Discussion on Creation article...

Perhaps in the future you could clearly mark in your posts which of your arguments are straw men that are not deserving of a reply, and which you consider to be genuine arguments which you wish us to debate.Let's see if I've got this right as of now: your claim that there is no bad design in nature is a straw man, and we shouldn't reply to it; your argument about avian lungs isn't and we should.By the way, how can a claim which you've actually made be considered a straw man? Except by the magical power of wishful thinking?Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

Not at all. This is (to me) the core issue for creationists to explain.You can find evidence for practically any position you want to take (say a flat earth at the center of the universe, for example), so the issue is really what evidence against such a position needs to be denied to maintain that position.The "younge earth" is a prime example of a position that requires massive denial of evidence from so many different fields.Enjoy.

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Join the effort to unravel {AIDSHIV} with Team EvC! (click)

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Maybe we (or the Earth generally) is an experiment to see how long it takes to evolve a species that can fix the design flaws, or what novel methods we come up with (surgery, drugs, genetic engineering, who know what else). Or maybe he/she/it is just a major league sadist who is enjoying watching life on earth suffer. I kind of agree but it does mean - to me at least - that all our discussions about good vs. bad design are reduced to nothing more than speculations. Mind you, were they ever anything more than that anyway? Maybe, maybe not. Perhaps Earth is a biological warfare experiment by an alien race who are attempting to produce a weapon against their intergalactic enemy - a species with luxuriant fur resembling dog hair. In this case the mites responsible for mange would be an example of good design Like I say, without knowing the desired outcome we have no valid criteria for judging whether a design is good or bad.

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Oops! Wrong Planet

If an intelligent designer designed humans, then why do we have:crossover air and food pipes that make us very prone to chokingvery vulnerable, relatively weak knee joints that are quite easily damagedspines that are weak and very easily damaged simply by twisting the wrong waya sharp ridge on the inside of our skulls that causes severe brain trauma from not-that-hard of a blow to the heada blind spot in our visual fielda propensity to develop hernias?

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And, a funny porn movie is still a porn movie and your statement that "actually it is a comedy" is proof that you were demeaning.

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I didn't know that Alan Alda did porn.

I actually started a thread where BobAliceEve could argue this point but they never showed up (personally I think the four Oscar nominations scared them off ).By the way - Alan Alda isn't in it according to IMDB

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Oops! Wrong Planet

PZ Myers had a post on this subject today.Page not found | ScienceBlogs

Sorry folks, a big new garden and yard has sucked me in. I have a couple projects to finish up (before the rain starts for 10 months) followed by a short vacation. I would guess early September.The rating by the movie industry of R and the review's point that it is about sexual relationships makes it porn (designed to be sexually stimulating according to the dictionary).Oscars? Wow, I really missed that; I guess by not showing up!!Very best regards,
BAE

Excellent. Thanks for the link Clark. Always nice to realize I'm not just talking out my fundament... Now if only Mr. Matrix would return. Think we scared him away?

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The rating by the movie industry of R and the review's point that it is about sexual relationships makes it porn

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Oh, for goodness sake, it is not porn.By your definition, this is porn: and this: Edited by AdminJar, : OffTopic reminder

Have you ever heard of Chrysopelea? They are also called flying snakes. They glide through the air by making their bodies flat. They have no avian lungs, no perfectly designed feathers, no wings. In fact, they have no limbs at all. They're snakes, remember?And yet they fly. Well, sort of. They don't nearly fly as well as birds do, and compared to a humming bird, I guess you could say they fly only slightly better than a brick. Yet, by your logic, they should not exist.Well, they do and they thrive. They falsify your theory that flight must be perfect or else it won't work at all.Edited by Parasomnium, : No reason given.

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"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science." - Charles Darwin.

Yet when I asked Richard Lewontin who mentioned the flat nature of sea snake tails in the "Dialectical Biologist" how it got it's spots he only had had the thought (dynamically) about how fish got their tails. He had not considered snake flatening in general (which is something any one who looks at corn snakes vs blue racers for instance would have already noticed) NOR tried to make a guess about possible relations to the formation of snake rattles which also "flatten" the tail end rather than simply in th emiddle.

Corn snakes? You mean, put them in a bowl, add milk, and munch away? Oh wait...Anyway, snakes trigger you, don't they? But what's your point in relation to the topic?

There is some more sophisticated system"" of form-making in reptiles that is not being considered by evolutonists in general and even by herpetologists in particular. I thought that this formation of gradable information would be available to a dissector of the colubridae should formerly thought non adaptive characters, such as scale location topological junctions be, be cooridinated with muscle group divisions but even the herpetologist who started one of the two only internationall all herpetological associations could not strech his imagination this far. Lewontin had used this as an example where his coupled differntial equations might apply.Subsequently all that occurred was that niche construction may apply there. The shape of this contribution is far from a correct human design and I suspect that perfect Gibbs thermo evalutations of the continuum that reproduction of these forms produces is too coincident for the evos in general to have given the snakes the correct yard of a measure.Instead Gould has insisted (see Wose dissusion and temporal extant of the current discussion is an extent to the mid 60s not the late 90s that is acutally operative in today's evc terms)

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The Structure of Evolutionary Theory SJ GOULD Harvard Press

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The fact that I am off the middle does not mean that the shift is the bad move Gould implies. Simple language would belie otherwise but readers are unaware oftentimes.
see also
evc link
Perfectness as arithmetically seperable occurs where an Gibbs/Gladyshev minimization is tolerated within the adaptive hardening of a shifting balance during biological form-making and translation in space. This appears to have been the reason that evolutionists have in post-modern times challengend creationists to accept organic designs that ARE malformations inherently.Edited by Brad McFall, : op.cit.

Hi, Brad. One subject I`ve never heard resolved is the belief of camouflage, especially in a marine environment. Marine biologists speak of the development of spots, stripes, change of colour, appendages, etc. as an survival mechanism to blend in with their surroundings. And they do. Yet we have many marine species, usually sedentary or reef-dwellers, that are extremely noticeable due to patterning or clash of colours. Sort of goes against the idea of hiding from predators. Any thoughts?