Since Evolution Is The Answer - Tell Me When Can I Expect To Grow My Wings And Fly

[RD2191]

End of story, no one has ever observed evolution.

[RD2191]

All available evidence supports the central conclusions of evolutionary theory, that life on Earth has evolved and that species share common ancestors. Biologists are not arguing about these conclusions. But they are trying to figure out how evolution happens, and that's not an easy job. It involves collecting data, proposing hypotheses, creating models, and evaluating other scientists' work. These are all activities that we can, and should, hold up to our checklist and ask the question: are they doing science?
All sciences ask questions about the natural world, propose explanations in terms of natural processes, and evaluate these explanations using evidence from the natural world. Evolutionary biology is no exception. Darwin's basic conception of evolutionary change and diversification (illustrated with a page from his notebook at left) explains many observations in terms of natural processes and is supported by evidence from the natural world.
Some of the questions that evolutionary biologists are trying to answer include:

1. Does evolution tend to proceed slowly and steadily or in quick jumps?
2. Why are some clades very diverse and some unusually sparse?
3. How does evolution produce new and complex features?
4. Are there trends in evolution, and if so, what processes generate them?

[Woo Bum-kon]

Yes they have. You sound like a broken record.

You haven't observed your God, yet you still believe in him.

[RD2191]

We don't know how it happened, but we know that it did happen.

[RD2191]

And you haven't observed evolution yet you believe in it, so what's the difference?

[Woo Bum-kon]

Evolution has been observed. I already posted a link showing that it has. If you are trying to make a point about me personally not observing evolution, I'll ask you this: Have you ever been to Antarctica?

Why do you believe in a god who hasn't been observed?

[RD2191]

Charges of fraud

In 1983, a half-dozen leading British scientists led by noted British Radio-astronomer Sir Fred Hoyle carefully studied the plates and counter-plates from the two best Archaeopteryx specimens, and found evidence of forgery.^[3] They discovered that the front and back slabs of each specimen do not match.^[4] They found that an alteration had been made to the left wing as depicted in an 1863 drawing.^[4] They concluded that the feather markings had been imprinted by hand.^[4] They also found that etching process had used cement blobs.^[4] When the scientists requested the ability to use an electronic microscope and carbon-14 dating, the museum refused and withdrew the specimens from the scientists.^[4] The same British Museum had been responsible for the Piltdown Man fraud.

[RD2191]

[RD2191]

Piltdown Man was a notorious hoax perpetrated early in 20th century Great Britain, in which a medieval human skull was combined with the lower jaw of an orangutan and subsequently "found" in a gravel pit in the near the village of Piltdown, England. Hailed as the "missing link" between man and ape-like species by promoters of evolution for decades, Piltdown man was exposed as a fraud only through later scientific testing and simple observation. The refusal of the discoverer to allow independent scrutiny of his claims enabled this fraud to persist for over forty years.
Critics of evolution believe that the Piltdown man was not an isolated incident of bad judgment by evolutionists and that the examples of the Nebraska Man, Java Man, Ocre Man, Neanderthals, and Flores Man can be cited. ^[1] Rather than admit the defects in their methods that facilitate hoaxes, many evolutionists simply rewrote their alleged tree of ancestors without the Piltdown man in it (a clear case of evolutionist denial and not of science working as intended, since the fraud was easily detectable immediately if scientific methods had been used by evolutionists).

[RD2191]

[Clipper Nation]

You're just asking the same stupid questions a million times, with slight variations. You already know that that is not what evolution claims.

It's been clear for a long time that you don't know anything about evolution and simply have no desire to learn. You feel that it threatens your belief in an invisible sky daddy, so you misinterpret it (sometimes deliberately and sometimes through sheer ignorance) in a vain attempt to make your opponent look stupid. You are lame and you take pride in your complete ignorance.

The most ironic thing is that you claim to not want to explain your religious views, because you fear that atheists will pick them apart no matter what you post. It's ironic because not only do you automatically reject every claim that atheists make, you put words in their mouths and attack claims that they don't even make more than you attack claims that they actually do make.

There's really no use debating with him, he's made zero effort to learn the basics of evolution and has only Googled it in order to come up with strawman arguments and spam irrelevant bull .... he's just a proudly ignorant Jeebo who melts down to a pathetic degree whenever his narrow and primitive worldview is challenged, so it's not worth it....

