80 million years ago, and measure for ourselves the activity of their Adh enzyme. We don’t have a time machine, unfortunately, but we do have the ability to reconstruct ancient genes.

The authors compared the sequences of Adh1 and Adh2 from S. cerevesiae and from 15 other Adh homologs in other yeast species. They then calculated the maximum likelihood gene sequence for the last common ancestor of these enzymes, the primordial alcohol enzyme, which they called AdhA. They then took modern yeast, removed their Adh1 and Adh2 genes, and replaced them with AdhA. Voilà, they have yeast from the Age of the Dinosaurs.

They then analyzed the chemical kinetics of this enzyme. The question was whether it was more like Adh1, the enzyme that primarily makes ethanol, or whether it was more like Adh2, the enzyme that primarily consumes alcohol. Did yeast evolve this enzyme to make a byproduct to inhibit its competitors, or did it evolve it to eat this byproduct?

The answer is that it was more like Adh1, and that early yeast were brewers, not drinkers.

“Notably, the kinetic properties of the remaining ancestral AdhA candidates resembled those of Adh1 more than those of Adh2. From this, we inferred that the ancestral yeast did not have an Adh specialized for the consumption of ethanol, similar to modern Adh2, but rather had an Adh specialized for making ethanol, similar to modern Adh1. This suggests that before the Adh1-Adh2 duplication, the ancestral yeast did not consume ethanol. This implies that the ancestral yeast also did not accumulate ethanol under aerobic conditions for future consumption and that the make-accumulate-consume strategy emerged after Adh1 and Adh2 diverged. These interpretations are robust with respect to the ambiguities in the reconstructions.”

We can assemble a history of yeast fermentation from this information now. The first step was the gradual evolution of efficient alcohol-producing enzymes that allowed the yeast to colonize and exploit rotting fruit exclusively. This occurred a very long time ago, in the Cretaceous. Next, there was a gene duplication event that produced two copies of Adh; initially, both would have done exactly the same thing, just allowing the lucky duplicators to pump out alcohol even faster. With two copies, though, one would have more freedom to drift and change its enzymatic properties without serious consequence to the owner. One fortuitous change would be a shift in enzyme kinetics in one copy to better promote conversion of alcohol back to acetaldehyde and enter back into the citric acid cycle. So, first they learned how to make an environmental poison to give them exclusive access to a food source, and then that same machinery was adapted to better allow them to eat that poison, permitting them recover some of the energy lost in secreting it.

Notes

* “Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy,” Benjamin Franklin.

References

Thomson JM, Gaucher EA, Burgan MF, DeKee DW, Li T, Aris JP, Benner SA (2005) Resurrecting ancestral alcohol dehydrogenases from yeast. Nature Genetics 37:630-635.

Woolfit M, Wolfe K (2005) The gene duplication that greased society’s wheels. Nature Genetics 37:566-567.

The thread title is spelled wrong. OP, please fix it. EVOLUTIONIST

I'm not sure what creation "historical science" would be...I'm still trying to wrap my head around Psychology being a science :tongue:, let alone something that isn't even remotely scientific calling itself a science. There is no shame in religion just being religion, without trying to dress itself up to look like science.

I'm not sure I follow the argument in your 3rd paragraph...are you saying the adaptation part of evolution is okay, as long as we're not talking about forming new species? I'm not a biologist, but I believe several bird species (known as ring species) can breed outside their own species, and produce *fertile* offspring.

The point is that historical sciences must be brought to bear on this subject. Just because something could have happened doesn't mean it did happen. It's like CSI trying to reconstruct the evidence, and there being little to no unambiguous evidence about the formation of life on earth. BTW, I have no problem if God used evolution to make life. I just think it oversteps science's abilities to determine that that is true.

I've already answered him. Species can and do cross-breed, adding even more elements to the evolutionary process. But that isn't even the whole story since sexual production is a relatively late evolutionary adaptation.

Um, if you're talking about replying to me, you haven't answered my question about an animal with 54 chromosomes mating with something with, say, 24. I'm all for horse's, donkey's, and bird's interspecies dating, but I'm not aware that horses can successfully mate with birds. If you know of an example of animals with different #s of chromosomes successfully mating, I'd love to hear about it. BTW successful implies the creation of a viable, reproducing offspring, as you have mentioned.

I'm curious as to where you stand on extinction, since that is the other leg of the table that is "evolution"...do you believe extinction takes place?Of course.
The church historically had a lot of problems with the idea b/c --- if God made all the species on Earth, they had to be perfect, and a perfect species made by God could never just simply become extinct.I've been around the block quite a few times, and I've never heard this argument. Perhaps you've been talking to people specializing in demagoguery (sp?). Or perhaps this is an ancient argument that I haven't heard.
THIS was one of the biggest problems the Victorians had with Darwin. We of course get to see extinction in action all the time now which people could not in the past, and that question has been put to rest.They may have had a problem with death before Adam & Eve. I don't think that that is a valid or necessary argument from the perspective of the Bible. Science has been very helpful in teaching man how to read parts of the Bible.


A similar issue that both Nicolaus Steno and Leonardo before him struggled with was the explanation for fossils. Since the church deemed everything in the natural world to be static, exactly as God had made it save for the effects of the flood, the standard explanation for any fossils was that they were "curiosities" or artifacts placed in rock by God to amuse, entertain, and/or edify humans with their mysterious presence. When people like Leonardo and Steno argued that these were the remains of once-living organisms (Bishop Steno dissected a real shark to correctly identify fossils previously known as "tonguestones" as just fossilized shark teeth), this was seen as deeply heretic.There have been lots of courageous scientists who have stood up to the church at important points in history. Man is in their debt. Indeed Christianity is also in their debt.
The church and Christianity survived these two little "crises" intact...I imagine they will weather the next one (accepting evolution?) too.The problem is macro-evolution is a theory based on a reductionistic philosophical worldview. The idea that the earth is not the center of the universe is not.

The thread title is spelled wrong. OP, please fix it. EVOLUTIONISTROFL. Where have you been? This thread has had that title for the last 3 years and it is a running joke here.


Um, if you're talking about replying to me, you haven't answered my question about an animal with 54 chromosomes mating with something with, say, 24. I'm all for horse's, donkey's, and bird's interspecies dating, but I'm not aware that horses can successfully mate with birds. If you know of an example of animals with different #s of chromosomes successfully mating, I'd love to hear about it. BTW successful implies the creation of a viable, reproducing offspring, as you have mentioned.Horses and zebras; lions and tigers both can produce viable offspring. I'm sure there are more examples, especially in the plant world.

ROFL. Where have you been? This thread has had that title for the last 3 years and it is a running joke here.



sarcasm?

The problem is macro-evolution is a theory based on a reductionistic philosophical worldview. The idea that the earth is not the center of the universe is not.
Most of science is based on reductionism. So what? Einstein reduced Newton who reduced Galileo, Kepler. (so not being at the center of the universe was a reductionist philosophy)
Physics reduces biology and chemistry.

sarcasm?
No, I really found it funny that you haven't seen that in all the years this thread has been active. Why do you think I was sarcastic?

I've been around the block quite a few times, and I've never heard this argument. Perhaps you've been talking to people specializing in demagoguery (sp?). Or perhaps this is an ancient argument that I haven't heard.

Actually, this is a fairly well-known story, I believe. I've heard the late Steven Jay Gould mention it in passing in a lecture, and saw some print references to this last year when I was researching some stuff on Darwin's early training as a geologist. I'll try to dig up (a geology pun, haha) an original reference for you.

In the meanwhile, Evolutionary biologist Olivia Judson referenced it in a recent NYT article (Musings Inspired by a Quagga, May 27, 2008):

"Extinction is so much a part of today’s cultural background — this species endangered, that habitat lost, save the whale, save the rhino, save the rainforest — that it’s strange to think that as little as 200 years ago, most people didn’t think extinction was possible. The very idea was an affront to the Creator: it suggested imperfection and incompleteness in the original design of the world. So even once it became accepted that fossils had been formed from living beings — which itself took some time — most people supposed that the corresponding organisms were still alive, somewhere, awaiting discovery."

She then goes on to explain how Cuvier and others showed that these "missing" organisms were truly gone for good.

Hey, I'm sure some people thought that a species couldn't be entirely extinguished. Lots of people have thought lots of crazy things lots of times. And maybe there was a religious element to this thought. But I'm generally wary of unreligious scientists speaking of the beliefs of religious people. They tend to sound roughly like religious people who demagogue scientific views.


Like, one guy, Rev. Snooze will say he doesn't believe in extinction. It will appear in the Creation Times Quarterly magazine, and all of the sudden "religious people don't believe in extinction," or "most people don't believe in extinction because of their religion."

