Evolution True or False?

Georgi · Post by **Georgi** » Mon Sep 10, 2001 1:17 pm

Originally posted by Sailor Saturn:
First, I wanna say that those links were not for the purpose of prove or disprove anything specifically. They were merely to provide information that may or may not pertain directly to things I will state later on.

So do you actually agree with what is being said on that website, or not?

Sailor Saturn · Post by **Sailor Saturn** » Mon Sep 10, 2001 3:13 pm

Originally posted by Drako:
@SS thanks for the clarifications, but I am still confused about a couple of things.

Your explanation of Stephan Hawking is all well and good but it doesn't fit with the nine tenats of Biblical Creationism which you say you agree with, except for #3. Those tenats seem very straight foreward in their statements about their veiws. Which is it that you believe again? That God is and always well be the creator and is influencing us to this day or the one that just started it all and sat back. Thanks for saying you are baised towards your beliefs. I am baised in the belief that there probably isn't one, at least not in the general terms of any religon or faith that I have experienced. I look at the stars and I wonder why a God would creat this awesume Universe with only us in mind. It is just too large and massive for me to believe we are the one and only creature out here. If there are others, are we all made in Gods image? Does God then have any and therefore no image to call his own?

I believe there is a God. I believe that God is a personal being who takes part in our daily lives.

I'm not going to say anymore on the subject right now because I just got home from school and shopping, so I'm exhausted and my brain has been refried by this desert heat.

[ 09-10-2001: Message edited by: Sailor Saturn ]

C Elegans · Post by **C Elegans** » Mon Sep 10, 2001 8:58 pm

As usual, I work too much to have time to reply as fast I would wish

Sorry, everybody.

A few quick notes:

@SS Your time line looks fine, with one exception: They call some of the geological eras by nicknames, "reptilian age", "age of fish" etc. I don't think this matters since you are going to use it for a discussion about the geolocial column, but just in case, I thought I'd let you know it's too simplified to use for a description of the biological development.

@Drako: Welcome to this debate

I hope you will enjoy it as much as I do

To answer your questions:
- I don't belive in any gods. I don't rule it out, and I don't think it's impossible that a some transcendental conscious being acted as "watchmaker" in the beginning of our universe and/or the moment of start of self replication RNA (are you familiar with the RNA world-hypothesis?), but my personal belief is that no gods exist.
- About seeing things with your own eyes: I will have to ask you to please expand on your question. It depends on how you mean. No, I haven't performed any such experiments myself, neither have I been present when other people perform them. However, I think there is a difference between reading about evolution in a peer-reviewed scientific journal or discussing it with a scientist in the area and then checking his references (ie controlling they are supported by scientific data and not only his/her personal opinion), as opposed to reading it in a newsmagazine or popular science magazine and not checking primary literature references. And no, I don't think peer-reviewed scientific journals are perfect, but look at it this way:

If I want to publish a paper in a peer-reviewed journal, I have to back up every claim I make with references to other peer-reviewed papers. I also have to describe my experiment in such great detail so anyone could perform the same experiment and check if the results are replicable or not.

In popular press, I could claim "Aliens have landed on earth" and build my case on anecdotal data (I have seen it with my own eyes! My boss has seen it!) or by claiming some observations I think support my idea, without needing to establish any casual correlations (my dog barked 3 times the same morning! When I analyzed the barking in my computer and decoded the frequenzes to letters, it turned out to be a backwards code in Swahili that predicted the aliens would come! This proves they actually did come!)

This is the main difference between scientific press and "normal" press. I'm of course not saying all popular press is actually doing this, I just took an extreme example to point out the major difference in demands.

(A tiny nitpick, but important to me: please don't refer to the content of my posts as "proof". Evidence, yes, but proof - no. To tell you the truth, I never use the words "proof" when I speak about science.)

Did this make things clearer?

C Elegans · Post by **C Elegans** » Mon Sep 10, 2001 9:16 pm

@SS: I checked out all your links. I understand you are not using them as evidence, only as references to build your .

@I hoped you checked out my links also. The ref. to the US National Academy of Science was not to build credibility (I totally agree with you that the content of the theory is what builds credibility not degrees, names or institutions), in my monstrous post on page 3 I stated somewhere that I used them as as reference to what is the current consensus in the mainstream science community. I used the US NAS just because most posters in this thread are from the US - I didn't want you all to believe that evolution is only consensus in Europe.

I'll comment both on the content of your links and yours and others posts as soon as I can.

