Evolution is not science

No, this simple statement is understood by all scientists who accept evolution.The evidence for evolution consists entirely of observations which can be repeated as often as you like. You made that up.Ever heard of archaeology? Astronomy? Paelentology? Textual criticism? Dendrochronolgy? Paeleolinguistics? Geology? Forensic science? Evolution?Forensic science is a good case. Do you deny that scientists can use fingerprinting, DNA, fibre analysis, ballistics and so forth to tell us something about a crime they didn't personally witness?Evolutionist: This man has been shot.Creationist: How do you know? You weren't there.Evolutionist: He has a bullet wound in his skull, he has a bullet in his brain, he has scorch marks consistent with gunpowder on his forehead, here's CCTV footage of someone shooting him, there's a strong smell of gunpowder in the air, and look, here's a smoking gun.Creationist: That's unscientific! It's impossible to know about the past! Your belief that he's been shot is a religion! Waaah!Evolutionist: If you ever get called for jury service, please recuse yourself on the grounds of idiocy. No, they're facts. They're supported by the all evidence. If this is so easy, why can't creationists actually do it?---But the craziest thing about this whole line of argument is your bizarre assumption that you get to define science.You might as well have posted: "Many evolutionist doctors think that medicine is about the diagnosis, cure, alleviation and prevention of disease, but really it's about slapping people in the face with a fish."The people best qualified to know what is and isn't science would be scientists.Like these people.Since its first appearance on Earth, life has taken many forms, all of which continue to evolve, in ways which palaeontology and the modern biological and biochemical sciences are describing and independently confirming with increasing precision. Commonalities in the structure of the genetic code of all organisms living today, including humans, clearly indicate their common primordial origin. --- Albanian Academy of Sciences; National Academy of Exact, Physical and Natural Sciences, Argentina; Australian Academy of Science; Austrian Academy of Sciences; Bangladesh Academy of Sciences; The Royal Academies for Science and the Arts of Belgium; Academy of Sciences and Arts of Bosnia and Herzegovina; Brazilian Academy of Sciences; Bulgarian Academy of Sciences; The Academies of Arts, Humanities and Sciences of Canada; Academia Chilena de Ciencias; Chinese Academy of Sciences; Academia Sinica, China, Taiwan; Colombian Academy of Exact, Physical and Natural Sciences; Croatian Academy of Arts and Sciences; Cuban Academy of Sciences; Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic; Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters; Academy of Scientific Research and Technology, Egypt; Académie des Sciences, France; Union of German Academies of Sciences and Humanities; The Academy of Athens, Greece; Hungarian Academy of Sciences; Indian National Science Academy; Indonesian Academy of Sciences; Academy of Sciences of the Islamic Republic of Iran; Royal Irish Academy; Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities; Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, Italy; Science Council of Japan; Kenya National Academy of Sciences; National Academy of Sciences of the Kyrgyz Republic; Latvian Academy of Sciences; Lithuanian Academy of Sciences; Macedonian Academy of Sciences and Arts; Academia Mexicana de Ciencias; Mongolian Academy of Sciences; Academy of the Kingdom of Morocco; The Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences; Academy Council of the Royal Society of New Zealand; Nigerian Academy of Sciences; Pakistan Academy of Sciences; Palestine Academy for Science and Technology; Academia Nacional de Ciencias del Peru; National Academy of Science and Technology, The Philippines; Polish Academy of Sciences; Académie des Sciences et Techniques du Sénégal; Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts; Singapore National Academy of Sciences; Slovak Academy of Sciences; Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts; Academy of Science of South Africa; Royal Academy of Exact, Physical and Natural Sciences of Spain; National Academy of Sciences, Sri Lanka; Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences; Council of the Swiss Scientific Academies; Academy of Sciences, Republic of Tajikistan; Turkish Academy of Sciences; The Uganda National Academy of Sciences; The Royal Society, UK; US National Academy of Sciences; Uzbekistan Academy of Sciences; Academia de Ciencias Físicas, Matemáticas y Naturales de Venezuela; Zimbabwe Academy of Sciences; The Caribbean Academy of Sciences; African Academy of Sciences; The Academy of Sciences for the Developing World (TWAS); The Executive Board of the International Council for Science (ICSU). Are you really telling me that you know what science is --- and they don't?Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

No. Nor have I used a time machine to go back and observe the fall of the Roman Empire, but I know that it happened.What's your point? Are you really claiming that it's impossible to know anything about the past? No. Scientists, unlike creationists, aren't allowed to go around assuming things at random. The other scientists would point at them and laugh.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