That said, maybe you're right, maybe it was a more widely held belief. If so this would be another place where science has assisted religious people, teaching them what is good to believe.

Yey science. I'm still hoping someone can find an example of interspecies mating with animals of different #s of chromosomes. This is my big problem with evolution. Of course when I talk about it, people generally think that I'm super biased because I'm religious and won't listen to reason anyways.


Meanie scientists. :)

Hey, I'm sure some people thought that a species couldn't be entirely extinguished. Lots of people have thought lots of crazy things lots of times. And maybe there was a religious element to this thought. But I'm generally wary of unreligious scientists speaking of the beliefs of religious people. They tend to sound roughly like religious people who demagogue scientific views.


Like, one guy, Rev. Snooze will say he doesn't believe in extinction. It will appear in the Creation Times Quarterly magazine, and all of the sudden "religious people don't believe in extinction," or "most people don't believe in extinction because of their religion."

That said, maybe you're right, maybe it was a more widely held belief. If so this would be another place where science has assisted religious people, teaching them what is good to believe.

Yey science. I'm still hoping someone can find an example of interspecies mating with animals of different #s of chromosomes. This is my big problem with evolution. Of course when I talk about it, people generally think that I'm super biased because I'm religious and won't listen to reason anyways.


Meanie scientists. :)

As opposed to religious types speaking on the beliefs of scientists. :rolleyes:

I guess you missed the post a few back on animals that cross breed with species with different chromosome numbers.
Horse-zebra, lion-tiger (ligers and tigons), donkey-zebra, savannah cats (cross between domestic cat and serval), Fertile Polar-Grizzly cross have been found in the wild although I think they have identical chromosome numbers, Camels and llamas are intergeneric,
There are a number of plants that have interspecies as well as intergenus crosses and are usually fertile.

As opposed to religious types speaking on the beliefs of scientists. :rolleyes:

Huh? That was my point, and you can't have it! :)

...But I'm generally wary of unreligious scientists speaking of the beliefs of religious people. They tend to sound roughly like religious people who demagogue scientific views....

I guess you missed the post a few back on animals that cross breed with species with different chromosome numbers.....

Cool, you didn't include the fact that these animals had different chromosome counts, and I didn't bother to look it up. I'll check this out when I get the chance.

Cool, you didn't include the fact that these animals had different chromosome counts, and I didn't bother to look it up. I'll check this out when I get the chance.

Well, since I was responding to your specific request, I tried to keep the hybrids to species that I was pretty sure had different chromosome numbers, however I'm not sure on all of them since I didn't look them up.
Also keep in mind that not all offspring are fertile. For example, sometimes only the female offspring can reproduce, however that should be enough since the hybrids usually have different chromosomal numbers even than their parents. It looks like horse-zebra hybrids are sterile so you can ignore that one but zonkeys have been able to reproduce

Well, since I was responding to your specific request, I tried to keep the hybrids to species that I was pretty sure had different chromosome numbers, however I'm not sure on all of them since I didn't look them up.
Also keep in mind that not all offspring are fertile. For example, sometimes only the female offspring can reproduce, however that should be enough since the hybrids usually have different chromosomal numbers even than their parents. It looks like horse-zebra hybrids are sterile so you can ignore that one but zonkeys have been able to reproduce

Just the examples you put out there seem to me just fine. The pairs are of the same type. Just variations of each. I think this is a problem.. that species can be a tricky word. I think Bonk said this before.. its a man-made term that only has the meaning we assign it. If i am not mistaken, I beleive the criteria that is used to discribe what constitutes a different species is subjective and has changed. Which is why I have used the biblical term kinds.

Just the examples you put out there seem to me just fine. The pairs are of the same type. Just variations of each. I think this is a problem.. that species can be a tricky word. I think Bonk said this before.. its a man-made term that only has the meaning we assign it. If i am not mistaken, I beleive the criteria that is used to discribe what constitutes a different species is subjective and has changed. Which is why I have used the biblical term kinds.
a horse and a zebra aren't different kinds? If you continue your viewpoint along this line of thought, I believe you'll eventually run into a contradiction showing you're wrong :)

a horse and a zebra aren't different kinds? If you continue your viewpoint along this line of thought, I believe you'll eventually run into a contradiction showing you're wrong :)

Yes. If you put up a zebra, donkey, horse and dog, I think any 3rd grader would tell you which one isn't the same kind.

Yes. If you put up a zebra, donkey, horse and dog, I think any 3rd grader would tell you which one isn't the same kind.
That's which one's less similar than the others in outward physical appearance. different question.

That's which one's less similar than the others in outward physical appearance. different question.

Sure. And they can produce offspring. Dog and a horse cannot.

Sure. And they can produce offspring. Dog and a horse cannot.
The kiang also looks like a horse, though I don't think it can successfully mate with one. Not sure, though.

Here's a list. I'm sure not all can mate with each other successfully :) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equidae)

Just the examples you put out there seem to me just fine. The pairs are of the same type. Just variations of each. I think this is a problem.. that species can be a tricky word. I think Bonk said this before.. its a man-made term that only has the meaning we assign it. If i am not mistaken, I beleive the criteria that is used to discribe what constitutes a different species is subjective and has changed. Which is why I have used the biblical term kinds.
Well since there is no clear definition for 'kind' we have to use something else and that is species, genera, family, etc.
If two animals don't even share the same number of chromosomes, how do you consider them the same 'kind'? Even among zebras there is enough variation to consider them separate species.
I think this is a major pitfall of your side, trying to use non-specific ideas in that piece of literature to make conclusions about the natural world. It is no different than saying well those two animals look similar, they must be of the same group. Not even considering that many similar animals aren't even of the same class. Even kingdoms have been confused, look at coral. For a long time they were though to be plants.
If you can't even begin to accept basic biology as a starting point, then there is no hope that you will come to the correct conclusions on evolution, whatever it ends up being. Please find me one biologist, even a creationist, that denies the idea of taxonomy to the extent that you just did.

The kiang also looks like a horse, though I don't think it can successfully mate with one. Not sure, though.

Here's a list. I'm sure not all can mate with each other successfully :) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equidae)

African wild ass sounds like a fun romp if your an animal mating with it lol

Well since there is no clear definition for 'kind' we have to use something else and that is species, genera, family, etc.
If two animals don't even share the same number of chromosomes, how do you consider them the same 'kind'? Even among zebras there is enough variation to consider them separate species.
I think this is a major pitfall of your side, trying to use non-specific ideas in that piece of literature to make conclusions about the natural world. It is no different than saying well those two animals look similar, they must be of the same group. Not even considering that many similar animals aren't even of the same class. Even kingdoms have been confused, look at coral. For a long time they were though to be plants.
If you can't even begin to accept basic biology as a starting point, then there is no hope that you will come to the correct conclusions on evolution, whatever it ends up being. Please find me one biologist, even a creationist, that denies the idea of taxonomy to the extent that you just did.

I am not sure i did deny it as you stated. My point is kind is a label and species is one. We give basic rules stating when one starts a different species based on what the person of the day classifies it as. I am just saying species is as ambiguous as kind in many instances. Often times you see animals listed as different species that are just variations of the same animal that have in some cases different characteristics do to its environment.

We all can except that there are many variations in this world of simular animals. Its just a matter of how you catagorize them. To me the term species would make one think its completely different. when as in birds most could be the outter look of the bird with minor beek differences and the like.

I did a search of this thread and there were no hits on the Dover School Board. There is a documentary on the trial that resulted when teachers at the Dover High School, in Central Pennsylvania, refused to make a one minute statement trying to equate Creationism as having as much scientific merit as Evolution.

As a result of the trial, most of the Dover school board resigned.

I can't begin to explain how much was made clear in the documentary. I can say that the judge was rather conservative yet he came away from the trial a somewhat changed individual, at least as far as the "science" of Creationism.

If you really want to know how seriously the judge took the matter and evaluated the testimony, here is a link to his decision:

http://www.pamd.uscourts.gov/kitzmiller/kitzmiller_342.pdf

Be advised, the decision is 139 pages long.

I will say this much. As a result of this trial and attempts by others to bring something other than a scientific explanation of the origin of the species, creationism was morphed into intelligent design.

Just a new label on creationism.

I am not sure i did deny it as you stated. My point is kind is a label and species is one. We give basic rules stating when one starts a different species based on what the person of the day classifies it as. I am just saying species is as ambiguous as kind in many instances. Often times you see animals listed as different species that are just variations of the same animal that have in some cases different characteristics do to its environment.

