Summations Only

What a pile of shite.Evolution is a branch of biology. It's a scientific area of study.There are millions of Christians that happily accept both the bible and evolution. If evolution=atheism then there are millions of atheistic Christians.

The differences between a bunch of designed vehicles and a nested hierarchy of vehicles is in the lineage of traits.When new features are shared across the board rather than only in one lineage, that breaks the nested hierarchy.Example: rear window wipers. Introduce by Volvo (1969 Volvo IIRC), now there is no SUV from any company that doesn't have them.Not a nested trait.Tires from same company on different makes and models vehicles.Not a nested trait.Injection carburetors from the same company on different makes and models vehicles.Not a nested trait.BUT ... this is what evidence of design looks like.EnjoyEdited by RAZD, : .

Sort of actually being self-replicating?It doesn't need to be "likely to occur naturally" ... it just needs to be possible to occur naturally.Moving on:

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(Self-Replicating Molecules - Life's Building Blocks (Part II) references continued):

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(2) - Self-Reproducing Molecules, Reported by MIT Researchers, 09 May 1990 By Eugene F. Mallove

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In work recently reported in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, Professor Rebek and his coworkers, Tjama Tjivikua, a graduate student from Namibia, and Pablo Ballester, a visiting scientist from the University of Palma in Mallorca, Spain, described the creation of an extraordinary self-replicating molecular system.
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Amazingly, the laboratory-made molecule that Professor Rebek and his colleagues have created can reproduce itself without the "outside" assistance of enzymes. As such, and because of its specific constitution, the molecule embodies some of the "template" qualities of a nucleic acid, and some of the structural qualities of a protein
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Technically, the self-replicating compound made by the MIT group is called an amino adenosine triacid ester (AATE). This molecule was initially formed by reacting two other molecules.

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The AATE replicates by attracting to one of its ends anester molecule, and to its other end an amino adenosine molecule. These molecules react to form another AATE. The "parent" and "child" AATE molecules then break apart and can go on to build still more AATE molecules.

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Pretty straight forward. This appears to be the original article.Enjoy

Except that Michael Ruse objects to being quote-mined like this. In Is Darwinism a Religion he states:

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I think this paragraph, the introduction to a book review (for which I was never paid) in a Canadian newspaper some 10 or so years ago, has received more attention and more repetition (especially on the Internet) than anything else I have ever written...No matter that I qualified it then and have qualified it before and ever since. Ruse recants! Evolution is a religion! Read all about it! Or more accurately, don’t read all about it, because then you might find that that is not quite all that I had to say.
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So the answer to the question Is Darwinism a religion? is varied, interesting and insightful. But I bet a million dollars that for the next 10 years it will be the first paragraph and only the first paragraph of this piece that will be quoted and requoted by those who are more interested in using my words for their own ends rather than for understanding what I am really trying to say.

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The full book review from which you took your quote can be found here: HOW EVOLUTION BECAME A RELIGION - Creationists correct?: Darwinians wrongly mix science with morality, politics. He's not saying what you think he's saying.--Percy

A nested hierarchy is a special and very unusual arrangement of items.

• All items must be placed in a labeled container.
• No two containers may share the same label.
• Containers may be placed inside containers.
• All items in any container must have the property named by that container and all containers containing that container.
• All items that have the property named by a by a container must appear n that container and no other,

So the difference is that no significant number of vehicles or any man-made objects can be arranged in a nested hierarchy. Many have tried, none have succeeded. Whenever anyone does produce a nested hierarchy of man-made objects it's trivial to produce an example that breaks the nesting.Maybe I can post Michael Denton's allegedly nested hierarchy of vehicles to see if you can figure out where it fails. There's lots of possibilities.Now, the fact that life can be arranged in a nested hierarchy of literally hundreds of millions of items is incredibly unusual in the universe of all possibilities of relationships or lack thereof. It demands explanation. Further, there are two independent ways of producing a nested hierarchy of life and they agree almost exactly.

