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Cobra_snake writes:
Hypocritical statement. Scientists never question whether or not evolution occurred, they only question HOW it occurred.

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I think by and large you are correct. For most scientists in the biological sciences evolution is the central unifying framework. Most would agree with Dobzhansky (famous geneticist) when he said, "Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution."I think scientists are discovering that though evolution is a simple concept to understand, it's a damn difficult one to work with. Life is complex and messy, and evolution is part of the whole mess. This is not to deprecate evolution, but as much as scientists are learning, the deeper they look the deeper many mysteries become.Evolution in the modern world appears to proceed at a snails pace, if it proceeds at all. Our own evolution remains a deep mystery. The adolescence of pre-humans appears to have been much shorter than our own, so they could squeeze more generations into a given time period, but given the relative stability in the fossil record of possibly ancestral species like Australopithecus afarensis the introduction of a new hominid species must have occurred rather suddenly (geologically speaking, where "suddenly" still means thousands of years). What exactly happened? We don't know. Even our speculations fall short, and given the paucity of evidence we may never know.But getting back to your original comment about scientists never questioning the fact of evolution, I think it's important to recognize that most Creationists also accept the fact of evolution. Where scientists and many Creationists differ on this particular point is in the scope of evolution. Creationists understand and accept evolution in the form of variable expression over time of characteristics already present in a population's gene pool, but they deny the possibility of such change moving beyond kind boundaries. This fact moves the debate from a question of whether evolution has occurred to one of how much evolution has occurred.--Percy

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TrueCreation writes:
If you wan't to get someone to question whether the basic fundamentals of evolution have ever occured or not, don't ask the Smithsonian, and other wealthy evolutionary organizations.

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If you prefer to view evolution as some vast conspiracy then it's far broader than that, encompassing all major universities around the world and many of the world's significant religions.--Percy

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TrueCreation writes:
Who ever said Creationism was anything more than a belief, and who ever said evolution was not a scientific theory?

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Christian says evolution is religion, and he is quoted saying so in the very message you replied to:

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Christian writes:
Creation is a religion, Evolution is a RELIGION.

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Perhaps you and Christian should talk.--Percy

Hi Quicksink!Congratulations on a relatively smooth transition into the spirit of this board, but there's still an occasional bit of roughness around the edges:

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Quicksink writes:
Excuse my language, but creation1 is a nutcase.

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I know what you're trying to say, but this is pushing up against the limits of rule 2. I try to encourage people here to avoid bald characterizations like this, to be more deliberative, and to support their positions with discussion and evidence. In this particular case you could characterize what you feel are the irrational aspects of Christian's position. I think you've done this already, and so it would be fine just to refer to another message.I know that saying something like, "His positions are in conflict with themselves and reality" and then describing how you reached this conclusion doesn't have the same panache as a simple "He's a nutcase," but the more circumspect approach prevents these debates from sinking into anarchy, and the ensuing discussion often helps to bring out nuances in the other's position of which you might have been unaware. Or, incredibly, you might actually persuade someone to accept your point of view. On a volatile and polarized subject like this it's rare, but it happens.--Percy

testing...

This thread had been closed due to technical problems, but it has now been reopened. Enjoy! Please report any problems to admin@.--PercyPS - For those with a technical bent and an interest, here's what happened:A few weeks ago this thread began experiencing technical difficulties when new posts stopped appearing. The problem was traced to this site's webhosting company, God Bless Them, who without notifying their customers placed limits on the size and time that programs can run. As soon as a thread reaches around 24 pages it becomes too long for the HTML pages to be generated without exceeding these limits.I didn't hold out much hope of fixing this until I looked at the code, which was written by, God Bless Them, InfoPop. I've made so many modifications to their code that I'm very familiar with it (the message numbers are one modification), and I noticed that the HTML generation routine is recursive instead of iterative. By itself this isn't too serious, unless some of the variables contain large amounts of data. But every 15 messages (15 messages/page) the routine calls itself and READS THE ENTIRE THREAD, ALL 750,000 BYTES OF IT, INTO A VARIABLE!With around 360 messages in the thread that translates into the routine calling itself 24 times and taking 18 MegaBytes total just for the 24 copies of that one variable. The webhost places a limit of 32 MegaBytes on a process, and that's the limit I believe was being violated.I rewrote the routine to be iterative, and so all should be well for the time being. Hopefully I've pushed the limit above what any thread could reasonably reach.

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[This message has been edited by Percipient, 03-24-2002]

This Thread Now Open

Just bumping this up in case some people missed it - it scrolled down over the weekend after the fix.--Percy