We all can except that there are many variations in this world of simular animals. Its just a matter of how you catagorize them. To me the term species would make one think its completely different. when as in birds most could be the outter look of the bird with minor beek differences and the like.
it's not AS ambiguous as "kind." While it doesn't have a strict definition, it DOES have a collective group of characteristics that can be compared, and the people doing the comparing are active. "Kind" is completely ambiguous (though I'm not sure if that's just lost in translation) and it's passive. Species, of course, is also a part of a hierarchy denoting differences in changes. Different species is less of a change than different genus, different phylum, different kingdoms, etc. Kind is nonspecific.

This post illustrates the disconnect between the biologist and the average person (no offense, talgot). There can be huge behavioral, genetic, and internal characteristics between animals that look nearly identical. But we are very visual-centric, so we weigh what we see much more. Animals take advantage of this all the time -- which is why you have many "imitator" species, like king snakes (not poisonous) and water snakes (very deadly).

I am not sure i did deny it as you stated. My point is kind is a label and species is one. We give basic rules stating when one starts a different species based on what the person of the day classifies it as. I am just saying species is as ambiguous as kind in many instances. Often times you see animals listed as different species that are just variations of the same animal that have in some cases different characteristics do to its environment.

We all can except that there are many variations in this world of simular animals. Its just a matter of how you catagorize them. To me the term species would make one think its completely different. when as in birds most could be the outter look of the bird with minor beek differences and the like.

You are denying it by not accepting the classifications. I have already pointed out to you how phenotype alone will cause you to make incorrect assumptions. Sure, species is a label, but a very specific one that is always open to change when and if new information is concluded. For example, dogs and wolves used to be separate species but now are one, with dogs being a different subspecies (Canis lupus familiaris). Foxes, however, although they 'look' very dog like are not even the same genus, but either vulpes or urocyon.
Why did Noah take aboard a Raven AND a Dove? Aren't they just 'birds' one 'kind'? A dove is just a small, white version of a Raven. :lmao:
Your definition of kind is much more ambiguous than possibly anything else.

I did a search of this thread and there were no hits on the Dover School Board. There is a documentary on the trial that resulted when teachers at the Dover High School, in Central Pennsylvania, refused to make a one minute statement trying to equate Creationism as having as much scientific merit as Evolution.

As a result of the trial, most of the Dover school board resigned.

I can't begin to explain how much was made clear in the documentary. I can say that the judge was rather conservative yet he came away from the trial a somewhat changed individual, at least as far as the "science" of Creationism.

If you really want to know how seriously the judge took the matter and evaluated the testimony, here is a link to his decision:

http://www.pamd.uscourts.gov/kitzmiller/kitzmiller_342.pdf

Be advised, the decision is 139 pages long.

I will say this much. As a result of this trial and attempts by others to bring something other than a scientific explanation of the origin of the species, creationism was morphed into intelligent design.

Just a new label on creationism.

You have to go back and search the archived portion of the thread. It has been discussed, but it is great to have brought up again because it is important to know about in relation to how this has infiltrated into many school boards. Marietta, Georgia has also had their problems.

You are denying it by not accepting the classifications. I have already pointed out to you how phenotype alone will cause you to make incorrect assumptions. Sure, species is a label, but a very specific one that is always open to change when and if new information is concluded. For example, dogs and wolves used to be separate species but now are one, with dogs being a different subspecies (Canis lupus familiaris). Foxes, however, although they 'look' very dog like are not even the same genus, but either vulpes or urocyon.
Why did Noah take aboard a Raven AND a Dove? Aren't they just 'birds' one 'kind'? A dove is just a small, white version of a Raven. :lmao:
Your definition of kind is much more ambiguous than possibly anything else.

I haven't denied it. I just put forth some issues i have with it. Of course we need to use somecommon ground and that may be to denote things how the majority would. To me I can have an issue with how cool is used. It wasn't always ment to mean more than it has. Doesn't mean I haven't accepted the meaning put forth.. but doesn't mean I can't have an issue with it as well.

I never said birds are all one kind. You put those words in my mouth.

it's not AS ambiguous as "kind." While it doesn't have a strict definition, it DOES have a collective group of characteristics that can be compared, and the people doing the comparing are active. "Kind" is completely ambiguous (though I'm not sure if that's just lost in translation) and it's passive. Species, of course, is also a part of a hierarchy denoting differences in changes. Different species is less of a change than different genus, different phylum, different kingdoms, etc. Kind is nonspecific.

This post illustrates the disconnect between the biologist and the average person (no offense, talgot). There can be huge behavioral, genetic, and internal characteristics between animals that look nearly identical. But we are very visual-centric, so we weigh what we see much more. Animals take advantage of this all the time -- which is why you have many "imitator" species, like king snakes (not poisonous) and water snakes (very deadly).

I am not sure we disagree . I am not denying things other than visual can make animals incapatible.

I haven't denied it. I just put forth some issues i have with it. Of course we need to use somecommon ground and that may be to denote things how the majority would. To me I can have an issue with how cool is used. It wasn't always ment to mean more than it has. Doesn't mean I haven't accepted the meaning put forth.. but doesn't mean I can't have an issue with it as well.

I never said birds are all one kind. You put those words in my mouth.

I'm didn't claim you said that. Re-read my comment, I was using your example of similarity without specifics to put make those two birds of one 'kind'. IOW, it was my way of showing the flaws of your idea of 'kind', it just doesn't work because there aren't any rules.

Why do we need common ground. As both Bonk and I have pointed out, species are very specific, and are subject to change with more information, making it very useful. We don't use majority rule since the majority doesn't have enough understanding on the subject. We defer to the people that study this daily and rely on their consensus. You don't have to accept it, but you seem to have issues with things while coming from a point of ignorance. It's fine if you want to learn the details of taxonomy, THEN take issue with it, but to do so as you are, no one will, or should take you seriously.

http://richarddawkins.net/article,2488,An-Open-Letter-to-David-J,Richard-Dawkins

Open Letter to a victim of Ben Stein's lying propaganda
by Richard Dawkins
On 18th April, the day Ben Stein's infamous film was released, Michael Shermer received the following letter from a Jew (referencing a past article that Shermer had written debunking the Holocaust deniers) whose identity I shall conceal as "David J".

Now I truly understand who you atheists and darwinists really are! You people believe that it was okay for my great-grandparents to die in the Holocaust! How disgusting. Your past article about the Holocaust was just window dressing. We Jews will fight to keep people like you out of the United States!



Shermer wrote to Mr J to ask if he had by any chance just seen Expelled, and he received this reply:

Yes I have. You know, I respect you as a human being and you have done great work exposing psychics and frauds, but this is a very touchy issue that affects me and family emotionally. Our family business was affected because of Auschwitz because now, our family has nothing. It is gone. Things began to make sense once I saw the movie and I am just appalled. I have learned a lot from Ben Stein, a Jewish brother, who has opened my eyes up a bit.



It seemed to me that Ben Stein and his lying crew were more to blame than Mr J himself for his revolting letter. I therefore decided to write him a personal letter and try to explain a few things to him. It then occurred to me (indeed, Michael Shermer suggested as much) that there are probably many others like him, whose minds have been twisted in this evil way by the man Stein, and that it would be a good idea to publish the letter. I decided to wait 24 hours to see if he would reply, although I didn't expect him to. I am now publishing my letter to him, exactly as I sent it to him except that I have removed his name.

Richard


Dear Mr J

Michael Shermer forwarded me a letter from you which suggests that you have unfortunately been taken in by Ben Stein's mendacious and/or ignorant suggestion that Darwin is somehow to blame for Hitler. I hope you will not mind if I write to you and try to undo this grievous error.

1. I deeply sympathize with you for the loss of your relatives in the Holocaust. Nevertheless, I don't think that could really be said to justify the tone of your letter to Michael Shermer, who is a kind and decent man, as even you seemed to concede in your second letter to him, and the very antithesis of a Nazi sympathizer.

Now I truly understand who you atheists and darwinists really are! You people believe that it was okay for my great-grandparents to die in the Holocaust! How disgusting. Your past article about the Holocaust was just window dressing. We Jews will fight to keep people like you out of the United States!

Just look at those words of yours. Probably you regret them by now. I certainly hope so, but I'll continue to write my letter to you, on the assumption that you still feel at least a part of what you wrote.

2. Hitler's horrible opinions were not all that unusual for his time, not just in Germany but throughout Europe, including my own country of Britain, by the way. What singled Hitler out was the fact that he somehow managed to come to power in one of Europe's leading nations, which was also one of the world's most technologically advanced nations. Hitler had a lot of support in Germany. His horrible bidding was done by millions of ordinary German footsoldiers, and the great majority of them were Christians. Many were Lutheran, and many (like Hitler himself) were Roman Catholic. Very few were atheists, and whatever else Hitler was he most certainly was not an atheist. It is sometimes said that Hitler only pretended to be Catholic, in order to win the Church's support for his regime. In this he was very largely successful. So, whether or not Hitler was himself a true Catholic (as he often claimed) the Church bears a heavy responsibility for what happened. And Hitler himself used religion to justify his anti-Semitism. For example, here is a typical quotation, from the end of Chapter 2 of Mein Kampf.