Sailor Saturn · Post by **Sailor Saturn** » Mon Sep 10, 2001 9:25 pm

@C Elegans I haven't had the chance to check out any of the links that anyone has posted(except mine since I was looking at them when I posted them). I'll take a look at those when I get the chance. I'd look at them right now, but I'd probably have trouble understanding a physics book if I read it right now.

C Elegans · Post by **C Elegans** » Mon Sep 10, 2001 9:29 pm

@SS: No stress

I still haven't replied to MM:s questions that he posted over a week ago

I think this kind of discussion has to progress slowly since we all collect data and references.

Sailor Saturn · Post by **Sailor Saturn** » Mon Sep 10, 2001 9:50 pm

Originally posted by C Elegans:
@SS: No stress I still haven't replied to MM:s questions that he posted over a week ago I think this kind of discussion has to progress slowly since we all collect data and references.

Yeah...well...I'm not sure how much I'll be posting at SYM for a while...

EMINEM · Post by **EMINEM** » Tue Sep 11, 2001 5:38 am

<lurking>

Methinks you people have too much time on your hands

C Elegans · Post by **C Elegans** » Thu Mar 14, 2002 5:29 pm

A bump of thread seems to be needed!

I anyone is still intersted, I could post what I long ago promised MM to do.

1. The abiogenesis - how life began on earth
2. Speciation - how one species can evolve to another species
3. The molecular data that strongly support evolution and also are consistent with fossil findings
4. More details about transitional fossiles
5. The primate/hominoid evolution
6. The evolution of complex organs

The WTC attacks made me and SS stop this discussion since none of us could focus then. I'm very interested in evolution as a topic, so to me it's OK to continue the discussion now.

SS, Waverly and MM, you were discussing probability in Fables thread, please continue here if you wish, I might join in also.

Sailor Saturn · Post by **Sailor Saturn** » Thu Mar 14, 2002 5:36 pm

Originally posted by C Elegans
The WTC attacks made me and SS stop this discussion since none of us could focus then. I'm very interested in evolution as a topic, so to me it's OK to continue the discussion now.

SS, Waverly and MM, you were discussing probability in Fables thread, please continue here if you wish, I might join in also.

To be honest, I'm a little afraid to post in this thread again...

fable · Post by **fable** » Thu Mar 14, 2002 5:48 pm

Perhaps we should simply restart it, and find a focus for it at the top?

Georgi · Post by **Georgi** » Thu Mar 14, 2002 7:25 pm

Hmmm, interesting this thread has suddenly resurfaced... A school in the north of England has recently been criticised for teaching creationism (though I don't know the specifics). On a debate programme I was watching earlier, it seemed the consensus view was that it shouldn't be taught in science lessons, but religious education... although it's not wrong to point out that not everyone believes in evolution.

fable · Post by **fable** » Thu Mar 14, 2002 7:51 pm

Originally posted by Georgi
Hmmm, interesting this thread has suddenly resurfaced... A school in the north of England has recently been criticised for teaching creationism (though I don't know the specifics). On a debate programme I was watching earlier, it seemed the consensus view was that it shouldn't be taught in science lessons, but religious education... although it's not wrong to point out that not everyone believes in evolution.

@Georgi, there were efforts undertaken to move a thread about hoaxes and urban legends into the evolution/creationist controversy, which was resisted by two moderators.

It was suggested that this would be an appropriate location for such a discussion, so...

Beldin · Post by **Beldin** » Fri Mar 15, 2002 1:23 am

Originally posted by Tom
the general theory of evouloution that darwin first dicoverd/invented. is it true or is it false?

Could you really imagine some god actually MAKING lifeforms like BS, Weasel, Waverly.....and so on ....ad infinitum ?

LOL.

No worries - such things certainly HAVE evolved...

Beldin

Sailor Saturn · Post by **Sailor Saturn** » Fri Mar 15, 2002 1:55 am

Originally posted by Beldin

Could you really imagine some god actually MAKING lifeforms like BS, Weasel, Waverly.....and so on ....ad infinitum ?

LOL.

No worries - such things certainly HAVE evolved...

Beldin

Of course I can believe that. God does have a sense of humor, after all.

Beldin · Post by **Beldin** » Fri Mar 15, 2002 2:01 am

Originally posted by Sailor Saturn

Of course I can believe that. God does have a sense of humor, after all.

So it IS true....I read it in someones signature around here "It's easier if you imagine god as a kind of standup comedian..."

- just can't remeber who it was at the moment....

ROFL

No worries,

Beldin...

Sailor Saturn · Post by **Sailor Saturn** » Fri Mar 15, 2002 2:16 am

Originally posted by Beldin

So it IS true....I read it in someones signature around here "It's easier if you imagine god as a kind of standup comedian..." - just can't remeber who it was at the moment....

