Summations Only

Fine, if you can account for all those billions of years as occurring AFTER the Fall, which brought death into the Creation.

That's possible. I don't expect that change to happen any time soon.

"Microevolution" has been known for millennia. It's just the normal variation of all living things from generation to generation, built into the genome and played out through sexual recombination. It acquired the name because of the theory of evolution, a way to distinguish this normal process of variation within a Species or "Kind" from the idea of Species-to-Species evolution.There ARE "creationists" like Pat Robertson who "say the world is old," but it contradicts the Bible so it has nothing in common with the concept of "microevolution" which is understood to be the normal variation within a Biblical Kind.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

And has been known to be that (among YECs that post on the internet) for a reasonable proportion of the eleven years that I've been following the argument. Dwise1 can amplify on this, but, as of 2002 or so, most YECs denied that "microevolution" existed at all. "Variation," maybe, but not anything with that E-word mixed in. That was the very spawn of Satan back in those olden days. Your dictionary has been mentioned recently around here, Faith: how fast does it spin, again?

This is not what I meant. What I meant is what Coragyps already indicated; if you go back a couple of years, you will find creationists who denied that any form of evolution or change happened. You won't find them anymore, and the reason for that is that they no longer can defend or rationalize that position, not even to themselves. And I would argue that this is going to happen with the 6000 year old earth as well (and most of their other ideas as well, given time). The problem with creationists, though, is that they cannot admit that they were wrong, because then they would have to admit that their theology/reading of the bible was/is wrong and that would open the door to the possibility that they are still wrong about other things in the bible. Therefore they will continue to deny that their positions ever changed.

I took a European History Course and have read many things concerning church history. Yes, the Roman Catholics did many deplorable things as an institution. Yes, the Protestants have by and large done bad things as well. It matters not the scale of this. It matters the intent. This is one of the facts that has had me questioning the validity of the power of religion and/or the concept of spiritual regeneration. I mean, why are religious minded folks as bad or worse than secular humanists or even people of other faiths?I was taught that humans were all recipients of Original Sin. Even though the concept has been questioned and even disproven as originating directly from the Bible, the idea and observable fact of humans behaving badly--almost by nature---has been verified.It almost seems to me that the more religious one claims to be, the more they sin. Anyway, this rant has nothing to do with Young Earth Creationism although I did used to watch Pat Robertson before I got saved, back when I used to get stoned every night in the family room at home. For the record, Young Earth Creationism doesn't make much logical sense to me either...and I don't defend it because when I pray, its importance never comes up.

I know what you meant and the acceptance of the term "microevolution" means absolutely nothing because it only refers to what we've always accepted under other names. If it's no concession to evolution to use it then your point is invalidated.

Faith, what mechanism prevents the "small changes" of "microevolution" from becoming the large, species-or-higher differentiation of "macroevolution" over many generations?Please be specific. Small steps unimpeded, after all, add up to long journeys. Is the mechanism blocking this cumulative change under your model simply the lack of sufficient time for the small changes to sufficiently accumulate?

The forming of varieties or breeds reduces genetic possibilities so that eventually no more evolution is possible. I've argued this at length here and at my blog. No, there is no such thing as mutations rushing in to save the day, and that's all I'm going to argue of this here. Again, the formation of varieties or breeds reduces genetic variability, often slowly and with no great genetic cost but always some genetic cost, and if further population splits occur or if a new population is made up of sharply reduced numbers then the genetic cost can be very great, which eventually leads to inability to vary further at alll. End of evolution.

By which you mean the science supported emergence of truth as far as is humanly possible to determine at this time?Yes, I agree with the one stipulation that we stay open to changes if science retracts or edits the truth in the future.But when I see that Genesis is thoroughly supported by sciwnce riht noq, I emphasize that the atheitist and bible bashed has no case against the bible since both knoqwledge and the faith in scripture cn be complementary.As far as evolution is concerned, the bible agrees that the Plant Kingdom appeared before the aAmal Kingdom, using only the Two Kingdom System since only plants and animals are mentioned.We also read the amazing claim in Gen 1:9 that a Pangea-like event occurred during the third "day" which would be geologically analogous to the evening of the Archean and the early morning of the Proterozoic Era.I can not understand why the church people do not accept this Theistic Evolution teaching which has bbeen on the internet for a dozen years now.Maybe Pat Robertson has been reading some of those Forums and sees that this interpretation is the next ecumenicalistic teaching of the moment????

What about the one mutation which was an Act-of-God that fused together two of the 24 Ape chromosomes, back 7 million years ago, and created the first "human-oid" with only 23 chromosome pairs????? Chimpanzees and Humans have extremely similar DNA to humans.
But Chimpanzees have one more chromosome than Humans do, (24 pairs), and if Humans and Chimpanzees are genetically related (sharing a common ancestor), this extra chromosome had to go somewhere.
Evolutionary Biologists might predict that two chromosomes fused into one.
But they would need hard evidence to use that hypothesis as more argument for evolution in general, and for a good enough reason to make such a claim.
As it turns out Chromosome number 2 in Humans was once two different chromosomes that were fused together.
Additionally, the evidence is that an extra large Telomere appears in the middle of the #2 chromosome, as well as an extra Centromere, as depicted in the illustration above.

