Both or neither.

Hi Sconzey.I will leave the scientific areas of your post to the scientists, but I would like to deal with a theological/historical matter that you raise.You state that: You blame this on evolution for these atrocitites without any supporting documentation. However, with even a cursory glance I am confused as to why you blame evolution for dehumanisation and evilness that was around long before anyone suggested that we evolved.What you may find disturbing is that all these atrocities have their foundations in the Bible, although I am not blaming the Bible for this I do blame the people who have used the Bible to justify these actions.The truth is the Bible endorses all kinds of dehumanising behaviour, for example here is some Bible teachings on slavery:Exodus 21:20-21 "If a man beats his male or female slave with a rod and the slave dies as a direct result, he must be punished" but he is not to be punished if the slave gets up after a day or two, since the slave is his property.Clearly the Bible thinks it is perfectly alright for a human being to own another human being and also promotes that you can beat a slave to within an inch of his/her life and this is fine with God.Lev 25:44 'Your male and female slaves are to come from the nations around you; from them you may buy slaves.Again, God promotes slavery thousands of years before even the word 'evolution' was invented.Brian

There are a good many transitional forms in the fossil record. Most of them are not known to the general public because they just aren't very interesting.The "dehumanisation" is always attributable to preexisting beliefs - and not evolution itself. Creationism is just as - if not more - supportive of racism. And even if that were not the case it would have no bearign on the truth of evolutionary theory.Irreducible complexity ? TO the best of my knowledge that one relies on Behe's opinions that the "indirect" routes - the routes any knowledgable person would EXPECT evolution to use - are too improbable. If you can find a decent argument FOR that let me know - Behe didn't bother to include one in his book.Improbability ? I haven't seen one argument which amounts to more than playing with made-up numbers.What's wrong with creationism ? Well is is'nt the idea that we might be responsible to a higher being. Plenty of Christians accept evolution. The fact that creationists frequently attribute such motivations to their opponents IS one of the things wrong with the creationist movement. They usually insist that people who dare to disagree with them cannot be Christian.But what is wrong with creationism ?Well the main questions is why is there so much evidence for evolution ? Is there a creator trying to fool us into believing evolution ?Another is that there is no theory of creationism - the closest you will find is apologetic attempts to "justify" a more-or-less literal interpretation of Genesis. By any account that is religion since it STARTS with the assumption that Genesis is in some sense a scientific account of the history of the world.

If you are going to calcvulate the probability of forming a "correct" chain of amino acids then first please explain what the "correct" chain or chains are and how you know them to be correct.Then explain the mechanisms available to form them and explain how you know that they are the only ones relevant.And don;t forget to justify any other assumptions you make.That is if you want to do a MATHEMATICAL proof rather than an excuse to reject evolution dressed up as mathematics.

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The thing is that whatever happened, Creation or Evolution only happened once, and was not observed by anyone. I mean, whether this violates scientific method is debatable, for me it does, but thats my opinion.

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New species have arisen in this century. It's very well documented. Are you aware of this?It's true that not every past transition can be observed (though many may be inferred from strong evidence). However, when we see these minor changes still happening today, it's hard to claim that some invisible boundary prevents such small jumps from connecting us to a complex molecule if enough time is involved. How does 4 billion years sound?

wait a minute, Evolution only happened once? Even if you do think its false you should know enough about the theory that's its an ongoing process which has (or hasn't) ocurred for the last 4 billion years.

sconzey, Your opinion is wrong. This is rather the point of science, isn't it? To infer things that exist/occur/have existed/have occurred that defy direct observation?Mark

