Why is evolution so controversial?

Sorry, I do get confused. I should stick to mammals. Land animals don't occur in the Precambrian though some do in higher layers but mammals not until the highest. OK? So instead of a mammal in the Precambrian how about a mammal in the Triassic, would that do for a falsification criterion?Well, actually it does occur to me to wonder why so many of some kinds of animals aren't in some of the strata, but I also wonder how well represented they are in the strata where they supposedly ARE found. I don't find this sort of information to be readily available. One thing about this peculiar "science" is that it gives out its information to the public very sparingly, as well as presenting the interpretive baggage rather than simple description, which is, as I've said, pure mystification. Not very science-like at all. Although in public presentations it tells us what SORTS of fossilized creatures are found in which "time periods" it only gives a rough sketch, doesn't tell us geographically where particular ones are found, which are found in groups of their own kind or with other groups or whatnot, or in what numbers or anything like that. Perhaps the information is available somewhere but it's not very accessible. Everywhere the inquiring layman is met with handy dandy little charts and diagrams, basically interpretation and mystification.My point when I joined this thread was just to answer why evolution is so "uncontroversial," meaning so easily believed and the main answer is because it is pure mental stuff, pure "theory" and nothing but theory, intertwined theory, theory building on theory, nothing provable in any of it, as well as being presented in such a mystifying way that defeats actual thought many simply don't even try. In contrast to true science which is observable and available to all inquirers. Microevolution is an observable and provable phenomenon, known and knowable by all for millennia. While on the other hand macroevolution is pure theory and totally unprovable. Genetics is a true science, many can observe it and work with it with the right tools, but the theory of evolution remains unprovable theory. Medicine doesn't need evolution, which I believe was part of the OP of this thread. In fact I can't think of a single actual useful science or technology that needs anything from the idea of evolution, it's a navel-gazing useless science. Veterinarians don't need it, doctors don't need it, conservationists don't need it. Knowledge of microevolution can be useful, but macro, useless.So for all intents and purposes it's unfalsifiable. Twenty people working on DNA can correct each other. Twenty people working on evolution are doing nothing but elaborating the mental labyrinth, memorizing theory and regurgitating it and cramming data into it.And then there is that nonsense about the strata. It just keeps astonishing me that you can look at the surface of the earth which has beneath it layer upon layer of strata with fossils, say the Kaibab Plateau in the Grand Canyon area, that stretches for thousands of square miles in that area, look at it and not realize that all those layers were built up in the PAST and are over and done with, and now we have the surface of the earth on top of them all and the process has come to a stop. Long long ago. The land was tilted and folded here and there AFTER it all, the canyons were cut in "our" time, not in any time period before, and all the rest of the striking formations we see everywhere, including the Kaibab Plateau itself which was washed clean at the same time the Grand Canyon was cut. It all happened AFTER the layers were laid down, those supposed millions upon millions upon millions of years worth, and yet you can't see this obvious fact that makes the whole notion of reading past aeons in them utterly futile. But this is all a matter of SEEING, or interpreting, so you either see it or you don't. Some science.It would be nice if you did find a rabbit in the Precambrian but as I realized here you aren't going to because obviously the Flood, which is the only viable alternative theory, didn't happen to sort things in such a way that a mammal would be found in the Precambrian. Hence like making flying pigs your criterion for falsifying the theory of gravity. MAYBE a rabbit could be found in the Triassic, maybe we should keep looking.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

I was talking about AZPaul, who is a lot sharper than Dr. A.

The point still stands. It is the rare poster here who cannot follow your arguments.Seriously, when we are not having discussions about you, I find that most posters have no trouble making themselves understood. Somehow the property of not having people follow your arguments, such as they are, is just about unique to you.

You and CS responded very weirdly to a simple remark of mine and while I'm sure AZPaul would recognize that fact and could point it out I'm also sure he wouldn't want to be appreciated by me. I tried to leave a while back, I'll try to leave again. Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

As opposed to nonpeculiar sciences such as electromagnetism, where physicists come to your door with pamphlets and ask if they can come in and explain Maxwell's equations to you.Ah well, I guess evolution is just so darn peculiar that scientists won't come round to your house and spoonfeed you information. You may have to look for it yourself. A google search on the term cenozoic fossil gets 615,000 hits, perhaps that would be a good place to start. And again, I would point out that this, if true, would not explain why it's uncontroversial among scientists. It would make the thing completely inexplicable.Watch. This is what you're doing:* Why don't the police arrest me for singing in the shower? Because it's a class A felony.
* Why do nutritionists recommend eating vegetables? Because they are bad for you.
* Why does John always vote Democrat? Because he is a staunch Republican.
* Why do gourmets love chocolate cake? Because it tastes disgusting.
* Why do scientists agree with evolution? Because it is utterly unscientific.These are not explanations, because they do not explain the thing to be explained. If true, they would make it deeply mysterious. They would add to the mystery. When we are told that John is a staunch Republican, then if we believe it we are further away from understanding why he always votes Democrat then we were to begin with. Hey, Faith, remember how you don't know anything about geology? But this is asinine. Imagine someone who ascribes the motion of planets to magic pixies. "The theory of gravity is unfalsifiable" he says. "Not at all," I tell him, "it would be falsified by (for example) seeing hexagonal orbits. "But this is no test at all," he replies, "because obviously the magic pixies, which is the only viable alternative theory, don't happen to push planets in such a way that they have hexagonal orbits."But his fantasies about magic pixies are not germane to whether we can test the theory of gravity.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

Nope.The first fossils of what be can be classified as mammals (with lots of reptilian features) appear in the mid-Triassic. They occur in terrestrial deposits.There's no fixed boundary between mammals and reptiles in the fossils record. We get a record of fossils with reptilian features grading into fossils with mammalian features as we go up in the stratigraphy of the Karoo Sequence.By the way, have you figured out what the Clarens Formation entails yet? Have you studied those biozones? I know you won't find it in creationist literature, but you will find it in the scientific literature. Lets give you a hint; the members of the Clarens Formation straddle the boundary between the Triassic and the Jurassic.Edited by Pressie, : No reason given.