By death, Genesis means the second death of the speies, an extinction.Adam was a species which went extinctGen 5:2 says god called them, the man and his wife, the "Adamites,"... i.e.; a species:Gen 5:2 Male and female created he THEM; and blessed THEM, and called THEIR name Adam, (a species), in the day when THEY were created.The text of Genesis 5 compared to the present paleonotology.

I've been thinking a lot lately about religious rage.It may seem a non sequitur to say, then, that this seems the perfect place to pay homage to Clair Patterson, who both established the age of the earth by studying lead ratios and determined that industry was subjecting all citizens of the earth to lead poisoning.On the age of the earth:

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In 1955, Patterson published a study in the journal Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta, that reported lead ratios found in one of the Canyon Diablo meteorites. These iron meteorites are the leftover pieces of a big one that created Meteor Crater in Arizona about 50,000 years ago. Most important, they were also leftovers from the formation of the solar system, which before the publication of his papers was known only to be billions of years ago. As Patterson explained in an interview in the year that he died, the Canyon Diablo meteorites didn't contain any uranium, a metal that radioactively decays into lead at well-established rates taking hundreds of millions of years. Other rocks contained both lead and uranium, screwing up earlier age estimates.

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So, by reporting the ratio of lead types found in these pristine meteorites and comparing them to lead ratios found in the other rocks on the Earth and other meteorites, Patterson could calculate the age of the solar system, when the Earth formed, to be 4.55 billion years old, give or take 70 million years. "Except for a few minor disagreements, this paper is probably a concrete expression of the attitudes of most investigators in the field," Patterson noted in the study.

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The estimate, now refined and narrowed by other investigations, has stood for five decades, Eiler says, "and has only gotten more solid over time."

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On the poisoning of modern humanity by lead:

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The ability to detect faint traces of lead in billion-year-old rocks allowed Patterson to also realize that the Industrial Age was awash in lead. In 1965, he reported that lead from gasoline, solder, paint and pesticides meant that lead levels were 100 times higher than normal in the bloodstreams of most Americans, a result that led to congressional hearings and disagreements with scientists employed by the petroleum industry. Looking at 1,600-year-old Peruvian mummies led him to report in a 1975 New England Journal of Medicine study that modern people suffered lead levels thousands of times greater than in the past, levels close to being poisonous, with debilitating effects on the brain, kidneys and almost every other organ.

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Above quotes How do we know the age of the earth?So on the one hand, we have a man who employed the most complex known system--the human brain--to measure the age of our mother planet and to warn humanity of the cost of unthinking, unregulated use of lead in myriad products.On the other, we have people who cite the authority of a cobbled book of myths to deny the authenticity of the work produced by an organ they believe, by their own texts, to be fashioned in the image of God.One (this one) is tempted to find some leaden connection between these environmental insults to human intelligence and the irrational rejection of its indisputable findings by folks who cling to idiosyncratic interpretations of religious texts produced by primitive peoples.Fortunately, among the many demographic realities revealed by the recent U.S. election, we find evidence of the increasing secularization of American youth. In my lifetime, I have been thrilled to watch the racist heritage of my parents' generation yield, in my children's and grandchildren's generations, to a casual, confident and loving celebration of commonality. Personally, I've traveled from being a race traitor to a grandfather embraced by my grandchildren as a prophet of something much greater than tolerance.Sadly, the rejection of scientific and social advances by Christian conservatives--the disdain for environmental science, the rejection of scientific findings that reveals a frightened clutching of religious beliefs no more justifiable by reason than human sacrifice and ethnic genocide, the coded, dog whistle appeals to racism--leads me to believe that we are approaching a period of extreme Christian violence. As the Islamic extremists react to the economic and cultural dominance of the secular west, so I expect the American Taliban to respond to their deepening irrelevance with the acts of terror of which they have already shown themselves capable: bombing Planned Parenthood and government buildings, shooting doctors and creating the ground for further violence by demonizing secularists and Others.Is it a stretch to get to this conclusion from disagreements about the age of the earth? I don't think so. The age of the earth has been established with as much rigor as the efficacy of vaccines and the heightening threat posed by our global industrial pollution. We can see how those are faring.Once you embrace the denial of reason, once you commit yourself to believing the cobbled, edited, translated and expurgated religious texts of a desert tribe rather than the products of your own lying mind, then there is no limit.Discussion with someone whose yardstick of truth is an ancient text rather than rigorous study is not a debate: it is an exercise, for them, in testifying and martyrdom. Inquire (to garner a superficial fluency in terms they cannot understand), obfuscate, deny and distort, and then flee under the flag of martyrdom because rational minds reject tattered myths as the arbiter of reality.We've seen that cycle over and over here, and we'll see it again, here, soon.The good news is that this particular disorder appears to be waning, if ever so slowly. The bad news is that true believers, cornered by contradiction, sooner or later seek their redemption in blood.The earth is 4.5 billion years old. People will die over it.P.S. Oni once remarked that I sometimes sound like I'm making a speech. He's right--it betrays a regrettable early training in rhetoric, as well as some long ago employment as a speechwriter.For best results, run the above through your favorite de-rhetoricizing filter. YMMV.

I suppose the idea that Pat Robertson is not YEC is interesting. But Robertson is a blooming idiot. There must be dozens of ways to demonstrate his idiocy without being the least bit controversial.So old Stopped Clock Pat is right about something? Okay, but he'll be onto something else in five seconds and he'll be way wrong about it.

Altogether too true.