Hence today I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord.

Hitler's obscene anti-Semitism was able to hold sway in Germany because there was a deeply embedded history of anti-Semitism in Germany, and indeed in Europe generally.

3. Going further back in history, where do we think the toxic anti-Semitism of Hitler, and of the many Germans whose support gave him power, came from? You can't seriously think it came from Darwin. Anti-Semitism has been rife in Europe for many many centuries, positively encouraged by most Christian churches, including especially the two that dominate Germany. The Roman Catholic Church has notoriously persecuted Jews as "Christ-killers". While, as for the Lutherans, Martin Luther himself wrote a book called On the Jews and their Lies from which Hitler quoted. And Luther publicly said that "All Jews should be driven from Germany." By the way, do you hear an echo of those words in your own letter to Michael Shermer, "We Jews will fight to keep people like you out of the United States." Don't you feel just a twinge of shame at those truly horrible words of yours? Don't you feel that, as a Jew, you should feel especially regretful that you used those words?

4. Now, to the matter of Darwin. The first thing to say is that natural selection is a scientific theory about the way evolution works in fact. It is either true or it is not, and whether or not we like it politically or morally is irrelevant. Scientific theories are not prescriptions for how we should behave. I have many times written (for example in the first chapter of A Devil's Chaplain) that I am a passionate Darwinian when it comes to the science of how life has actually evolved, but a passionate ANTI-Darwinian when it comes to the politics of how humans ought to behave. I have several times said that a society based on Darwinian principles would be a very unpleasant society in which to live. I have several times said, starting at the beginning of my very first book, The Selfish Gene, that we should learn to understand natural selection, so that we can oppose any tendency to apply it to human politics. Darwin himself said the same thing, in various different ways. So did his great friend and champion Thomas Henry Huxley.

5. Darwinism gives NO support to racism of any kind. Quite the contrary. It is emphatically NOT about natural selection between races. It is about natural selection between individuals. It is true that the subtitle of The Origin of Species is "Or the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life" but Darwin was using the word "race" in a very different sense from ours. It is totaly clear, if you read past the title to the book itself, that a "favoured race" meant something like 'that set of individuals who possess a certain favoured genetic mutation" (although Darwin would not have used that language because he did not have our modern concept of a genetic mutation).

6. There is no mention of Darwin in Mein Kampf. Not one single, solitary mention, not one mention in any of the 27 chapters of this long and tedious book. Don't you think that, if Hitler was truly influenced by Darwin, he would have given him at least one teeny weeny mention in his book? Was he, perhaps, INDIRECTLY influenced by some of Darwin's ideas, without knowing it? Only if you completely misunderstand Darwin's ideas, as some have definitely done: the so-called Social Darwinists such as Herbert Spencer and John D Rockefeller. Hitler could fairly be described as a Social Darwinist, but all modern evolutionists, almost literally without exception, have been vocal in their condemnation of Social Darwinism. This of course includes Michael Shermer and me and PZ Myers and all the other evolutionary scientists whom Ben Stein and his team tricked into taking part in his film by lying to us about their true intentions.

7. Hitler did attempt eugenic breeding of humans, and this is sometimes misrepresented as an attempt to apply Darwinian principles to humans. But this interpretation gets it historically backwards, as PZ Myers has pointed out. Darwin's great achievement was to look at the familiar practice of domestic livestock breeding by artificial selection, and realise that the same principle might apply in NATURE, thereby explaining the evolution of the whole of life: "natural selection", the "survival of the fittest". Hitler didn't apply NATURAL selection to humans. He was probably even more ignorant of natural selection than Ben Stein evidiently is. Hitler tried to apply ARTIFICIAL selection to humans, and there is nothing specifically Darwinian about artificial selection. It has been familiar to farmers, gardeners, horse trainers, dog breeders, pigeon fanciers and many others for centuries, even millennia. Everybody knew about artificial selection, and Hitler was no exception. What was unique about Darwin was his idea of NATURAL selection; and Hitler's eugenic policies had nothing to do with natural selection.

8. Mr J, you have been cruelly duped by Ben Stein and his unscrupulous colleagues. It is a wicked, evil thing they have done to you, and potentially to many others. I do not know whether they knowingly and wantonly perpetrated the falsehood that fooled you. Perhaps they genuinely and sincerely believed it, although other actions by them, which you can read about all over the Internet, persuade me that they are fully capable of deliberate and calculated deception. You are perhaps not to be blamed for swallowing the film's falsehoods, because you probably assumed that nobody would have the gall to make a whole film like that without checking their facts first. Perhaps even you will need a little more convincing that they were wrong, in which case I urge you to read it up and study the matter in detail -- something that Ben Stein and his crew manifestly and lamentably failed to do.

With my good wishes, and sympathy for the losses your family suffered in the Holocaust.

Yours sincerely

Richard Dawkins

http://richarddawkins.net/article,2488,An-Open-Letter-to-David-J,Richard-Dawkins

Open Letter to a victim of Ben Stein's lying propaganda
by Richard Dawkins
On 18th April, the day Ben Stein's infamous film was released, Michael Shermer received the following letter from a Jew (referencing a past article that Shermer had written debunking the Holocaust deniers) whose identity I shall conceal as "David J".

Blah blah blah ....



Do you feel Stein is as "wicked" as the author suggests? Sounds to me hes doing a diservice to his letter by going to that extreme.

Do you feel Stein is as "wicked" as the author suggests? Sounds to me hes doing a diservice to his letter by going to that extreme.
From the point of view of a scientist, it's a big no-no to pass something off as scientific without having done a shred of scientific research. It's one of the most wicked things you can do, in fact. Which is why the scientific community can be disgustingly fierce in attacking people who falsify data. IMO, they can be too adamant in cases where it was just laziness that prevented them from checking their work (spotting software errors can be very difficult), but when there is data that is blatantly falsified, the results are immediate and drastic -- expulsion, shaming, paper retractions, etc. At least one I can think of has committed suicide after her falsifications were revealed.

Just have to keep in mind where Dawkins is coming from. As a scientist, he's incredulous that someone could falsify so much data and make it into a feature-length movie. (don't make a joke about and inconvenient truth -- there were facts in that movie. :) )

On a happier note:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080625/ap_on_sc/sci_fish_evolution

Fossil of most primitive 4-legged creature found

By SETH BORENSTEIN, AP Science Writer Wed Jun 25, 6:06 PM ET

WASHINGTON - Scientists unearthed a skull of the most primitive four-legged creature in Earth's history, which should help them better understand the evolution of fish to advanced animals that walk on land.
ADVERTISEMENT

The 365 million-year-old fossil skull, shoulders and part of the pelvis of the water-dweller, Ventastega curonica, were found in Latvia, researchers report in a study published in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature. Even though Ventastega is likely an evolutionary dead-end, the finding sheds new details on the evolutionary transition from fish to tetrapods. Tetrapods are animals with four limbs and include such descendants as amphibians, birds and mammals.

While an earlier discovery found a slightly older animal that was more fish than tetrapod, Ventastega is more tetrapod than fish. The fierce-looking creature probably swam through shallow brackish waters, measured about three or four feet long and ate other fish. It likely had stubby limbs with an unknown number of digits, scientists said.

"If you saw it from a distance, it would look like a small alligator, but if you look closer you would find a fin in the back," said lead author Per Ahlberg, a professor of evolutionary biology at Uppsala University in Sweden. "I imagine this is an animal that could haul itself over sand banks without any difficulty. Maybe it's poking around in semi-tidal creeks picking up fish that got stranded."

This all happened more than 100 million years before the first dinosaurs roamed Earth.

Scientists don't think four-legged creatures are directly evolved from Ventastega. It's more likely that in the family tree of tetrapods, Ventastega is an offshoot branch that eventually died off, not leading to the animals we now know, Ahlberg said.

"At the time there were a lot of creatures around of varying degrees of advancement," Ahlberg said. They all seem to have similar characteristics, so Ventastega's find is helpful for evolutionary biologists.

Ventastega is the most primitive of these transition animals, but there are older ones that are oddly more advanced, said Neil Shubin, professor of biology and anatomy at the University of Chicago, who was not part of the discovery team but helped find Tiktaalik, the fish that was one step earlier in evolution.

"It's sort of out of sequence in timing," Shubin said of Ventastega.