It is also entirely possible that a designer would not create species so that they fall into a nested hierarchy. Therefore, any pattern of shared features is as likely as another which means that the claims of a common designer does not predict a nested hierarchy. If a single 911 shares and engine with a 969 while two 911s have different engines, this violates a nested hierarchy. If a Cayman and 914 have the same tire while two Caymans have different tires, then that is a violation of a nested hierarchy. I could give many examples, if you like.

Science isn't a religion, so it doesn't work through scriptures and proclamations. You need to present evidence.

Atheism is the lack of belief in deities, so by definition atheism can't have a theology. And you still can't address the evidence.

Do you have any idea what the difference is? Do you even know what an atheist is? Or what an agnostic is? Any idea at all?Your determined avoidance of divulging what your definitions are and of how you determine whether a person or organization is "atheistic" is a very strong indicator that this is yet another topic about which you are completely clueless.

Here's a fun quote-mining fact: Your objection to that piece of quote-mining would be the same as our objections to the quote-mining done by your creationist handlers. They are lying to you!

You can no more explain "why" God did something than science can. "How" is certainly a step above no explanation at all.

It doesn't say anything about Satan speaking to Judas, but this is way too off topic.

{intonation=sarcasm}Well, that's a detailed citation!{/intonation} "an essay"? What, you read it and you don't even know what the title was? Nor what page in that book it was lifted from? At least you mentioned the book's name, so I guess we should thankful for small miracles. But if you had read it, then why didn't you know those things?Oh, yeah, you didn't read it. Like Slusher and Morris with that NASA document, you have never ever even seen the source that you claim. And you wonder why we are so disgusted with creationist dishonesty.Well, I have seen that book and I had read that essay. In fact, it's sitting on the desk here in front of me. There really is no substitute for going back to the actual original source. You should try it some time. I have found that it is the best first step you can take in refuting a creationist claim.In the following, missing text will be in bold and changed text in yellow -- there are some changes which are clearly typographical, so I refrained from marking those.Sage advice to anyone reading a creationist quote: always check to find out what they are hiding in those ellipses (the "..."). Of course, there are some valid uses for ellipses, but creationist use is commonly to leave out necessary context so that they can change the meaning in order to misrepresent the source. One classic example of this was a single-sentence quote with an ellipsis in the middle. What was the creationist hiding in that ellipsis? Only several pages, almost all of his essay, such that the first half of the quote was from the first page and the second, unrelated half was from the last or penultimate page, such that he ended up splicing together two sentence fragments that had nearly nothing to do with each other in order to create a new sentence that said something the quoted scientist was not saying.Part of the context from which that had been lifted is that it is in a list of responses to the creationist arguments which Raup had just spent ten pages presenting and discussing. In keeping with restoring that lost context, I will include the other three items in that list and their concluding paragraphs. And keep in mind that I had to type all of that straight from the source. "The Geological and Paleontological Arguments of Creationism", David M. Raup, pp 147-162, Scientists Confront Creationism, edited by Laurie R. Godfrey, 1983 -- quote taken from page 157, buried ten pages into the essay, missing text (in bold in order to identify it, with ) taken from pages 152 to 158:

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The Rocks and Fossils Say Yes!

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In this section I will respond to the four main arguments of the scientific creationists presented earlier in this essay.
1. Catastrophism. The catastophism argument is a straw man. ...
{concluding paragraph}The question then is not whether catastrophes occurred (including large floods) but whether they were relatively few in number, with one large flood dominating geologic history. Assuming that our geologic time scale is reasonably accurate, geologists and paleontologists have identified many thousand separate catastrophic events, which means that any scenario based on catastrophism must include a very much larger number of small and large catastrophes than is allowed by the creationist model. Therefore, the general argument concerning catastrophism is a nonargument. Creationists claim that geology says that there should be no catastrophes. Creationists find some catastrophes and geologists find many -- far more than are suggested by the creationist model. I suspect that the problem results from a basic misunderstanding of geology as it is now practiced. The misunderstanding has been caused in part by the geologists themselves: the ninteenth-century idea of uniformitarianism and gradualism still exists in popular treatments of geology, in some museum exhibits, and in lower level textbooks. It is even still taught in secondary school classrooms, and one can hardly blame creationists for having the idea that the conventional wisdom in geology is still a noncatastrophic one.