[RD2191]

[RD2191]

[RD2191]

“

Our theory of evolution has become, as Popper described, one which cannot be refuted by any possible observations. Every conceivable observation can be fitted into it. It is thus outside of empirical science but not necessarily false. No one can think of ways in which to test it. Ideas, either without basis or based on a few laboratory experiments carried out in extremely simplified systems, have become part of an evolutionary dogma accepted by most of us as part of our training. The cure seems to us not to be a discarding of the modern synthesis of evolutionary theory, but more skepticism about many of its tenets.[135]

”

[Woo Bum-kon]

There's really no use debating with him, he's made zero effort to learn the basics of evolution and has only Googled it in order to come up with strawman arguments and spam irrelevant bull .... he's just a proudly ignorant Jeebo who melts down to a pathetic degree whenever his narrow and primitive worldview is challenged, so it's not worth it....

Yeah, I'm done. He asks a stupid question, claims that nobody answered it even though several people have, then keeps asking until he can't pretend like his question wasn't answered. Then it's on to the next stupid question.

He never acknowledges that he is wrong. He just fires off ty argument after ty argument to try to see what sticks, and doesn't even attempt to explain why he believes what he does.

[RD2191]

10 fishes moving from water to land.
Supposedly there is no point to evolution and just happens.
What are the odds that all 10 fish evolved into the same species say for instance a rat?

[RD2191]

What are the odds that, of the millions of species of animals, birds, fish and insects, a male of each species developed at the same time and in the same place as a female of the same species, so that the species could propagate? Why are there two sexes anyhow? This is not foreordained in the evolutionary framework. Is there some sort of plan here? If the first generation of mating species didn’t have parents, how did the mating pair get to that point? Isn’t evolution supposed to progress when an offspring of a mating pair has a beneficial mutation?

[RD2191]

Knowing that detail about the transition from fish to land-dweller, she said, “might help us to unravel why it happened at all. Why did creatures come out of the water and get legs and walk away?”
It’s impossible to tell if Tiktaalik was a direct ancestor of land vertebrates, she said, but if a scientist set out to design a plausible candidate, “you’d probably come up with something like this.”

[RD2191]

[ChumpDumper]

rob is really a strong candidate for top meltdown of all time.

Wasn't sure anything was going to beat SBM's screenplay, but the stunningly pronounced ignorance, the sheer volume of reassuring emoticons and non sequitur Google pastes makes a strong case for rob.

[xmas1997]

rob is really a strong candidate for top meltdown of all time.

Wasn't sure anything was going to beat SBM's screenplay, but the stunningly pronounced ignorance, the sheer volume of reassuring emoticons and non sequitur Google pastes makes a strong case for rob.

Don't know about down here, but upstairs kobyz is my choice for melt down king. He doesn't need any help, he does it all by himself!

[DisAsTerBot]

holy i didnt know someone could be so dumb. lol rob

[RandomGuy]

Oh and scientist can't lie? Has he done any actual studies himself? No, he hasn't. In other words he has faith in what they are saying is true.

So much wrong in one short post.

Lets break it out.

"A scientist can lie."

Sure, a scientist can lie, for a brief period of time, and some do. The problem is that collectively, you are talking about hundreds of thousands of people, using a peer-review process for published papers, designed to catch bad science or reasoning or even such flaws as outright lying/fraud.

This touches on concepts you need to understand when thinking about science and speaks to the rest of it.

Reproducibility.
--IF the work is valid, then any scientist can, and often do, come along and try to reproduce the results. Additionally, older papers are often used to form the basis of subsequent papers. They build on each other. Scientists get the accolades from overturning established science. Taking a long held theory, and finding new conclusive evidence that points to a different theory is how you win Nobel prizes. If someone lies, others are out there to find it.

In that way it is self-correcting, unlike the copy and paste bull on creatist websites that gets passed around without a whiff of critical thinking.

Reproducibility also speaks to whether I have to do it myself. I don't, but I can, if I chose to do so, and so could you.

"he has faith in what they are saying is true."

I do not have faith in scientists. Faith is the excuse people use when they don't thave a good reason to believe something.

In this case, I understand the process and methods of science. It is designed to be a self-correcting mechanism, produce results that are reproducible by anybody who knows what they are doing, and the value of any theory is its ability to make predictions about future data, which the theory of evolution does extremely well.

I have, thereofore, a good, logical reason to think that when the evidence and overall consensus about that evidence is that great over centuries, it is almost certainly correct.

Although my college education primarily dealt with language and accounting/finance, I am very, very scientifically literate. Further, my professional job as an intelligence analsyst, and now auditor both required me to look at underlying data, and evaluate sufficiency of evidence, apply critical thinking and examine confirmation bias.

