Why is evolution so controversial?

According to the Scientific American webpage U.S. Science Degrees Are Up, the U.S. graduates about 235,000 science majors each year (including psychology majors). So I guess to you they're all scientists, even though half of recent graduates are working jobs that don't require a degree, and significant numbers are unemployed. But according to you scientists all, I guess.The U.S. also graduates around 360,000 business & management majors each year. I guess to you they're all business managers. The recent business major graduate from Stoneham college who just called on me at my place of business last week to sell me a Keurig must be a business manager, though his boss, who I also spoke with, seemed to think of him as an apprentice sales representative of W. B. Mason.Cedre, you've got to stop being so inflexible, stiff and black/white in your declarations. In some things graduation means you have a meaningful title, like graduating from West Point means you're an officer. In other things graduation doesn't mean anything other than that you're degreed. Graduating with a degree in science no more makes you a scientist than graduating with a degree in medicine makes you a doctor.You should focus on the points you introduced when you proposed this topic. Or maybe this diversion is part of your plan: divert discussion onto pointless trivialities by making silly claims, declare victory, disappear.--Percy

I like your proposals for falsifications. They remind me of the Comfort/Cameron crocoduck, although of course they misunderstand evolution and proposed it as something that would validate evolution rather than falsify it.--Percy

[Faith]"You're forgetting that this is an immense flood and would behave differently than normal floods. It would sort sediment into different layers, and it would also sort animals and plants into these layers in a way precisely resembling an evolutionary progression (which is what huge floods do), and it would also transport entire burrows and egg clutches and even footprints intact. The flood will create both marine and terrestrial layers (no, it isn't contradictory, you just have no idea what a flood this big can do), and it will keep land animals from being deposited in marine layers, and marine animals from being deposited in terrestrial layers.

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"The sediment carried and deposited by the flood was eroded from the Earth's surface during the flood, or it wasn't, I can change on a dime on this point. Some canyons were carved by catastrophic releases of water from high altitude lakes left over from the flood, some weren't, but you can't tell which are which, you have to ask me and I'll tell you, though I'll be so vague you'll never know what I'm actually saying, and then I'll accuse you of misrepresenting what I say."[/Faith]--Percy

Their crocoduck argument is probably very effective with their intended audience, which isn't us. In essence they're saying, "The theory of evolution is so ridiculous it actually predicts we should see something like a crocoduck." Creationists hearing the argument think, "What a silly theory to predict such stupid things! How foolish these scientists are."The image of the crocoduck is probably stuck in creationist minds, working its magic long after the scientific mumbo-jumbo rebuttal has been forgotten - it's certainly stuck in mine, and *I* know how ridiculously wrong it is.--Percy

Cloudy here, too. I hear there will be three more over the next 17 months or so.--Percy

And the Precambrian is just a stand-in for every other geologic period where modern land animals wouldn't fit. This, too, has been explained to Faith.I'm amazed at Faith's ability to send us into a tizzy of explanations. We should well know by now that she doesn't listen to explanations. She's not here to discuss science - she's here making a testimony of faith.Any rational person, especially after a decade of this, would think, "Gee, I'm not convincing anyone, including those sympathetic to my position. I've got to go off and rethink this."But Faith will never do that. Because she's not rational. She's religious.I'll mention again that we're off-topic, but Cedre's gone for now so I don't think it matters.--Percy

I don't think biology is an important area of study for doctors. If I recall the prerequisites for applying to medical school I believe they were a semester of biology, two semesters of chemistry, and a semester of organic chemistry. The Harvard Course Requirements are a year of biology but two years of chemistry with a semester of organic chemistry. Evolution doesn't get a mention.--Percy

Yes, just as I pointed out in Message 145. Where have you been?As to the claims in the rest of your message, you know that every one of them has been rebutted in detail dozens of times here, yet you prattle on as if these rebuttals had never been made. Repeating false claims over and over doesn't make them any less false.If your claims are actually true then you must offer evidence that they are true that is convincing to other people. That you personally and creationists in general have been unable to do this (which includes being unable to convince each other since creationist theory is widely varied) should be telling you something, such as that creationists are just people with a mental fixation like those who believe in a flat Earth or geocentrism, who also can't be convinced they're wrong. It's not like creationists are unique.In order to prove creationists are not those type of people you have to come up with some persuasive evidence. And you have to at least realize that the inability to do so strongly implies error, and it should make creationists desperate to come up with actual evidence instead of just making things up that are believable to none but their own.--PercyEdited by Percy, : Grammar.

Dr A addressed this several times. If a theory is true, there is no potential falsification that you could go out there and actually do.Neil Shubin looked all around the world for the most likely place where a tetrapod transitional might turn up. He went there and found one, producing yet another validation of evolution.Creationists could look all around the world for the most likely place to turn up a fossil that doesn't fit the theory of evolution. They don't bother because they know in their hearts they'll never find one.--Percy

This has been explained to you before in many other threads. The oldest seafloor in the world is perhaps 200 million years old. Most seafloor is less than 100 million years old. Seafloor is produced at oceanic ridges where it travels conveyor like to subduction zones where it descends into the Earth and is melted and consumed in the mantle. Only occasionally does seafloor become continent and so is preserved. Most seafloor that has ever existed on Earth is long gone now, disappeared into subduction zones.--Percy

This is as inexplicably nonsensical as something Faith would say.--PercyEdited by Percy, : Fix attribution.

Much older. The lower end of the range is, of course, zero years, but the most ancient sea floor in the world is around 200 million years old, if memory serves.The seafloor off the east coast of the US should be around 100 million years old. Doing a little math, the sea floor is moving at about 4cm/year, and I'm guessing it's around 3000 miles from the mid-oceanic ridge to the east coast, so it would take 120 million years for the east coast, which used to be adjacent to the ridge, to move 3000 miles away.In addition to skepticism Faith's message expressed surprise, as if she'd never heard any of this stuff before. This has, of course, been explained to her many times, but she's never understood any of it, including, unfortunately, what you've just written.But her reacting as if she's never heard it before is an honest one. We know now that all these explanations go right over her head. She hides it as well as she can, does a very good job of hiding it, actually, but she still regularly comes out with howlers. Her inability to understand is reflected in this very thread by her belief that different people using different words to explain the same thing are contradicting each other.It isn't that she disagrees with what we're trying to explain to her, at least not in any specific way. It's that even after all this time she has no idea what we're trying to explain to her.--Percy

Hi Faith,I think Pressie was assuming you understood that the higher the elevation the more a region is an area of net erosion, and the lower the elevation the more a region is an area of net deposition.This has been explained to you many times, plus it's just plain old common sense. Wind, rain, rivers, streams and gravity will always cause sediments to collect at the lower elevations, the sea floor being the lowest elevation and the ultimate destination for all sediments, though any sediment eroded from a mountain top will likely have many way stations (lakes, valleys, etc.) before reaching the sea.--Percy

Uplift has already been described in this thread, Faith, and in countless other threads that you've been a part of.It's funny how you can remember things like tectonic forces and uplift when it's convenient for you, like when you make up stories about the flood and the Grand Canyon (e.g., tectonic forces that cause the rotation of buried strata, uplift that causes strata to crack into pieces that the flood carries away), but which you conveniently forget whenever real evidence points to their actual occurrence, like sea shells atop Mount Everest.--Percy

Ooh, good catch, I fixed the attribution. But what an oddly appropriate slip!--Percy