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2. Relative time scales. ...
{concluding paragraph}An interesting irony in this whole business is that the creationists accept as fact the mistaken notion that the geologic record shows a progression from simple to complex organisms. Faced with the problem of reconciling this presumed sequence with rapid deposition by the Flood, the creationists develop painful explanations of the sequence: large mammals floated to the surface of the Flood sea, complex (and therefore more mobile and intelligent) animals were able to escape to higher ground, and so on. The creationists have fit essentially false information into their model -- something that would have been quite unnecessary had they read the geologic literature more carefully.

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3. Absolute dating. ...
{concluding paragraph} The most significant finding of radiometric dating, of course, is that the earth is extremely old, perhaps 4.5 billion years old, and that life on earth is almost as old. This is in direct conflict with the ten thousand-year-old earth of scientific creationism. Although there could be some error in radiometric dating (and probably is), it is inconceivable, to me at least, that the error could be anything approaching the difference between billions of years and thousands of years.

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4. Darwinian predictions. Darwin predicted that the fossil record should show a reasonably smooth continuum of ancestor-descendant pairs with a satisfactory number of intermediates between major groups. Darwin even went so far as to say that if this were not found in the fossil record, his general theory of evolution would be in serious jeopardy. Such smooth transitions were not found in Darwin's time, and he explained this in part on the basis of an incomplete geologic record and in part on the lack of study of that record. We are now more than a hundred years after Darwin and the situation is little changed. Since Darwin a tremendous expansion of paleontological knowledge has taken place, and we know much more about the fossil record than was known in his time, but the basic situation is not much different. We actually may have fewer examples of smooth transition than we had in Darwin's time because some of the old examples have turned out to be invalid when studied in more detail. To be sure, some new intermediate or transitional forms have been found, particularly among land vertebrates. But if Darwin were writing today, he would still have to cite a disturbing lack of missing links or transitional forms between the major groups of organisms.
How does the evolutionist explain the lack of intermediates? I see three principal areas of explanation, all of which probably operate to some degree. The first of these is a simple artifact of our taxonomic system of classification. The practicing paleontologist is obliged to place any newly found fossil in the Linnean system of taxonomy. Thus, if one finds a birdlike reptile or a reptilelike bird (such as Archaeopteryx), there is no procedure in the taxonomic system for labeling and classifying this as an intermediate between the two classes Aves and Reptilia. Rather, the practicing paleontologist must decide to place his fossil in one category or the other. The impossibility of officially recognizing transitional forms produces an artificial dichotomy between biologic groups. It is conventional to classify Archaeopteryx as a bird. I have no doubt, however, that if it were permissible under the rules of taxonomy to put Archaeopteryx in some sort of category intermediate between birds and reptiles that we would indeed do that. Thus, because of the nature of classification, there appear to be many fewer intermediates than probably exist.
In this context, it should be noted that creationists occasionally make the argument that the Darwinian model should predict a complete absence of distinct kinds of organisms.

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If all organisms have actually dscended by evolution from common ancestors, it seems inexplicable that there should be any distinct categories of organisms at all. One would certainly expect that nature would instead exhibit a continual series of organisms, with each grading into the other so imperceptibly that any kind of classification system would be impossible.
{Boardman, Koontz, Morris 1973, p. 68}