Why don't you just call those who believe in evolution "Nazis" and get Godwin's Law out of the way? Do you think that the Deep South, the heart of racism and bigotry, of slavery and degradation in the United States through much of its history, did it because of evolution? Quite to the contrary, the Deep South used to be America's "Bible Belt". The Klu Klux Klan considers itself to be founded on the principles of Christianity.Please, demonizing your opponents is grossly unfair. You might as well have just said "Murderer X believes in evolution, and said that he killed someone because he believes that person is evolutionarily inferior." And then we respond "Murderer Y believes in Christianity, and said that he killed someone because that person is a different religion."... and we go round until we're both thoroughly insulted on a baseless sidetrack.There are the level of fossils found as are to be expected - larger gaps on older fossils and more fragile fossils, smaller gaps on more recent and more sturdy fossils. They are virtually all in the exact layers that they should, and *nowhere else* (this is the reason why evolution was initially proposed; as people kept digging, they couldn't explain why on earth creatures were all perfectly sorted into perfect layers, worldwide, regardless of niche, body size, body shape, etc; in fact, the first theory proposed to explain this was that there were "multiple creations") (the very few exceptions to the rule all match up with their environments - for example, if there's a column of rubble pile above a human body but nowhere else, the human bone isn't anywhere near as fossilized as the bones around it, etc, it's clearly a burial chamber; these are but a *tiny* percentage of total fossils). The level of transitions found is, in most cases, excellent. I am not aware of a single line vertebrates whose transition is unknown up to the Order level; family-level gaps are rare (I think there may be one on bats, because their skeletons are so fragile, but I'd have to check); most transitions are at the genus and species level. What archaeologists have to look at - and the reason why they virtually all had to end up accepting evolution - was because the higher in the strata you collect fossils from, you get such a perfect transition between fossil types, as in Mark's graph. And, not coincidentally, radioisotope dating - all except (note the boldfaces) in cases where it obviously should not work and is not done (i.e., radiocarbon dating an aquatic animal, or a plant that lived very close to a volcanic vent) is generally accurate to within a few percent (a young earth would require not only orders of magnitude of error, but *consistant error of orders of magnitude* between all of the different kinds of dating which not only confirm each other, but are off by the same number of years between each other - which means many very precise, huge levels of inaccuracy, that somehow match up with the fossil sorting and each other). Needless to say, given what they face in the field, creationists comprise less 1% of paleontologists. In fact, in the 19th century, the different sciences didn't interact so kindly with each other. Paleontologists were stating that the Earth was several billion years old. However, the physicsts were insistant that they were wrong, that the world was several tens of millions years old. Both were insistant that the other side had to change their views. The reason that it was held that the universe was tens of millions of years old was that, while scientists had realized that the sun wasn't so hot and bright due to fire, fusion wasn't known yet. The dominant theory at the time was that the sun condensed from a cloud of gas; equations showed that, yes, the sun would generate a lot of heat and light that way (and in fact, that is why early-forming stars glow), but that it would reach the stage that it was at now after a few tens of millions of years, and would die after a few more. Fusion was unknown. However, when fusion was discovered, this was an incredible moment in science - all of the sudden, there was a new possible energy source for the sun, and it was matching up with their readings of the sun. And when they ran the calculations for how long ago the sun would have had to have condensed from a cloud of gas based on its current contents, they an answer of around 4.5 billion years. All of the sudden, the different sciences "fit".Finally, as for abiogenesis, here's some suggested reading:Abiogenesis FAQs: The Origins of Life- Karen------------------
"Illuminant light,
illuminate me."[This message has been edited by Rei, 09-15-2003]

Yeah, the point that was made about the correct soloution being saved, I thought of also, but too late, I already had people replying to my post. :$With regards to abiogenesis, I think I have found a more accurate example...The following are my words, but not my thoughts. It was paraphrased from an essay by Dr John P Marcus. It can be found on pages 162 and 163 of the book In Six Days.First, seventy five protiens need to be present together with the prequisite DNA and RNA for life to arise.So, let us calculate the probability of just one of these protiens arising by chance.Lets make it a simple one, say smaller than average at 100 amino acids.The nessecary left handed amino acids need to be in the same place at the same time, and interfering compounds, such as right handed amino acids need to be removed.All by chance.The amino acids then need to join at a rate faster than the one at which proteins usually decompose...Even then the chance would be 1 in 20^100; 20 amino acids available, raised to the power of the number of residues in the protein, i.e. 1 in 1.268x10^130.Lets put this in perspective... The earth has a mass of 5.97x10^27g. If the entire mass of the earth was converted to amino acids, there would be in the order of 3.27x10^49 amino acid molecules available. If all of these molecules were converted into 100-residue proteins, there would be 3.27x10^47 proteins.Since there are 1.268x10^130 possible combinations of amino acids in a 100-residue protein, the chances of having *just one* correct sequence in the *whole globe* is 1 in 3.88x10^82!!Even if the protiens could rearrange themselves into all the different combinations in the 1.45x10^17 seconds available, they would have to be rearranging themselves 2.67x10^65 times per second!This is physically impossible.4.6 billion years may be a long time, but it is nowhere near long enough...I'll get down off my soapbox and put my whiteboard away. :-P