Nonono, God is not a standup comedian. As I said, God has a sense of humor.

Beldin · Post by **Beldin** » Fri Mar 15, 2002 3:13 am

Originally posted by Sailor Saturn
God has a sense of humor.

..and a twisted one it is....

Beldin

VoodooDali · Post by **VoodooDali** » Fri Mar 15, 2002 10:04 am

Here are my questions for creationism:
1. Do you work within the scientific method? If so, do you hold that it is possible for creationism to be falsified? Implicit in the scientific method is the belief that nothing is absolutely proven for all time. Scientists hold that all truly scientific theories are capable of being falsified. That is, researchers must always be prepared for some future experiment or investigation that will prove that an existing theory is invalid. Without falsification, the scientific method would not be a self-correcting process. With falsification, any errors are eventually detected and corrected. If not, are you of the view that God said it, I believe it, and that settles it?

2. What do you think of the creation stories of other religions? Although there are many points of similarity among the creation stories of some religions, there are also great differences. Most creation stories are mutually exclusive. For example if the biblical creation story is true, then all of the hundreds of creation stories of the other religious holy books and oral traditions are are wrong.

3. How can a rock be dated as being billions of years old by the use of radioisotope analysis, if the world (and the rock) was created less than ten thousand years ago? If you believe that radiometric dating is erroneous, then you would have to conclude that various scientific analysis methods are in error by a factor of perhaps a million times.

4. Do you accept the Genesis Flood story as true? How do you account for these problems with the story?
It says that Noah loaded the entire ark with two (or seven) from each species within a 24 hour day. This would have required him to have taken into the vessel, classified and stored 480 species per second.
Noah took his wife, three sons, and three daughters-in-law into the ark. Each person would have had to sort, house, look after, feed, water, and remove the excrement from about 5 million animals each day.
Noah is said to have built an all-wooden arc about 450 feet long. Long wooden ships, some as long as 300 feet, have actually been built, but they required extensive metal reinforcing - an option not available to Noah. And they leaked badly, requiring either a large crew or mechanically driven pumps to remove water from the hold. Motor driven pumps were not available in those days, and there were not enough humans on the arc to manually pump the water.
Many animals can only survive in certain small regions of the earth where the food supply and temperatures are ideal. These species could not have left their homeland, moved through jungle and desert in order to reach the arc; they would not have survived the journey.
There was no mechanism whereby animals found only in North America, South America, and Australia could cross oceans and arrive at the arc.
When there are fewer than about 20 members to a species, extinction is inevitable, even when massive human intervention occurs. After the flood there would have been only 2 or 7 members to each species; they would not have survived.
The Tower of Babel is recorded as happening 110 to 150 years after the flood. How could the 3 fertile female human survivors of the flood (Noah's step daughters) produce such a large number of descendants within 6 generations?
There is no indication of a worldwide flood in ancient Egyptian, Indus or Chinese writings, temples, pyramids, sculptures, etc., which existed at the time of Noah. Yet, if the flood really did occur, then all of the world's early civilizations would have been completely destroyed. The entire population of the world would have consisted of 8 people, in the vicinity of the ark. It would have taken millennia for humanity to become re-established in China and elsewhere. Also, they would have developed a very different culture from the pre-flood society. The archeological record in Egypt would show a sudden change from ancient Egyptian artifacts, to no signs of civilization, to ancient Israelite culture after the time of the flood. The archeological record in China would show a sudden change from ancient Chinese artifacts, to no signs of civilization, to ancient Israelite culture after the time of the flood. And so on. But the archeological record shows that the various cultures were not interrupted; they continued to develop throughout the period when the flood is supposed to have happened. For example, the Egyptian "Old Kingdom" covered the era from 2649 BCE to 2134 BCE, the 3rd to the 8th dynasty. In particular, the fifth dynasty covered the interval 2465 to 2323 BCE, straddling the time when conservative Christians believe that the flood happened.
How would the fish survive? Some fish require fresh water, some brackish water and some salt water. If sufficient water were added to the oceans so that the level rose above that of the highest mountains, then the salinity of the oceans would drastically change. There would have been a mass die-off of fish species; only a few tolerant ocean fish would have survived. The salt content of all the fresh water lakes in the world would drastically increase, causing a die-off of numerous fish species found only in fresh water.

fable · Post by **fable** » Sat Mar 16, 2002 8:28 pm

A bump to this. @VD has written a lengthy post, and I think it deserves some comment from a variety of our thoughtful regulars.