Maybe it's because you don't read any scientific literature. When was the last time you even tried to get hold of the South African Journal of Geology? Do you expect someone to knock on your door every Sunday morning and deliver a copy the South African Journal of Geology for free?Maybe it's because you just read creationist websites and your favourite Holy Books?Edited by Pressie, : No reason given.

So mammals are found in the Triassic, fine, give me a layer where they aren't found that isn't as low as the Precambrian.And I've certainly looked up scientific questions in scientific sources, and I'm talking about FOR THE LAYMAN, not professional journals, and the presentations are all of the sort I've described, not description but interpretation, which is mystification and not science, an abuse of the mind.

Your question doesn't make any sense. Do you mean from an earlier period than the Triassic?I'll try to answer it, though. In the Ordovician we don't find any mammals. The Ordovician is younger than the Precambrian and older than the Triassic.In my country the Ordovician is represented by quite a few formations ( and members of formations, for example the lower members of the Cape Supergroup and the Natal Group with the Durban Member very prominent ). These contain fossils, but no fossils of mammals. The Beit Bridge Kimberlites also are of that age, but obviously Kimberlites are highly unlikely to contain fossils.Did I answer your questions?Of course we can still discuss the members of the Clarens Formation if you're up to it (it straddles the Triassic-Jurassic boundary) .Edited by Pressie, : No reason given.

No, I mean from lower down in the strata than the "Triassic." It is interpretive mystification to discuss layers of rocks in terms of time periods. The actual physical facts have to do with layers of sediments with fossilized dead things in them. Time periods are a fictional overlay. OK, then let's make finding a mammal in the Ordovician the falsifiability test. It's still a bit like flying pigs but better than the Precambrian. I invited you to tell us about this formation, saying I'd really like to hear about it, but you never responded. The invitation still stands.

Or perhaps, as is more likely, Arizona Paul would simply be more polite than I. AZPaul3, by and large, finds your positions just as silly as does everyone else.What kind of science is it that you understand but none of the rest of us who have studied math, physics, geology, archaeology, history, engineering can follow? Is it like those dog whistles that I cannot hear?I noticed that after about 963 people pointing it out, that you finally stopped being wrong about falsification, figured out what a cow meant, and stopped being confused about mammals, only to ask an even sillier question about geological layers. Perhaps a brief Sabbatical might be good to ponder why that kind of thing seems to happen so often to you.Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.

This is where you are going wrong. One needs to examine the specialist scientific literature to be able to understand specialist scientific issues.If I wanted to explore the some aspect of CBT I would read (for example) the journal of Behaviour Research and Therapy. But I would be hard pressed to understand the details if I did not have years of education in the subject.For all their faults specialist journals are where the information is. When I was an undergrad we were told in no uncertain terms that if you really wanted to get good grade we need to to read the research, rather than reading the text books because text books go out of date rather quickly.Journals come out every month. They are the bleeding edge of understanding. When on writes an essay if one can find a brand new paper and cited it appropriately to support or contradict a thesis one would get a better grade than if one had just read the core text.You appear to have not read the core text or any of the journals. How can you opinion be of value?ABE: actually that sound harsher than I intended. It would be the same thing as if I tried to tell you that the there should be a Pope as mediator between man and the god of the bible, without giving the bible more than a brief flick through and not understanding the actual role of Peter and thinking "yeah that's why we should have a Pope".If I said that you you would think I'm crazy.All the best.Edited by Larni, : No reason given.

Yes, just as I pointed out in Message 145. Where have you been?As to the claims in the rest of your message, you know that every one of them has been rebutted in detail dozens of times here, yet you prattle on as if these rebuttals had never been made. Repeating false claims over and over doesn't make them any less false.If your claims are actually true then you must offer evidence that they are true that is convincing to other people. That you personally and creationists in general have been unable to do this (which includes being unable to convince each other since creationist theory is widely varied) should be telling you something, such as that creationists are just people with a mental fixation like those who believe in a flat Earth or geocentrism, who also can't be convinced they're wrong. It's not like creationists are unique.In order to prove creationists are not those type of people you have to come up with some persuasive evidence. And you have to at least realize that the inability to do so strongly implies error, and it should make creationists desperate to come up with actual evidence instead of just making things up that are believable to none but their own.--PercyEdited by Percy, : Grammar.

Nope. Actually lots of Triassic strata outcrop. Nope. Boreholes.Actually, we do have over 60 000 boreholes studying and describing every millimeter of those cores. That's apart form all the geophysics, geochemistry, etc. You can do yourself. All published for everyone else to see and evaluate. You're welcome to do all those tests, yourself. Nope. They're there. You can go and see where those rocks outcrop. You can go and drill. You can go on and describe those cores. Yourself. You can even do the mapping of outcrops, geophysics, drilling holes, everything, yourself! Actually, you need to find a modern mammal in the Ordovician to do that. Actually, a flying pig would falsify the ToE, even if you find a flying pig. now. Sure. Have you ever touched a 'rock' from the Clarens Formation? Which borehole core have you studied?

Um so what mechanism of the flood was responsible for burying things in a way like this. I would get your idea if say for example every large thing was at the bottom and progressively smaller ones to the top. Or even in a reverse order, or all jumbled up. But its not they are layered in a clear order as expected by the theory of evolution.