There's no such thing as irreducible complexity, at least not in the sense that you're talking about (not being able to construct a given system step-wise).After all, an arch is irreducibly complex - remove any piece, and the arch fails. Yet, arches are built piece by piece. How? By scaffolds. Temporary structures that are not themselves irreducably complex, but aid in the development of structures that appear to be. Scientists have hypothesized analogous "scaffolds" in evolution, as well. What, like it's more probable that Christianity just happens to be the right choice out of the world's hundreds of religions? That there just happens to be a God so loving and so omnipotent that, while he created us all and loves us, he never lifts a finger to do anything or assure us of his presence?No offense, but I'll take evolution as the alternative with the least improbable entities. The only things that's truly improbable about evolution is that a self-catalyzing molecule came to be, but that only has to happen once. Actually, I wouldn't mind the higher being. I'm already accountable to my human peers, what's one more being to be accountable to? I don't believe in evolution because it lets me do what I want. (In fact, I have a harder time doing what I want because there's no clearly defined moral law - I have to assess each individual action in terms of its effect on my human peers and environment, which is a lot harder than just comparing notes with a pre-defined rule set.)The reason scientists (who largely are people of faith anyway) reject creationism is that it simply isn't supported by the evidence. There's far too much evidence that the Biblical account can't explain. (Paleobotanical sorting, for instance.)

-[This message has been edited by crashfrog, 09-16-2003]

sconzey, Stay on topic, your argument is with evolution, not abiogenesis.Can we assume you have no problem with evolution being taught as science, & creationism being left to the church?But anyway........ Do they? Who said proteins need to be synthesised at all by the original self replicator? Let's not, it is another strawman non-sequitur. No-one in science is postulating that a cell just sprung into existance.But like I say, you have strayed off of your original topic.Mark------------------
"I can't prove creationism, but they can't prove evolution. It is [also] a religion, so it should not be taught....Christians took over the school board and voted in creationism. That can be done in any school district anywhere, and it ought to be done." Says Kent "consistent" Hovind in "Unmasking the False Religion of Evolution Chapter 6."

75 proteins ? where does that number come from and what does it represent ?Whty do they have to be randomly assembled ? Replicators can be simpler - much simpler - and therefore evolution rather than random assembly is a distinct possiblity. Why is this ignored ?Let me put it VERY simple. NO scientist engaged in serious research into the origins of life would assume that 75 proteins would have formed by pure chance. This is not an "accurate" example at all it is a strawman invented by someone who is at best ignorant of the actual science involved.

I suggest you start with this:Abiogenesis FAQs: The Origins of LifeThe simplest known self-replicator is a mere three subunits long (the SunY self-replicator). There are self-replicators of all kinds in the world; even BSE (Bovine Spongiform Encephalapathy) is a self replicator. Now, note that BSE requires a very specific type of chemical to make a replica of itself. And in fact, that is precisely what the first self replicators would have been like (although they would have likely been much shorter chains than prions). Self replicators which then became able to utilize a wider variety of materials for replication are selectively superior to the limited ones, and those begin to take over.. etc.I like the graph that contrasts the view of many creationists about abiogenesis with the view of scientists:Creationist:
Simple chemicals -> bacteriaScientists:
Simple chemicals -> polymers -> replicating polymers -> hypercycle -> probiont -> bacteria.To read about the processes believed to cause this, read the attached literature; it's much better than me summarizing it for you. Even if you disagree with it, it's good to understand what your ideological opponents believe, so that you don't inadvertently create straw men.- Karen------------------
"Illuminant light,
illuminate me."

Sconzey If I may I would like to paraphrase a physicist on the point of the use of odds. "Today on the way over here I saw a most remarkable thing.I saw the license plate number FKM-587. Calculate for me the odds,out of all the possible license plates,of my seeing that particular one." I would like to see if you can show us the math and the answer as I have often wondered how large a number that would be.

To get back on topic (this isn't quite the place to discuss the likelihood of original replicate molecules) creationism is decidedly a religion, while evolution is not.COMPLETLY disregarding the validity of evolution, it still follows the scientific method, and is open to revision and falsification. Since it is also supported by evidence it is taught in science classes as what is probably true.creationism on the other hand is not open to revision, and assumes pre-existing knowledge of the state of the world. well... they actually assume the existence and infallibility of a god, however that is even farther from the scientific method.