Yes indeed he did. He said it 150 years ago, when it was true. And it shows the dishonesty and inadequacy of the creationist cause that you need to depend on a quotation which is 150 years out of date.You might as well quote Galileo to "prove" that Jupiter only has four moons.---Incidentally, what makes you think that Darwin did say that? I think he said that 'cos there's lots of evidence that he did, but that's just my dogmatic evolutionairianist "interpretation". As you would doubtless be the first to tell us, it is in fact impossible to know anything about the past without the use of a time machine. Where's your time machine?--- Possibly that was true in 1979 when he wrote it.Here's a more up-to-date quote on the same subject. [i]"Elephants, turtles, whales, birds often have been cited as species where transitional species have not been identified. This is no longer true. We have gained more in the fossil record in the last ten years than in almost the entire previous history of science." (151; cf. Miller, 2003, p. 180). He's talking about abiogenesis, not evolution. Here's another quote from Stephen Jay Gould:"[T]ransitions are often found in the fossil record ... Faced with these facts of evolution and the philosophical bankruptcy of their own position, creationists rely upon distortion and innuendo to buttress their rhetorical claim. If I sound sharp or bitter, indeed I am ”- for I have become a major target of these practices ... it is infuriating to be quoted again and again by creationists -- whether through design or stupidity, I do not know -- as admitting that the fossil record includes no transitional forms. Transitional forms are generally lacking at the species level, but they are abundant between larger groups." (Stephen Jay Gould, Evolution Is A Fact And A Theory)---I agree with Stephen Jay Gould --- the reason creationists have to stoop to gutter practices such as this is that they don't have anything left. If you had facts, you'd use facts. But if libel, lies, and distortion are all you've got --- then apparently it's better to abandon your honesty and cling on to your creationism.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

Putting scare quotes around the facts doesn't make them go away.Science and Nature, for example, are scientific journals. They are the world's most prestigious scientific journals. Calling them "scientific" journals doesn't magically abolish that fact. Oh dear oh dear. I'm afraid someone's been pulling your leg.I just looked up the figures, and I could store the human genome eight times over on my C drive. And my computer is hardly the world's most sophisticated.Before you posted rubbish like this, why didn't you spend one moment trying to find out if it was true? Don't you think you have a moral responsibility to find out whether something is true before you declare it in public as fact. Let me guess. You call it "incredibly sophisticated" because you have absolutely no idea how it works. I'm afraid someone's been lying to you again.I would suggest once more that before you recite stuff like this in public, you have a moral responsibility to find out whether it's true. More made-up stuff. Which is why you can't name a single one of these "many" atheists.

Your comment about transitional fossils shows that you've never bothered to find out what the evidence is. So on what basis can you say that evolution is not the best explanation for it?---Actually, we may be going off topic. The purpose of this thread, if I recall, was not for an all-round display of creationist ignorance, but to tackle the old "you-can't-know-anything-about-the-past-without-a-time-machine" chestnut.

Er ... by definition, a mutation can ONLY produce a new trait if the genetic information needed for those traits did not already exist. Someone's been lying to you again.Let me point out once more that before you recite stuff like this, you have an obligation to find out if it's true.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

They are, however, intermediate whatever you assume.

Now find out what "base pairs" means. You'll believe anything, won't you?

No, I have a 6 gig hard-drive, and * coughs gently * a byte is eight bits.I said it wasn't the world's most sophisticated computer, didn't I?Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

Less.Look, 3 billion letters = 6 billion bits.GB stands for gigabyte.A byte is eight bits.Perhaps you're thinking of storing only one letter per byte, but you can store four. My way is better.

That eye evolution article, though sound on how the eye evolved, manages to quote Darwin out of context.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

By comparing theory to observation.The data from an experiment is nothing more than an observation of what happens under artificial circumstances.When we want to know what happened in nature, then an observation of what we can achieve artifically is irrelevant. But doing experiments doesn't solve this epistemolological problem, because experiments also give you only a finite number of observations on which to base your conclusion. That depends on what the theory says. If the theory is "Saturn has rings", for example, or "the Roman Empire existed", then the lab is not the best place to test the theory. Oh Noes! We only know about nature by observing it! The horror! I refer you again to my second set of comments in this post. Why should the sixth dot be the last?And why should a sixth dot drawn from observing an artificial experiment be superior in this respect to a sixth dot drawn from observing nature?Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

Is it not true that for a theory to be scientific you must be able to test it in extreme conditions?For example, the theory of gravity is not scientifically valid because it cannot be tested in a laboratory. You might be able to observe it in nature (Planetary orbits etc.) but for it to be scientifically valid you must be able to take the theory to extremes (Usually done in a lab) and see if the theory complies with those extremes. This is a necessary in order to thoroughly falsify a theory.Thus, as it is not possible to test the theory of (macro)gravity in a laboratory, it is not a scientific theory but only faith.

Irrelevant to what?My point is that there are some things to which experiments in labs are certainly irrelevant, such as whether Saturn has rings, whether the Roman Empire existed, whether birds evolved from reptiles, et cetera. Or we might not. For example, the proposition that planets orbit in ellipses. But you're not busy telling physicists that Kepler's laws aren't scientific, because you have no axe to grind there. I still don't know where you got this "extreme" busines from, or how you think it applies to anything.If chimists want to know, for example, whether sulphuric acid disolves silicon dioxide, what are the "extreme conditions" under which they should test this? Hanging upside down over a tub of live piranhas?Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

Not at all.You take a theory, you calculate what observations you should be able to make if the theory was true (the "predictions" of the theory) and then you go forth and see if those observations obtain. Sometimes the theory will predict the results of experiments that we can perform in a lab, and then we can test these predictions of the theory by carrying out the experiments and seeing if we get the predicted results.But sometimes, as (for example) with the theory of gravity predicting that planets should move in ellipses, we have a prediction that we cannot observe in a lab, but only by observing nature. This is not a problem. It would be a problem if the theory predicted that we could see planets moving in ellipses in a lab, but this is not among its predictions.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.