Why is it VERSUS?

Hmmm... Your fucking ego, Mike... going to get you into trouble one of these days... Yawn indeed...Edited by cavediver, : No reason given.

But it is factual, contra your objections. Common ancestry is not contentious, also the opposite of what you claim. Common ancestry is as evidenced as random mutations and natural selection. The only way that you try and counter this is to make up a story about magical poofing and supernatural deities. You are evoking Leprechauns to explain how your client's fingerprints ended up at the crime scene. This entire argument is an argument from ignorance, the very opposite of how science is done. The very opposite of how ERV's evidence common ancestry. The entire argument comes down to "evolution can't explain it, therefore God". You claim that "organisms are extraordinary beyond belief" and then immediately explain it through your religious beliefs. Surely you can see how frustrating this can be. And yet out of this ignorance you felt justified in claiming that common ancestry was not factual. As I have shown, it is factual.

You might want to rethink that one. You are conflating fact and factual. Look at the definitions some time.

You've blown now like a balloon, all floppy and useless.It is WORSE if you ARE a scientist, because you conflate fact or factual with a claim.You can switch from fact to factual if you want, but all FALSE theories are factual, in that they deal with facts and come to conclusions.There is the general claim that we all came from a common ancestry, through M+NS. That is the main ToE.There is the specific claim that ERVs show the fingerprint of the ToE.It follows, as I have conceded several times, that this should be so I F the GENERAL claim is true.You see, first you have to prove that time, natural selection and sampling errors, actually GIVE you these designs.The ERVs can help you point to evolution, but as a scientist, you should know not to try and put the ToE as fact.We can use the term factual if you want, because all theories of science are factual in that they deal with facts and come to conclusions. But because of this one evidence to favour a common descent, this does not mean evolution is a fact or true, ON THE WHOLE.Here is my example;I claim that pots and pans were washed not by a dishwasher but by hand.Here is my specific claim;I aim to show that the scour marks on the pots and pans indicate hand-washing, a very strong fingerprint for this.This is a strong indication, perhaps, that points to the general theory.However, if infact nobody in the house has the power to wash dishes, and they are the only people in existence, then as you can see, it is not a fact that they washed the dishes by hand.You see, first the general claim must be shown to be true. You can't just assume it's truth.This is why your theory works through confirmation evidence, and tentatively proceeds on tiptoes. For only operational science has the power of facts, in that I can show that without air something will die, experimentally.If you want to prove the general claim of the ToE, as fact, you have to show a fruit fly that can produce a new morphology in nature, or a bacteria evolve into something else. You should easily be able to just by stressing the niche of the bacteria, because they reproduce so fast that you should see new phyla within 20 years. All you have to do is use pressurized selection. Edited by mike the wiz, : No reason given.

mikey-hater.Yaya. baba..

I feel this is going nowhere. At this stage angers and frustration, although they don't come from me and I am able to stay polite, it is pointless to continue to frustrate my fellow-debaters. This is not my intention, as I cannot help my irrefutable words irrefutability that so vex them.Bye for now EvCers. Mikey shall return in mikey bond, and the woman with the golden rump.

Are you getting a sense why it is "VERSUS"?

Mike, your a first-year know-it-all undergrad trying to show off to a hall full of professors. We don't hate you. We're just waiting for you to grow up a bit.

...because of teenage angst!Which has brought us so many amusing antics:-the EvC debate
-screwed up drivethrough orders
-Final Fantasy 7 and up

I guess you never heard of a factual claim?"Factual claims assert that a condition has, does, or will exist. These claim are called factual claims since they are supported (are proven) by factual, verifiable information such as statistics, specific examples, and personal testimony (also called anecdotes). "
http://papyr.com/hypertextbooks/comp2/factual.htm Those are two separate issues. Another scientist, Stephen Jay Gould, puts it this way:"Well evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape-like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
Top Cash Earning Games in India 2022 | Best Online Games to earn real moneyThe fact of common ancestry is still be true even if Darwinian evolution is shown to be false.Or we can go to yet another of my well credentialed peers, Dr. Douglas Futuyma:"Any statement in science, then, should be understood as a HYPOTHESISa statement of what might be true. Some hypotheses are poorly supported. Others, such as the hypothesis that the earth revolves around the sun, or that DNA is the genetic material, are so well supported that we consider them to be facts. It is a mistake to think of a fact as something that we absolutely know, with complete certainty, to be true, for we do not know this of anything. (According to some philosophers, we cannot even be certain that anything exists, including ourselves; how could we prove that the world is not a self-consistent dream in the mind of God?) Rather, a fact is a hypothesis that is so firmly supported by evidence that we assume it is true, and act as if it were true."
Top Cash Earning Games in India 2022 | Best Online Games to earn real moneyInstead of playing the Descartian doubt game we can proceed from extreme confidence to fact. That is what scientists do. We don't spend our time verifying ideas that have decades of solid science to back them up. Common ancestry between humans and other apes is one of those facts. It is so well evidence and supported that it is considered to be fact within biology. If we were comparing this to the current debate you would claim that the dishes were cleaned by a supernatural deity because you just can't see how a machine could do the job. But then you would claim that there is an invisible person for which there is no evidence who cleaned the dishes using an unknown method at an unknown time in an unknown place. This is what you claim competes with evolution as a better explanation. And now the self proclaimed tyro proceeds to tell all scientists that real science is broken down into operational science and historical science. Another ploy that creates friction.Science is science. Period. Actually, I think I claimed that common ancestry was fact, not ToE. Besides, chihuahuas have a new morphology that no previous dog had so that should fulfill your criteria. Also, evolution doesn't cause species to evolve into something else. We are still apes, as were our ancestors. We are still mammals, still vertebrates, and still eukaryotes, as were our ancestors. And now we can add taxonomy to the things you don't understand. Evolution can no more produce new phyla than evolution can produce new grandparents. Increases in diversity increase the diversity of the phyla. They don't produce new phyla.