Ahlberg didn't find the legs or toes of Ventastega, but was able to deduce that it was four-limbed because key parts of its pelvis and its shoulders were found. From the shape of those structures, scientists were able to conclude that limbs, not fins were attached to Ventastega.

One question that scientists are trying to figure out is why fish started to develop what would later become legs.

Edward Daeschler, associate curator of vertebrate zoology at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia, theorizes that the water was so shallow that critters like Ventastega had an evolutionary advantage by walking instead of swimming.

Make sure to realize that this is the "most primitive 4-legged creature yet found." Not necessarily the most primitive 4-legged creature that appeared on earth.

From the point of view of a scientist, it's a big no-no to pass something off as scientific without having done a shred of scientific research. It's one of the most wicked things you can do, in fact. Which is why the scientific community can be disgustingly fierce in attacking people who falsify data. IMO, they can be too adamant in cases where it was just laziness that prevented them from checking their work (spotting software errors can be very difficult), but when there is data that is blatantly falsified, the results are immediate and drastic -- expulsion, shaming, paper retractions, etc. At least one I can think of has committed suicide after her falsifications were revealed.

Just have to keep in mind where Dawkins is coming from. As a scientist, he's incredulous that someone could falsify so much data and make it into a feature-length movie. (don't make a joke about and inconvenient truth -- there were facts in that movie. :) ).

What did he falsify? Now granted I didn't see his movie. But I am not aware he falsified anything? Or is anything that is contrary to the preconceived notion scientists have considered falsified?

On a happier note:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080625/ap_on_sc/sci_fish_evolution



Make sure to realize that this is the "most primitive 4-legged creature yet found." Not necessarily the most primitive 4-legged creature that appeared on earth.

All we know is it died. You certainly don't know its a link to anything. Thats an assumption scientists make. maybe true, maybe not.

its still cool to find new things.:)

What did he falsify? Now granted I didn't see his movie. But I am not aware he falsified anything? Or is anything that is contrary to the preconceived notion scientists have considered falsified?


He falsified by omission by not presenting why scientists don't consider any of the ideas plausible. He also falsified by removing context from statements of scientists to make it sound like they have no idea what they're talking about (you'll note that Dawkins is peeved by this as well).


All we know is it died. You certainly don't know its a link to anything. Thats an assumption scientists make. maybe true, maybe not.

its still cool to find new things.:)

:secret: They figure it's an evolutionary dead-end based on our current knowledge of fossils and phylogeny. You rarely "know" anything, but the probability of being right or wrong can drastically change based upon your hypothesis and the evidence -- which is what we simplify to being right or wrong.

Is it just me or does the Yahoo! featured news picture make it seem REALLY big?!?!?!?

http://l.yimg.com/a/i/ww/news/2008/06/25/4legs.jpg

Is it just me or does the Yahoo! featured news picture make it seem REALLY big?!?!?!?

http://l.yimg.com/a/i/ww/news/2008/06/25/4legs.jpg
certainly bigger than 3-4 ft. :nod:

http://richarddawkins.net/article...rd-Dawkins

Open Letter to a victim of Ben Stein's lying propaganda
by Richard Dawkins
On 18th April, the day Ben Stein's infamous film was released, Michael Shermer received the following letter from a Jew (referencing a past article that Shermer had written debunking the Holocaust deniers) whose identity I shall conceal as "David J".
.....

I haven't seen "Expelled" either, so I can't defend or accuse it. However, Dawkins is committing the same error he accuses the creationists of doing. He states that the "Church bears a heavy responsibility for what happened" but attempts to give athiests & Darwinian science a complete free pass. Why? I'd agree that Darwin himself might not be to blame for Hitler's eugenic principles, but is Christ really responsible for the actions of the Church?

Darwin himself may have not agreed with eugenics (he thought it was too utopian), but his followers certainly took the idea and ran with it. After all, it was Darwin's own cousin, Francis Galton, who first coined and triumphed the idea of eugenics. Other athiest/agnostics such as Herbert Spencer triumphed the idea of Social Darwinism and as Dawkins stated, "Hitler's horrible opinions were not all that unusual for his time, not just in Germany but throughout Europe, including my own country of Britain." Did the Church really foster/promote these ideas? Then from where did they come from?

And on the subject of Hitler, he is quick to show early quotes of Hitler "doing the work of the Lord", while completely ignoring later quotes, such as these "gems":

"Let it not be said that Christianity brought man the life of the soul, for that evolution was in the natural order of things." July 12, 1941

"Our epoch in the next 200 years will certainly see the end of the disease of Christianity.... My regret will have been that I couldn't... behold <its demise>." February 1942

http://homepages.paradise.net.nz/mischedj/ca_hitler.html

So in conclusion, yes it is wrong for Creationists to say belief in evolution caused the Holocaust. But Dawkins would like for us to look at the Church with scorn while ignoring the actions of Darwin's followers, which certainly impacted early 20th century philosophy much more than the Church.

I haven't seen "Expelled" either, so I can't defend or accuse it. However, Dawkins is committing the same error he accuses the creationists of doing. He states that the "Church bears a heavy responsibility for what happened" but attempts to give athiests & Darwinian science a complete free pass. Why? I'd agree that Darwin himself might not be to blame for Hitler's eugenic principles, but is Christ really responsible for the actions of the Church?

Darwin himself may have not agreed with eugenics (he thought it was too utopian), but his followers certainly took the idea and ran with it. After all, it was Darwin's own cousin, Francis Galton, who first coined and triumphed the idea of eugenics. Other athiest/agnostics such as Herbert Spencer triumphed the idea of Social Darwinism and as Dawkins stated, "Hitler's horrible opinions were not all that unusual for his time, not just in Germany but throughout Europe, including my own country of Britain." Did the Church really foster/promote these ideas? Then from where did they come from?

And on the subject of Hitler, he is quick to show early quotes of Hitler "doing the work of the Lord", while completely ignoring later quotes, such as these "gems":

"Let it not be said that Christianity brought man the life of the soul, for that evolution was in the natural order of things." July 12, 1941

"Our epoch in the next 200 years will certainly see the end of the disease of Christianity.... My regret will have been that I couldn't... behold ." February 1942

http://homepages.paradise.net.nz/mischedj/ca_hitler.html

So in conclusion, yes it is wrong for Creationists to say belief in evolution caused the Holocaust. But Dawkins would like for us to look at the Church with scorn while ignoring the actions of Darwin's followers, which certainly impacted early 20th century philosophy much more than the Church.
a) Christ != Church
b) people who followed Darwin chronologically != followers of Darwin in the intellectual sense. As mentioned prior, Social Darwinism is not Darwinism. It's not even close.

Scientists unearthed a skull of the most primitive four-legged creature in Earth's history, which should help them better understand the evolution of fish to advanced animals that walk on land

...

Ahlberg didn't find the legs or toes of Ventastega, but was able to deduce that it was four-limbed because key parts of its pelvis and its shoulders were found.
....
Ventastega is the most primitive of these transition animals, but there are older ones that are oddly more advanced


Who says it's even the earliest found? Based on what? The pelvis had to have been distinctive enough to completely rule out fins, what made it more primitive than already established early tetrapods (i.e. Acanthostega).

If you saw it from a distance, it would look like a small alligator, but if you look closer you would find a fin in the back

Or maybe not, since nothing of that sort was found....:rolleyes:

a) Christ != Church
b) people who followed Darwin chronologically != followers of Darwin in the intellectual sense. As mentioned prior, Social Darwinism is not Darwinism. It's not even close.

I agree, however instead of simply neutralizing the argument, abolishing blame on either camp (or conversely assigning it to both), Dawkins does a complete 180 on the "Expelled" argument and tries to slander the Church while attempting to make the evolutionist position look spotless. That's what I had a problem with. He calls the "Expelled" camp "wicked men" for showing half-truths & distortions and then proceeds to do the very same thing himself.

Who says it's even the earliest found? Based on what? The pelvis had to have been distinctive enough to completely rule out fins, what made it more primitive than already established early tetrapods (i.e. Acanthostega).

Based on that article...nothing but the researchers word. Read their report if you want more detail. Or email them. :) Odds are, they are experts in the field in which they study and they have an answer for the question you posed. Let us know what you find.

Earliest, though, is the wrong word. Earliest means chronologically. We're talking "primitive," which is a term of structure and function. remember: Ventastega is the most primitive of these transition animals, but there are older ones that are oddly more advanced, said Neil Shubin, professor of biology and anatomy at the University of Chicago, who was not part of the discovery team but helped find Tiktaalik, the fish that was one step earlier in evolution.

"It's sort of out of sequence in timing," Shubin said of Ventastega.