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This, unfortunately, shows a lack of understanding of the separation of genetic systems through reproductive isolation. There is little or no gene flow between species because they do not normally interbreed. Thus each species is able to evolve on a course independent of all others, and there is no opportunity for blending once speciation has taken place. Given time, and perhaps subsequent speciation events, organisms become distinct. By the same reasoning, major groups such as molluscs and arthropods become increasingly distinct and separated by anatomical gaps. Thus, the presence of distinct kinds of organisms (especially when viewed at an instant in time) is a reasonable prediction of the evolutionary model. Because the creationist model also predicts distinct kinds (Gish 1978), their mere presence cannot be a basis for argument between the two viewpoints. The only argument is whether the historical record of fossils should show more transitions between the distinct kinds than it does.
A second line of explanation for the underrepresentation of intermediates is the same one that Darwin used, namely that the fossil record is incomplete. We have as fossils a tiny fraction of the species that have existed. There are many ways of documenting this, but one is simply to look at the comparative numbers of extinct and living species. There are something like 2 million species known to be living today. We know that the average duration of a species is short relative to the total span of geologic time. Therefore, there must have been turnover in the species composition of the earth many times since the beginning of the fossil record. If we had even reasonably good fossil preservation, the number of known fossil species should thus be some large multiple of the number of species living today. Yet only about an quarter of a million fossil species have been found. This can only lead to the conclusion that the odds against fossilization are so high that we are seeing just a tiny fragment of past life. Also, along the general idea of catastrophism, the fossils that we do see depend largely upon occasional or unusual physical and biological events, and therefore the record is not a uniform or random sampling of life of the past. Under these circumstances, finding transitional forms (or any other particular form) is unlikely, and it is thus not surprising that our record appears to be quite uneven and jerky. In addition, most major groups of organisms originated quite early in the geological record, in that part of it that is especially poorly documented and where intermediate forms would be even less likely to be found. In this context, it is not surprising that our best intermediate or transitional forms are among land vertebrates, which evolved rather late in geologic time.
A third general explanation for the relative lack of intermediates is that transitional forms constitute very short intervals of geologic time if, as many evolutionary theorists now believe, the change from one major type to another occurs rather rapidly (the punctuated equilibrium model of Eldredge and Gould 1972). This simply lessens the probability of finding intermediates.
With these considerations in mind, one must argue that the fossil record is compatible with the predictions of evolutionary theory.

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REFERENCES CITED

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Boardman, William, Koontz, Robert F., and Morris, Henry. 1973. Science and creation. San Diego: Creation-Science Research Center.

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Eldredge, Niles and Gould, Stephen J. 1972. Punctuated equilibria: an alternaitve to phyletic gradualism. In Models in paleobiology, ed. T.J.M. Schopf, pp 82-115. San Francisco: Freeman, Cooper and Co.

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Gish, Duane T. 1978 Evolution? The fossils say no! San Diego: Creation-Life Pub.

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So then David Raup was not saying what you were trying to claim. You posted a lie. Indeed, over the years we see creationists posting such lies so frequently as to be described as "constantly". It very quickly gets to the point that the moment a creationist makes any kind of statement, the safest course of action is to assume that it's just yet another creationist lie. Sorry, but that's what creationists have taught us all too well.Also, I could not help but notice a number of places where the quoted text had changed. Those copy and transmission errors tell me that the version that you picked up from -- since everybody knows that you never read the original, please tell us what your actual creationist source is -- is a copy in a chain of copies that has been getting passed around the creationist community for who knows how long. It's like those email hoaxes and urban legends that have been getting passed along for decades, accumulating superficial changes and even getting rewritten for their time.An example of the last was the urban legend of Nixon going out for a swim in the ocean there in San Clemente ("Western White House") and nearly drowning but was saved by a teenager. Grateful, he offered the boy a reward, but the only reward the boy wanted was that he not tell his father, who would be furious that he had saved Nixon. The same story had also been told of other past presidents, such as FDR, as well as of foreign dictators, such as Hitler, and I wouldn't doubt that it had surfaced again since Nixon.The same false story passed around as anonymously as true, somethings redressed to make it appear more recent. That also describes the majority of creationist claims, especially the young-earth claims. Ever hear the one about the NASA computer that discovered Joshua's "Lost Day"? Case in point.So, bottom line: Why does your religion have to depend almost completely on lies?

You had 2 chances to give your best example. That's it.

In the real world you address all the evidence.