Which came first: the young earth, or the inerrant scripture?

Back to the old head in the hole arguement.It's useless to debate this with Tal. He's one of those guys we were talking about in the 1-10 string.He says, "species 1 never becomes species 10."
We say, "we'll, no, not in one jump. We have evidence of 3, 5, 7 and 8."
He says, "oh, yeah, well where's number 2?"
we say, "Wow, we just found number 2 in a fossil bed in China."
he says, "Yeah, well, where's 1.5? Where's 1.25? Where's 1.125? I won't be happy until you show me fossils of every single offspring all the way down the line."You aren't going to convince his type with fact or with science. They believe what they believe because they lack education. The lightswitch works through magic. The computer works through magic. Animals came to earth by magic. Lightning and thunder are magic. It's a really easy way to define the world.

He has written sci-fi, yes. Dr. Michael Crichton has also written sci-fi. He's still a doctor.

First off, I remember seeing a documentary where chemist created primordial conditions in a beaker, hit it with electricity and came out with amino acids - the building blocks of life. I'll try to find the name of the doc, but it was a while ago. Well, if you want to see something, you've gotta go look for it. And since we're talking about a process that takes place over time, we need to look at things that reproduce very quickly so that we can actually see the change take place in the very short time we are here.Let's look at viruses, the are living, they reproduce very quickly.Seems to me every time I open the paper, there's a new strain of flu coming out of Hong Kong. Since the new strain of flu doesn't reproduce with the old strain of flu, it can be said to be a different "species" of flu.How many strains of AIDS is there now?Or, let's look at bacteria. I personally, while working for Pfizer, exposed bacteria to chemicals designed to cause mutation. Most of the bacteria died as a result, and of the survivors, some were very different. They represented a related organism, not the same species.Your suggestion that evolution doesn't happen because you haven't seen it in the blink of an eye that you've been looking is pretty silly.Also, you're mixed up about classification. Just because we have a system of classification doesn't mean that everything was made to fit the system. The system is made to fit what we see. As we discover new things, we CHANGE the system to include them.A few years back a parasite was discovered living in the mouths of lobsters. The parasite was so radically different than anything else, it got it's own phyla.Here's an article.
http://dml.cmnh.org/1995Dec/msg00722.html

I love this! It's so precious. "I don't believe in your chemical beginnings of life. There's no rational basis for it. Instead, I believe it was started by magic."

I'm sorry, I've been misunderstanding Tal all this time.When he said he was a Creationist, I assumed he meant Biblical creation. But, since he considers things like lightning to me magical, I see that he's a Zeus Creationist. (Titan-ist?)Tal, lightning isn't "magic". And the bunny was in the hat to begin with.

This is clearly and demonstratably incorrect.Look at Piltdown Man, a hoax/forgery. It was believed (for racist/eurocentric reasons) for a long time. Eventually, as the data collected by scientists studying in Africa stacked higher and higher against Piltdown, the forgery was exposed.Lamarkian Evolution, namely that the giraffe has a long neck because it stretches more and more each generation, has been likewise disproven and discarded.There are debates raging within evolutionary studies about the rates at which change happens. (Stair step evolution vs slope)Science, all science, is constantly moving forward, correcting falsehoods, seeking better data.Your point that mathematics has less debate within it than biology is an apples and oranges non-starter. That's like saying that the alphabeta is in alphabetical order and therefore better than chemistry. Math is a construct. Biology tries to explain what we observe around us.

I would suggest this has more to do with math's relationship to engineering.Besides, which building it's located doesn't make much difference. When I was in college the Anthro dept was under the library and the Gym and Art dept shared a building.As for the Library of Congress, I think they are approaching math and science from a layman's perspective.If you ask a man on the street, is math a science, they'd probably say yes. This is because math seems more "science-like" than, say, French.But it doesn't mean that the layman is correct. If you asked them if coral was a rock, they'd probably say yes to that as well.

Let me ask you this Arach, is English science?I don't think it is. I think it useful for describing what I am observing so that others can understand it. I think if you tried to have science without any language, we'd be back at the hit two rocks together stage.Math is like language, you could even argue that math is a language. It's used to describe something.It happens to be a very useful language in that it can describe things very accurately, even if you don't know what they are to begin with.

Huh?