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Politics : Evolution -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: w molloy who wrote (691)	9/17/1999 1:29:00 AM
From: Tunica Albuginea	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 69300

wmolloy I can/will debate you with half my brain tied behind my back just to make it equal chuckle, chuckle I will pick just one point which in essence is the most important point of my post The Church of Darwin Message 11277789 The point here is that you have several pathetic biotechnophiles such as Carl Sagan and company that are trying ( when it is safe to do so, ie when they debate with intellectual cripples ) to do away with 20 centuries of keen intellectual debate as to -who are we? -where did we come from? -how were we created? -by whom or by what? -were do we go from here? -how is the Universe explained? -what is our purpose in life? -when did life begin? on and on and on. wmolloy:::::::::: NOBODY HAS THE ABSOLUTE PROOF of this in whole world. ALL we have are theories, beliefs, faith, postulates, assumptions, and as far as evolution is concerned what we have is a piecemeal quilt whose pictur keeps changing every couple of years. This is why this 20 century old debate has been enshrined by Our Founding Fathers in the 1st Amendment: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; Instead what do these jerckos want to do? They want to do just that: Prohibit the free excercise of religion. Here it is : All the most prominent Darwinists proclaim naturalistic philosophy when they think it safe to do so. Carl Sagan had nothing but contempt for those who deny that humans and all other species "arose by blind physical and chemical forces over eons from slime." Richard Dawkins exults that Darwin "made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist," and Richard Lewontin has written that scientists must stick to philosophical materialism regardless of the evidence, because "we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door." Stephen Jay Gould condescendingly offers to allow religious people to express their subjective opinions about morals, provided they don't interfere with the authority of scientists to determine the "facts" -- one of the facts being that God is merely a comforting myth. Richard Dawkins is obviously one of the biggest philosophical morons in the group: calls himself an atheist. The moron does not know one of the basic principles of modern philosophical thought: the non- existence of God cannot be proven for the same reason that it cannot be proven that He exists We can't see Him around the corner on a regular basis. So there it molloy. The Church of Darwin . Go back to your pews, stay there and stop bothering other worshippers. Freedom of religion. Freedom of thought . TA you said Message #691 from w molloy at Sep 16 1999 11:39PM Tunica- I see you have given up debating me - losing the arguments eh? Here are a few more pops. A Chinese paleontologist lectures around the world saying that recent fossil finds in his country are inconsistent with the Darwinian theory of evolution. His reason: The major animal groups appear abruptly in the rocks over a relatively short time, rather than evolving gradually from a common ancestor as Darwin's theory predicts. This is such an old chestnut that is trotted out by the creationists. Hell - I've even debunked it myself. WHY DO YOU IGNORE THE POST! The statement is true. However 'Gradualism' has been replaced by 'punctuated equilibrium' to explain the current view of the fossil record. The root of the problem is that "science" has two distinct definitions in our culture. ...... I don't see what this pargraph contributes to the argument - severe OT obfuscation. The reason the theory of evolution is so controversial is that it is the main scientific prop for scientific naturalism It isn't any more controversial than either of the theories of Gravity. Students first learn that "evolution is a fact," and then they gradually learn more and more about what that "fact" means. It means that all living things are the product of mindless material forces such as chemical laws, natural selection, and random variation. If one weighs the balance of probabilities, evolution is a fact, as is the round world and any other fact you care to name. Evolution is NOT mindless or random. Natural selection preserves gains and eradicates mistakes. only nine percent of Americans accept the central finding of biology that human beings (and all the other species) have slowly evolved from more ancient beings with no divine intervention along the way. This probably goes a long way to explaining the high percentage of foreign nationals working in Silicon Valley. An even more compelling reason for keeping the lid on public discussion is that the official neo-Darwinian theory is having serious trouble with the evidence. The what? What is official neo-Darwinism? Since the Darwinists sometimes define evolution merely as "change," and lump minor variation with the whole creation story as "evolution," a few trivial examples like dog-breeding or fruit fly variation allow them to claim proof for the whole system. This is a gross distortion of the facts. See my potted summary of Evolutionary theory in Post #538 The really important claim of the theory -- that the Darwinian mechanism does away with the need to presuppose a creator -- is protected by a semantic defense-in-depth. This is outrageous. An outright lie. Evolutionary theory, Darwinian or otherwise, makes no such claim! Prove me wrong. Here's just one example of how real science is replaced by flim-flam. The standard textbook example of natural selection involves a species of finches in the Galapagos, whose beaks have been measured over many years. In 1997 a drought killed most of the finches, and the survivors had beaks slightly larger than before. The probable explanation was that larger-beaked birds had an advantage in eating the last tough seeds that remained. A few years later there was a flood, and after that the beak size went back to normal. Nothing new had appeared, and there was no directional change of any kind. Nonetheless, that is the most impressive example of natural selection at work that the Darwinists have been able to find after nearly a century and a half of searching. This is NOT the most impressive example. The fossil record is. (See Gould "A wonderful life"). The explanation for the return to normal beak size has been conveniently excised. It's called 'regression to the mean'. In the absence of environmental factors forcing the change in he first place, regression to the mean will always take place. Thats why tall parents can sometime beget shorter offspring. If the Academy meant to teach scientific investigation, rather than to inculcate a belief system, it would encourage students to think about why, if natural selection has been continuously active in creating, the observed examples involve very limited back-and-forth variation that doesn't seem to be going anywhere. This is an apparent problem with the academy, one not shared abroad I'm sad to say. Why is the fossil record overall so difficult to reconcile with the steady process of gradual transformation predicted by the neo-Darwinian theory? Because Gradualism might be wrong? You are debating a mechanism of evolution, not evolution itself! See above I'm beginning to wonder I bother. w.