I have often found that the ideas worth understanding are the ideas that are the most frustrating. Food for thought.

If by that you mean that you should like me to stop pointing out your mistakes, I really don't see why I should.But I would once again suggest that these are mistakes that would be more appropriately made on another thread, one to which they bear a hint of a smidgen of an iota of relevance to the topic.

Reminds me of a graduate computer science class when the professor, a mathematician (this class was highly theoretical and mathematical), told an engineer joke to illustrate inductive reasoning (we have Pollocks and blondes, mathematicians have engineers). An engineer once proved through induction that all odd numbers are prime. He started with 1 and tested each odd number in succession up to 13 and found them all to be prime, so by induction all odd numbers are prime. Well, of course 9 wasn't prime, but in a sample this size you would expect statistically for one point to be off, so we can safely throw that single out-lier away.Since I was at the time already familiar with such inter-disciplinary jibes (eg, engineers viewing scientists with disdain, an attitude I have frequently seen from creationist "scientists", who themselves are more commonly engineers), I got the joke immediately, despite the professor's very deadpan delivery. Then I looked at my fellow students. The Asian students didn't know it was a joke and were furiously writing it all down in their notes. And the non-Asian students were sitting there very confused and trying to figure out whether they should write it down.The key, though, is in what you said. That we need to continue to test our conclusions. Had that engineer done so, he would have realized that his conclusions were wrong.And that is what scientists do: they continue to test their conclusions. Perhaps not individually, but certainly as a community. As soon as somebody publishes his results and conclusions, several other scientists around the world try to replicate his results. We saw that happening with the cold-fusion debacle: verifiers were so eager to get started that rather than wait for the official publication they were receiving FAX'd copies in the middle of the night and getting started then. That is how science operates and that is how the community rolls. It also helps that one sure way to make a name for yourself is to prove the other guy wrong, especially if he's a big name himself.Compare that with the creationist community. Do they test their conclusions? Do they have any reason at all to test their conclusions? Of course not! They continue to disseminate widely totally false and bogus claims and arguments that were disproven conclusively twenty and thirty years ago! If a scientist is caught falsifying his results or anything, then the scientific community takes action and his scientific career is over. If a creationist is caught doing the same thing, does the creationist community take any kind of corrective action against him? No, it doesn't. Not only is he not reprimanded for his misdeeds and dishonesty, but if his claims sound convincing, then the community rewards him by using his demonstrably false claims.Here is what I think is why we see these differences. The goal of science is to learn what we can about the universe. We want to discover new things. In order to do our research, we depend on the research that has been done by others. Because our own research depends on the research done by others, if that previous research was wrong or falsified, then that would cause our own research to fail. So as scientists, we have a very strong vested interest in ensuring that the research that we depend on has been done properly and is valid. That is why scientists test each other's results and conclusions and experiments. That is why is it so necessary for scientists to present their research in such a manner so as to enable other scientists to repeat their experiments and to verify that they get the same results (Dawn, are you listening?)In the creationist community, things are entirely different. They don't want to learn anything new; instead they only want to support their presupposed conclusions and to eliminate anything that might contradict those conclusions, including and most especially evolution. The goal, first and foremost from the 1920's to the present, is to kill evolution. In support of that goal, the creationist community seeks to deceive the public into supporting its political agenda. Both those efforts depend on convincing-sounding claims and arguments. Unlike in science, it does not matter one bit whether any of those claims and arguments are the least bit true, but only that they sound convincing. If truth doesn't matter, then testing does not matter.That, to me, is the main difference between how science operates and how creationism rolls.And, Andrew, the reason for the VERSUS is that the creationists have their goal in mind, which will also destroy science education. And we don't want them to succeed.