I have spent the last two decades looking into the claims of creationists, especially concerning the theory of evolution. At best, those claims are flimsy and made out of ignorance of the actual science involved. At worst some of it is DELIBERATE falsehoods on the part of people who think they are defending their faith in God, and see a little lying as an acceptable method to defeat evil.

If you want to think I am incapable of reading and understanding the science, simply because I don't have a degree, fine. I will say that I do, and can demostrate that fairly easily.

Lastly, although I have not done the science, and don't have a degree is not entirely relevant. The people making the claims in the papers and articles do. They are actual experts. Unless you can show where specifically they are wrong or lying, you will have to accept that what they say carries weight.

[RandomGuy]

Biased site, let me ask you something, are you a scientist?

Fallacy: Ad Hominem



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Description of Ad Hominem
Translated from Latin to English, "Ad Hominem" means "against the man" or "against the person."

An Ad Hominem is a general category of fallacies in which a claim or argument is rejected on the basis of some irrelevant fact about the author of or the person presenting the claim or argument. Typically, this fallacy involves two steps. First, an attack against the character of person making the claim, her cir stances, or her actions is made (or the character, cir stances, or actions of the person reporting the claim). Second, this attack is taken to be evidence against the claim or argument the person in question is making (or presenting). This type of "argument" has the following form:

1. Person A makes claim X.
2. Person B makes an attack on person A.
3. Therefore A's claim is false.

The reason why an Ad Hominem (of any kind) is a fallacy is that the character, cir stances, or actions of a person do not (in most cases) have a bearing on the truth or falsity of the claim being made (or the quality of the argument being made).

http://www.nizkor.org/features/falla...d-hominem.html

Person A = Talkorigins website
Claim X = that creationist claims have been debunked
Person B =robdiaz2191

1. Talkorigins website (Person A) claims that creationist claims have been debunked (X)
2. Robdiaz (Person B) says “[Talkorgins is a] biased website (attack on person A).”
3. Therefore TalkOrigin’s claims are false

QED.

What does it say about the strength of your reasoning, when it is relying on obviously flawed logic?

And where is the proof of evolution? A moth has always been a moth, a sparrow a sparrow, and a butterfly a butterfly. Have adaptations been observed? Yes, but not "evolution".

That isn't really an answer. You ignored this question too. I will ask it a second time.

What does it say about the strength of your reasoning, when it is relying on obviously flawed logic?

[RandomGuy]

I do not know and you don't either, you are simply doing what I am doing. You are gathering your so called knowledge and information from books or the internet. Have you done any studies on the second law of thermodynamics? I highly doubt that you have. So then how do you know that you are right and that I am wrong? You don't. I have links and sources that claim the theory of evolution does violate the second law, you have sources that claim otherwise, so who is right?

The second law of thermodynamics states that the entropy of an isolated system never decreases.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_...thermodynamics


The claims of creationists go like this:

"Evolution is order from chaos (entropy), therefore it violates the second law of thermodynamics, because disordered things (organic molecules) became more ordered. (long chain RNA, etc)"

The law of increasing entropy -- also known as the second law of thermodynamics -- stipulates that all systems in the real world tend to go "downhill," as it were, toward disorganization and decreased complexity.
This law of entropy is, by any measure, one of the most universal, bestproved laws of nature. It applies not only in physical and chemical systems, but also in biological and geological systems -- in fact, in all systems, without exception.

No exception to the second law of thermodynamics has ever been found -- not even a tiny one. Like conservation of energy (the "first law"), the existence of a law so precise and so independent of details of models must have a logical foundation that is independent of the fact that matter is composed of interacting particles.18

"In the natural sciences an isolated system is a physical system without any external exchange – neither matter nor energy can enter or exit, but can only move around inside."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_...thermodynamics


The claims of creationists go like this:

"Evolution is order from chaos (entropy), therefore it violates the second law of thermodynamics, because disordered things (organic molecules) became more ordered. (long chain RNA, etc)"




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

Now ask yourself:

"Is the Earth an isolated system?"

"Is the inside of a plankton cell living in the ocean an isolated system?"

Why or why not?


See, this is not difficult at all, and you don't ahve to take anybody's word for it. You can read on the subject yourself, as I have done.

That's what they all do, they all retort to name calling. They claim superiority and dismiss you as uniformed.

I have given you the information you need to answer a very basic question, about a very basic claim you have posted.

These questions don't go away, are simple to answer with less than five minutes worth of reading.

According to the second law of thermodynamics:

Is the earth an isolated system?

Is the inside of a plankton cell living in the ocean an isolated system?