BTW, the wiki page of acanthostega (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acanthostega) has a small timeline of the appropriate period including the tiktaalik and the acanthostega at the bottom. Some answers may be in the shoulder/neck and /neck/head structures, as well as pelvic shape.

Or maybe not, since nothing of that sort was found....:rolleyes:

You can tell a lot from the shoulders, pelvis, etc. That's what led them to conclude that it had limbs in the first place. "Maybe" is a rather senseless word -- "maybe" any fin it had was a growth like an extra thumb. Any fossil expert seeing someone with an extra thumb would realize that it is likely a mutant due to abnormal physiology relative to other (non-human) animals -- ie bone fusion.

I agree, however instead of simply neutralizing the argument, abolishing blame on either camp (or conversely assigning it to both), Dawkins does a complete 180 on the "Expelled" argument and tries to slander the Church while attempting to make the evolutionist position look spotless. That's what I had a problem with. He calls the "Expelled" camp "wicked men" for showing half-truths & distortions and then proceeds to do the very same thing himself.
IMO, it was because the letter came from a person who put an accent on their religion, although that religion was Judaism not Christianity.

Based on that article...nothing but the researchers word. Read their report if you want more detail. Or email them. :) Odds are, they are experts in the field in which they study and they have an answer for the question you posed. Let us know what you find.

Earliest, though, is the wrong word. Earliest means chronologically. We're talking "primitive," which is a term of structure and function. remember:

ok I did a little research and apparently they used a technique called "relative warp analysis", basically superimposing diagrams of the different Devonian species over each other and comparing similar skull feature points. Basically it looks like Ventastega and Acanthostega are nearly identical in skull shape, with the exception of a "tabular horn", a feature which seems to be unique to Acanthostega. Pretty interesting stuff.

http://talkrational.org/showpost.php?p=88049&postcount=48

I still think the "fin on the back" comment is a little unwarranted (unless it was sarcasm)...I don't even think Tiktaalik had one of those.

ok I did a little research and apparently they used a technique called "relative warp analysis", basically superimposing diagrams of the different Devonian species over each other and comparing similar skull feature points.

http://talkrational.org/showpost.php?p=88049&postcount=48

I still think the "fin on the back" comment is a little unwarranted (unless it was sarcasm)...I don't even think Tiktaalik had one of those.
thanks for the research! That's an awesome name :lol:

thanks for the research! That's an awesome name :lol:

Apparently it only works with a dilithium crystal powered projector :D.

New show on the History Channel coming up called Evolve (http://www.history.com/shows.do?action=detail&showId=322594).
I think this will be a good show for the Creationists to watch as well. It will probably lead to some good debate, but hopefully, some of the less informed might actually learn something so they can avoid mischaracterizing the evolutionist's position.

New show on the History Channel coming up called Evolve (http://www.history.com/shows.do?action=detail&showId=322594).
I think this will be a good show for the Creationists to watch as well. It will probably lead to some good debate, but hopefully, some of the less informed might actually learn something so they can avoid mischaracterizing the evolutionist's position.
sounds cool -- thanks for the heads up.

New show on the History Channel coming up called Evolve (http://www.history.com/shows.do?action=detail&showId=322594).
I think this will be a good show for the Creationists to watch as well. It will probably lead to some good debate, but hopefully, some of the less informed might actually learn something so they can avoid mischaracterizing the evolutionist's position.

Unfortunately I don't have cable/satellite, and only get 2 channels - consisting primarily of "Everybody Loves Raymond" repeats. Not that I'm complaining, it's a good show!

Unfortunately I don't have cable/satellite, and only get 2 channels - consisting primarily of "Everybody Loves Raymond" repeats. Not that I'm complaining, it's a good show!

do you really expect to find out to much thats new to their arguement? I love the link synopsis at the site. They write it as if its a fact, what they are promoting. Typical evol propaganda. But I am not questioning it will be entertaining. :) Most science fiction is :D

do you really expect to find out to much thats new to their arguement? I love the link synopsis at the site. They write it as if its a fact, what they are promoting. Typical evol propaganda. But I am not questioning it will be entertaining. :) Most science fiction is :D

It is interesting that they would kick off the series covering one of the weaker and less understood arguments for evolution: eyes. It will be interesting to see what exactly they use to present their case. And forget jellyfish, I wonder if they will explain the sudden appearance of complex eyes in the very beginning of the fossil record (trilobites).

It is interesting that they would kick off the series covering one of the weaker and less understood arguments for evolution: eyes. It will be interesting to see what exactly they use to present their case. And forget jellyfish, I wonder if they will explain the sudden appearance of complex eyes in the very beginning of the fossil record (trilobites).
Just thought I'd post this. (http://www.trilobites.info/eyes.htm) For anyone who's curious.

Just thought I'd post this. (http://www.trilobites.info/eyes.htm) For anyone who's curious.

I actually read that site this morning. Very interesting! However the major evolution related material involved the loss of an eye in certain trilobite species. I don't think this is anything new, and is something we've seen in many many species (catfish, etc..). However to see the development of the eye would be something else!

It is also very interesting that the author concedes the appearance of design, even though he firmly believes in evolution.

I actually read that site this morning. Very interesting! However the major evolution related material involved the loss of an eye in certain trilobite species. I don't think this is anything new, and is something we've seen in many many species (catfish, etc..). However to see the development of the eye would be something else!

It is also very interesting that the author concedes the appearance of design, even though he firmly believes in evolution.

Scroll all the way down. Maybe you did and I am misunderstanding your comment.
* I use the term "design" as a lead-in to the parallels between the optic designs of humans and the remarkably evolved morphology of trilobites. Trilobites provide some superb examples of evolution in action (see "loss of eyes" below). Trilobites make it quite clear that evolution of eyes occurs, and that one does not need to evoke "intelligent design" by a creator to explain them. To do so detracts from the idea of an omniscient being. It would have God tinkering with many flawed and suboptimal "designs" and never developing a perfect one. Who would want to worship a god like that? I mention this because this page has been used (without my permission) by people espousing "intelligent design" to the public, and I want it to be clear that I do not share those opinions, nor need that flawed argument to underpin my faith. Evolution is a remarkable and well-documented process, and breakthroughs in our understanding of its intricacies occur every year. Evolution is not in conflict with religious belief. Ignorance and intolerance damage the benefits of faith.

do you really expect to find out to much thats new to their arguement? I love the link synopsis at the site. They write it as if its a fact, what they are promoting. Typical evol propaganda. But I am not questioning it will be entertaining. :) Most science fiction is :D
As opposed to fantasy and fairy tales of creation? It's strange how if we point out the bible is myth and legend that people on your side get extremely upset, but you have no problem denigrating the hard work of the science community that actually helps society with their advances.:mad:

As opposed to fantasy and fairy tales of creation? It's strange how if we point out the bible is myth and legend that people on your side get extremely upset, but you have no problem denigrating the hard work of the science community that actually helps society with their advances.:mad:

So i am not allowed to have fun with you guys? You guys need to lighten up lol

Scroll all the way down. Maybe you did and I am misunderstanding your comment.

Yeah I saw his disclaimer. However his argument doesn't really flow. His arguments for trilobite eye evolution (loss of eyes) do not provide the necessary weight to support his statement that trilobites evolved highly complex eyes that give the appearance of design. I'll use an analogy i'm sure you can relate to ;). Just because one can ski down a hill efficiently does not mean that one can climb up a hill using ski's. It would be terribly inefficient and there may be terrain too steep for the ski's to overcome. You would need a different mechanism (ski lift) to get to the top of the mountain. Likewise, claiming that trilobite eye evolved due to evidence that certain trilobites lost their eyes is really apples and oranges IMHO.

Secondly, he assumes that an intelligent designer God specifically crafts each individual species and all steps along the way, and that this god would not be worthy of worship. This is a strawman god. Even most YEC'ers recognize evolution's necessity in speciation and adaptation. Fine-tuning of an existing mechanism via evolution does not make God any less omnipotent.

So i am not allowed to have fun with you guys? You guys need to lighten up lolI don't mind it one bit as long as the creationists don't get so upset when one of us points out that the bible is a fairy tale to most people. I'm pretty thick skinned, but I think it was this or the bible thread that I got blasted for what amounted to the same thing that you were saying about evolution.

Yeah I saw his disclaimer. However his argument doesn't really flow. His arguments for trilobite eye evolution (loss of eyes) do not provide the necessary weight to support his statement that trilobites evolved highly complex eyes that give the appearance of design. I'll use an analogy i'm sure you can relate to ;). Just because one can ski down a hill efficiently does not mean that one can climb up a hill using ski's. It would be terribly inefficient and there may be terrain too steep for the ski's to overcome. You would need a different mechanism (ski lift) to get to the top of the mountain. Likewise, claiming that trilobite eye evolved due to evidence that certain trilobites lost their eyes is really apples and oranges IMHO.