Well so much for mathematics, physics, chaos theory, blood-splatter analysis and so on.It seems as if he’s saying one accident invalidates all which follows, but wouldn’t the alternative be predestination which would mean that God is a tyrant.

Andrew, the thing is that this is not a recent issue. While the creationist side keeps recruiting new members ( la PT Barnum's "a sucker born every minute"), the opposition (in favor of truth) has been around possibly as long as 1980. From that period of time, we have the 1981 Arkansas "balanced treatment" law and a virtually identical law passed in Louisiana shortly thereafter and which made it up to the US Supreme Court where "creation science" was legally recognized as being religious in nature -- and at which time the creationist community switched to using "intelligent design" to hide its intentions. The reason why both of those laws were so similar is because they were both based on a model law drafted by respiratory therapist Paul Ellwanger. From the federal case regarding that Arkansas law, we have this piece of evidence from Ellwanger which reveals his motives (from a letter submitted as evidence in the federal court case that overturned the Arkansas law as being religious):

quote:

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... -- the idea of killing evolution instead of playing these debating games that we've been playing for nigh over a decade already.

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The fight actually goes back to the 1920's, when a strong anti-evolution movement developed in the US. In the 1920's, they succeeded in having anti-evolution laws passed in four states which would punish any teacher who taught anything about evolution with removal from the teaching profession for life -- the infamous "monkey laws". In Tennessee, the ACLU convinced a Physical Education teacher (gym and sports, whatever they're called in the UK) to challenge that state's "monkey law" by teaching evolution. John Scopes did so and was duly arrested and tried and convicted. The ACLU wanted the case to work its way up to the US Supreme Court, but it was overturned at the State Appeal level because of a technicality (the judge had levied the fine instead of the court bailiff). For the next four decades, evolution was effectively banned from high school education, though not from the colleges and universities. Then in the wake of Sputnik at the end of the 1950's, the USA realized that it had fallen behind in science education, so there was a broad move to "close the gap" (those who have watched Stanley Kubrick's "Doctor Strangelove" should be familiar with that Cold War rhetoric).For decades, high school biology textbooks had been written not by biologists, but rather by professional textbook writers who knew to leave evolution out. But there was one high school textbook, the BSCS series, which was instead written by biologists who knew that evolution is a vital part of biology * and so they included evolution. Susan Epperson was a high school biology teacher in Arkansas. Her school required her to use the BSCS biology textbook, which used evolution. Arkansas' "monkey law" threatened her with life-time expulsion from the teaching profession should she ever even mention evolution in the classroom, but if she were to refuse to use the required textbook then she would be fired. Caught in an impossible position, she had no choice but to file suit against the State of Arkansas. This time, it made it all the way up to the US Supreme Court, which struck down the Arkansas "monkey law" as being religious and had the effect of striking down all the other "monkey laws."Now suddenly the anti-evolutionists could no longer use their religion as a reason for having evolution barred from the classroom. So they created "creation science" in order to deceptively claim that they had "scientific reasons to oppose evolution". When that failed, they sought to have their "alternative" "creation science" taught in the public schools along with evolution. When that would fail, they would propose a "compromise" of not asking to have "creation science" taught if the schools would not teach evolution -- which of course is no compromise, but rather the creationists getting what they were after in the first place.While "creation science" has expanded out into other uses that have practically taken on lives of their own, its goal, first and foremost, remains the same, to kill evolution and to bar its teaching.{FOOTNOTE *:
Theodosius Dobzhansky, "Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution",
American Biology Teacher 35:125-129 (March 1973), p. 129:

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Seen in the light of evolution, biology is, perhaps, intellectually the most satisfying and inspiring science. Without that light, it becomes a pile of sundry facts -- some of them interesting or curious, but making no meaningful picture as a whole.

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A footnote to this is a public presentation by Dr. Eugenie Scott of the National Center for Science Education (NNCSE) that I had personally witnessed. At the time she described, she taught a physical anthropology class. At the university she taught at, the biology department didn't usually teach evolution (as, surprisingly, many university biology departments don't), but her physical anthropology classes most certainly did. In order to fulfill their General Education graduation requirements several biology majors would enroll in her Physical Anthropology class for an "easy A" (those poor fools!, Dr. Scott remarked) Hey, students, as you're sitting in your classes, your professors are observing you! Dr. Scott would give her lectures and, over the semestre, she would see that "Ah Ha!!!" light turn on in her biology majors -- "Ah hah!!! So that's why .... !!!!!"
} Edited by dwise1, : Clean-up the morning after