Secondly, he assumes that an intelligent designer God specifically crafts each individual species and all steps along the way, and that this god would not be worthy of worship. This is a strawman god. Even most YEC'ers recognize evolution's necessity in speciation and adaptation. Fine-tuning of an existing mechanism via evolution does not make God any less omnipotent.
umm...why wouldn't the lack of eyes be "designed in" rather than being lost, as you admit happens.

I don't mind it one bit as long as the creationists don't get so upset when one of us points out that the bible is a fairy tale to most people. I'm pretty thick skinned, but I think it was this or the bible thread that I got blasted for what amounted to the same thing that you were saying about evolution.

Sounds like your thick skin has started to peel. Want a cookie? They're freshly evolved; only a few billions years old. They grow on trees and are harvested by elves, I believe. That symbiotic relationship also evolved too, of course. Nothing but the best for you!

But I think I'll partake of the freshly baked created cookies, so you won't have to. :)

But how does creationism actually work?

http://people.howstuffworks.com/creationism.htm

But how does creationism actually work?

http://people.howstuffworks.com/creationism.htm

It works like this:

In the beginning, God created....

The rest of the details are a little foggy ;).

It works like this:

In the beginning, God created....

The rest of the details are a little foggy ;).
Step 1. Collect Underpants
Step 2. ??
Step 3. Profit

:D

Step 1. Collect Underpants
Step 2. ??
Step 3. Profit

:D

I'll ignore your snide little remark b/c i'm just glad to see you joking again. :hug:

I'll ignore your snide little remark b/c i'm just glad to see you joking again. :hug:
Snide remark?

http://www.mineralwellsindex.com/homepage/images_sizedimage_210093435/xl

Rock-solid proof? (http://www.mineralwellsindex.com/homepage/local_story_210093256.html)

A discovery by a former Mineral Wells resident might hold proof man and dinosaur walked the Earth together

By David May
editor@mineralwellsindex.com

A slab of North Texas limestone is on track to rock the world, with its two imbedded footprints poised to make a huge impression in scientific and religious circles.

The estimated 140-pound stone was recovered in July 2000 from the bank of a creek that feeds the Paluxy River near Glen Rose, Texas, located about 53 miles south of Fort Worth. The find was made just outside Dinosaur Valley State Park, a popular destination for tourists known for its well-preserved dinosaur tracks and other fossils.

The limestone contains two distinct prints – one of a human footprint and one belonging to a dinosaur. The significance of the cement-hard fossil is that it shows the dinosaur print partially over and intersecting the human print.

In other words, the stone’s impressions indicate that the human stepped first, the dinosaur second. If proven genuine, the artifact would provide evidence that man and dinosaur roamed the Earth at the same time, according to those associated with the find and with its safekeeping. It could potentially toss out the window many commonly held scientific theories on evolution and the history of the world.

Finding scholars and experts on evolution, paleontology or creationism to speak about the discovery proved difficult. Some who were contacted said they didn’t want to comment on the prints without a personal inspection or without review of data from scientific tests.

However, Dr. Phillip Murry, a vertebrate paleontology instructor in the Geoscience department of Tarleton State University at Stephenville, Texas, stated in his response to an interview request: “There has never been a proven association of dinosaur (prints) with human footprints.”

The longtime amateur archeologist who found the fossil thinks that statement is now proven untrue.

“It is unbelievable, that’s what it is,” Alvis Delk, 72, said of what could be not only the find of a lifetime, but of mankind.

Delk is a current Stephenville and former Mineral Wells resident (1950-69) who said he found the rock eight years ago while on a hunt with a friend, James Bishop, also of Stephenville, and friend and current fiancee Elizabeth Harris.

The three were searching in July 2000 for Indian artifacts like arrowheads – Delk’s specialty as a hunter and collector since he was 6 years old – when he said a pile of rocks along a creek bank caught his eye.

“I said it looks like something has been washed out of this hole,” Delk told the Mineral Wells Index.

Upon inspection of the pile, he said he saw a dinosaur footprint embedded in a piece of limestone. Delk said he has found and seen dinosaur prints, but now he had one on a piece of rock he could carry off – with Bishop’s help – to keep and add to his collection.

Which is what he did, for nearly eight years. The stone was kept otherwise untouched, stored amongst his other finds, which he said includes over 100,000 Indian artifacts.

A domestic fall from a ladder eight months ago nearly crippled Delk, resulting in surgeries, a long recovery and expensive medical bills. He decided to try and sell some of his archeological treasurers, so he turned to the large piece of limestone, thinking he could clean it up some and sell it to the Creation Evidence Museum located adjacent to Dinosaur Valley State Park near Glen Rose.

Two months ago – about the third week of May – Delk said he grabbed a 4-inch brush and began lightly brushing away sediments and deposits from the stone when he noticed something. He began to see another print develop – that of a human – partially beneath the dinosaur print.

“I seen the (human) track coming out and (saw) that it was a man,” Delk said. “I thought to myself, ‘Lord, I’ve been shown man was here when the dinosaur was here.’”

He said he knew what he had to do.

“When I found it, I said this has to get to someone who knows it,” he said. “I took it to Dr. Baugh. He liked to have a heart attack over it. He shed some tears.”

Creation evidence?

Dr. Carl Baugh is the founder and director of the Creation Evidence Museum and claims doctorates in theology and philosophy in education as well as a master’s degree in archeology. The aim of Baugh’s Creation Evidence Museum is to offer natural evidence to support the theories of creationism, versus the evolutionary perspective heavily portrayed by the neighboring dinosaur attraction operated by the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department.

Baugh said the fossil is the proof he has been searching many years for. He acquired the stone from Delk and has it in safekeeping. He was confident after his initial inspections of the stone that the specimen is genuine. He took it to a medical lab at Glen Rose Medical Center, where he said 800 X-rays were performed in a CT scan procedure.

Baugh said the scans prove that the impressions are real and could not have been carved or etched into the stone.

“The compression lines, the density features, do show, and there is no way to fake that,” he said. “It is possible to carve a track in limestone. But there is no way to compress the material in the rock under the track. That is absolutely impossible. That’s why the CAT scans are so important.”

He said the scans demonstrate the human footprint was made “during locomotion. That’s very important. That distribution is shown here. Compression is in the right place under both prints. Density. Compression, distribution. The density factor is there. Weight distribution. Forward locomotion, rocking of the foot.”

He also noted how the dinosaur’s impression pushed up material from the human print and altered its shape in the area of the intrusion.

The rock is approximately 30 inches by 24 inches. The human footprint, with a deep big toe impression, measures 11 inches in length. Baugh said the theropod track was made by an Acrocanthosaurus. Baugh said this particular track was likely made by a juvenile Acrocanthosaurus, one he said was probably about 20 feet long, stood about 8 feet tall and walked stooped over, weighing a few tons.

Its tracks common in the Glen Rose area, the Acrocanthosaurus is a dinosaur that many experts believe existed primarily in North America during the mid-Cretaceous Period, approximately 125 million to 100 million years ago.

Baugh said Delk’s discovery casts doubts on that theory. Baugh said he believes both sets of prints were made “within minutes, or no more than hours of each other” about 4,500 years ago, around the time of Noah’s Flood. He said the clay-like material that the human and dinosaur stepped in soon hardened, becoming thick, dense limestone common in North Texas.

He said the human print matches seven others found in the same area, stating the museum has performed excavations since 1982 in the area Baugh has dubbed the “Alvis Delk Cretaceous Footprint” discovery.

Baugh said he knows there are and will be skeptics, especially since the find is very recent and so far has been tested only in a medical laboratory by a medical doctor. Still, he said he is so confident in the authenticity of the specimen he is ready to put his reputation entirely on the line. He said he is willing put the rock to any non-destructive tests.

“It’s dynamite,” Baugh said of the fossil.

Left an impression

Bishop, himself an avid hunter of fossils and Indian artifacts, was initially reluctant to be associated with the find. But he said he knows it is a significant discovery and that he is part of what is likely to become a major story throughout scientific circles.

“Yeah, it was a nice find,” said Bishop. “I know it’s going to change history. That’s pretty heavy.”

A man of Christian beliefs who is a member of the First Assembly of God Church in Stephenville, he said his hopes are that the stone will “disprove Darwin’s theory. God made man. Man did not evolve from ape.”

Someone else who has had a close up, personal inspection of the stone is David Lines, who photographed the stone for Baugh, which Baugh has included in posters and on his Web site www.creationevidence.org

A technical writer for Texas Instruments in Dallas, Lines said he’s no expert on rocks, but he said he has no doubt the Delk rock is real and the prints are legitimate.

“I have really worked hard to figure out how it could be faked,” said Lines.

Lines said his photographs also show the rock contains a number of fossils commonly found in North Texas such as small seashells and shellfish, a fact he said lends credence to the stone’s authenticity.

“When I saw this, I said this is too good to be true,” said Lines. “If someone found a way to fake that, they could also get a patent for concrete that would far surpass anything.”

Delk’s own daughter, Kristi Delk, is a geology major at Tarleton State University in Stephenville and holds different beliefs from her dad about the creation of Earth and the origins of man.

She said she wants to see data from more tests before jumping to any conclusions.

“I haven’t come to terms with it,” she said. “I am skeptical, actually.”

But she said if verified, this rock could change her entire way of thinking, along with the thinking of a lot of other people.

“It’s going to change all the pale-ethnological principles,” she said.

Baugh added he is ready to begin speaking more about his new prized possession. He said he hopes this find will lead to more balanced educational teachings in classrooms and school textbooks.

“I don’t think it is going to displace the theory of evolution,” said Baugh. “My hope is that the scientific concepts of archeology and paleontology will be used under the guidelines of the Texas schoolbook committee. Any evidence supporting that should be presented, and hopefully this particular fossil will be presented, for the students to be able to see that there is evidence supporting an alternative concept as opposed to just evolution.”

Interesting post. Something to keep an eye on. As you might guess, I'm quite skeptical.

Besides the evidence that such a thing did not happen and the fact that the story sounds plain silly, if it is indeed true that the prints were made within hours of each other, why is the human print almost 1/3 as deep as the dino weighing a couple tons? Obviously, I'm just going by eye and further study would need to be made. They claim the human was running, though it looks as it the same can be said for the dino -- note how much deeper the toes are than the heel.

Discussion of how similar fossils are created. (http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/homs/a_anomaly.html)

EDIT: More interestingly, a creationist discusses why this shouldn't be (http://www.answersingenesis.org/articles/nab/human-and-dino-fossils-together) :lol:

Interesting post. Something to keep an eye on. As you might guess, I'm quite skeptical.

Besides the evidence that such a thing did not happen and the fact that the story sounds plain silly, if it is indeed true that the prints were made within hours of each other, why is the human print almost 1/3 as deep as the dino weighing a couple tons? Obviously, I'm just going by eye and further study would need to be made. They claim the human was running, though it looks as it the same can be said for the dino -- note how much deeper the toes are than the heel.

Discussion of how similar fossils are created. (http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/homs/a_anomaly.html)

EDIT: More interestingly, a creationist discusses why this shouldn't be (http://www.answersingenesis.org/articles/nab/human-and-dino-fossils-together) :lol:

I think you're being too generous. Considering all the attempts at dishonesty on the subject in the past, I would just assume this is another scam until proven otherwise. Sorry to be so cynical, but we all know the story of the boy who cried wolf.

I think you're being too generous. Considering all the attempts at dishonesty on the subject in the past, I would just assume this is another scam until proven otherwise. Sorry to be so cynical, but we all know the story of the boy who cried wolf.
Being generous and disproving intelligently is the only way we have to separate ourselves from them. And yes, I just saw Batman :lol:

It's likely a hoax. The story's hokey, there no other supporting evidence, and the only people confirming its reality are ones who believe in what it's saying. Not to mention, why are the only people covering the story (that I can see) a little town in texas and some creationist sites? But if it's a hoax, it'll be revealed by further examination. Which will likely happen. Not even giving it a chance is a mark of the unscience we're trying to fight. :)

Interesting post. Something to keep an eye on. As you might guess, I'm quite skeptical.
Wouldn't expect any less. :D

Besides the evidence that such a thing did not happen and the fact that the story sounds plain silly, if it is indeed true that the prints were made within hours of each other, why is the human print almost 1/3 as deep as the dino weighing a couple tons?
Exactly what I thought.
Obviously, I'm just going by eye and further study would need to be made. They claim the human was running, though it looks as it the same can be said for the dino -- note how much deeper the toes are than the heel.
Why is there a need for the clarification that he was running? Could you enlighten me?

Exactly what I thought.

Why is there a need for the clarification that he was running? Could you enlighten me?
We agree that one thing that looks odd about this is that the human imprint is too deep relative to the dino. The depth of the footprint is directly related to the force (may be force squared -- can't remember). Well, the force of the foot's impact on the ground is hundreds of times greater when running than walking. (this is why running shoes have more underfoot cushioning than walking shoes.) So the difference in depth could theoretically be explained by a sprinting human and a tiptoeing dinosaur -- this would make it appear like the human is relatively heavier and the dino relatively lighter than their absolute weights would make you think.

Highly unlikely though.

We agree that one thing that looks odd about this is that the human imprint is too deep relative to the dino. The depth of the footprint is directly related to the force (may be force squared -- can't remember). Well, the force of the foot's impact on the ground is hundreds of times greater when running than walking. (this is why running shoes have more underfoot cushioning than walking shoes.) So the difference in depth could theoretically be explained by a sprinting human and a tiptoeing dinosaur -- this would make it appear like the human is relatively heavier and the dino relatively lighter than their absolute weights would make you think.

Highly unlikely though.

Ok, I get it. Thanks bonk.

We agree that one thing that looks odd about this is that the human imprint is too deep relative to the dino. The depth of the footprint is directly related to the force (may be force squared -- can't remember). Well, the force of the foot's impact on the ground is hundreds of times greater when running than walking. (this is why running shoes have more underfoot cushioning than walking shoes.) So the difference in depth could theoretically be explained by a sprinting human and a tiptoeing dinosaur -- this would make it appear like the human is relatively heavier and the dino relatively lighter than their absolute weights would make you think.

Highly unlikely though.

Is it so implausable? If the ground was only partially or not very saturated when the dino stumbled through and got much more soggier when the human came through it wouldn't be that implausable. To me this is not new. This area has been around for a while. There is a story of this Baugh told once i believe how the man he worked for wouldn't even look at it and document it cause in baughs view he didn't want to know it was possible all he thought was wrong. Hope I am remembering it right. This as you might guess is not a surprise to me especially if true. I maintained this was the case all along. Dinos and man ;)

Is it so implausable? If the ground was only partially or not very saturated when the dino stumbled through and got much more soggier when the human came through it wouldn't be that implausable. To me this is not new. This area has been around for a while. There is a story of this Baugh told once i believe how the man he worked for wouldn't even look at it and document it cause in baughs view he didn't want to know it was possible all he thought was wrong. Hope I am remembering it right. This as you might guess is not a surprise to me especially if true. I maintained this was the case all along. Dinos and man ;)
within a few hours? what you say is actually a possibility for how it was created in the first place. There are recorded cases of dinosaurs being found in rock that miss the accepted age for that species' existence by tens or hundreds of millions of years. Did paleontologists flip out? No -- they realized there was another explanation: the fossil became uncovered and was actually reburied at a later time. So it's possible that the area became soggy enough to create another print.

Again, this is all speculation on what is a likely hoax. The main "investigator" is Carl Baugh. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Baugh#Controversy_and_criticism) While he claims degrees in many areas, including archeology, almost all are unaccredited.

Baugh has claimed several degrees, at one point professing to earning three doctorates.[5] All three "doctorates" are from unaccredited "schools." One is an honorary "Doctor of Philosophy in Theology" from the California Graduate School of Theology (not accredited). His 1989 "doctorate" comes from Pacific International University (not accredited), a distance education only "school" Baugh was the president of. His dissertation titled "Academic Justification for Voluntary Inclusion of Scientific Creation in Public Classroom Curricula, Supported by Evidence that Man and Dinosaurs Were Contemporary" was reviewed at the "Talk Origins Archive" website as including "descriptions of his field-work on the Paluxy river 'man-tracks', speculation about Charles Darwin's religious beliefs and phobias, and biblical evidence of Adam's mental excellence."[2] In 2005, Baugh completed a Doctorate degree in Theology from the unaccredited Louisiana Baptist University.[6]

IOW, nobody who actually knows what they're talking about has looked at this rock. The rock that the finder planned on giving to the creation museum even before he found the human footprint, according to the story.

I think you're being too generous. Considering all the attempts at dishonesty on the subject in the past, I would just assume this is another scam until proven otherwise. Sorry to be so cynical, but we all know the story of the boy who cried wolf.

Believe it or not, I actually agree with you here. Especially with Dr. Baugh & Paluxy tied to the case. Even AIG has said not to use evidence he has presented. This is a very intriguing story, though, and I'll be interested to see where it goes.